Kendrick started talking about the idea for his next album as he created To Pimp a Butterfly, though at the time, it was just a series of rough concepts that didn’t really gel together. While Butterfly was meant for the entirety of the black race, and though Kendrick thrived on such ambition, he wanted the next album to be a little closer to the ground—like a culmination of everything he’d released to that point, yet with God firmly at the center. His most notable work had referenced the divine to some degree, but he’d never delved into it for the entirety of an album. On good kid and Butterfly, God arrived at the precise moment Kendrick needed Him most, just when his life was taking a sharp turn. The rapper had hinted toward it, most notably on good kid’s “Sing About Me, I’m Dying of Thirst” and Butterfly’s “How Much a Dollar Cost,” but he hadn’t fully dissected his own spirituality. Kendrick was reverting his focus inward, back to his old neighborhood, and back to the people doing the groundwork to make it better. If his earlier albums spoke to those in his peer group, his subsequent work was to address his current stature as a community leader. He had different muses now—his little niece, who lights up when she sees him on TV, and his cousin, Carl Duckworth, a member of the Hebrew Israelites, who encouraged him to know his merit as a spiritual being. Once again, he was trying to move beyond hue: on To Pimp a Butterfly, red and blue didn’t matter, only black—black skin and black people. Now he was in search of something even deeper; no matter your complexion, all believers—whether black, white, or brown—must answer to God.
The albums good kid and Butterfly registered as avant-rap, and it’d been a while—probably since the old K-Dot days—that Kendrick rapped for the sake of rapping. And he wasn’t in a rush, either; with those two records on his résumé, the lyricist bought himself more time to fall back and figure things out at his own pace. One thing was for sure, though: the new album couldn’t sound like anything on To Pimp a Butterfly. “We needed to do the opposite of what our opposite thoughts were,” Terrace Martin told the Recording Academy.
Kendrick was in a zone and simply couldn’t stop working. One thought led to the next, then to something else. In years past, when he struggled publicly with his mental health, Jesus was there as a salve, a way out of the despair that gripped him and his friends who were suffering in the city. He, like other believers, called on God in his darkest moments, when life-or-death situations were on the horizon and he needed an immediate lifeline—like on “Bitch, Don’t Kill My Vibe” (“I am a sinner who’s probably gonna sin again”), and on “Alright” (“If God got us then we gon’ be alright”). Perhaps because he’d become a lightning rod for political pundits, and because he never wanted to be a political pundit himself, Kendrick had isolated himself. Even after he’d done so much for others and released music to lift an entire race, he seemed to think people didn’t care about him. In his mind, he’d prayed for so many others, but these same people weren’t praying for him. It’d just been interview after interview, tour after tour, incessant feature and appearance requests, and much of it had grown formulaic. It was easy for Kendrick to feel abandoned. In a 2015 interview with Billboard, he talked about the rapture: “We’re in the last days, man—I truly in my heart believe that,” he said. “It’s written. I could go on with Biblical situations and things my grandma told me. But it’s about being at peace with myself and making good with the people around me.” Kendrick’s parents weren’t especially religious and he wasn’t raised in a church. Much of what he knows about Jesus and the Bible came from his grandmother, whose mix of real talk and religious teaching helped cultivate the precocious young man. In his music, Kendrick hadn’t yet discussed how God resides through everything—through the peaks and valleys, the tragedy and the triumph. God is there as a calming spirit, a guide, a spiritual conduit between this world and the afterlife. For Kendrick, God was the way to stay connected with his grandmother and with close friends who were murdered in Compton. He saw God as a protector and a way to stay centered as the world spiraled out of control. In years past, he’d presented God as his salvation alone, but he’d never openly questioned the higher power about why people suffer, and specifically, why he had to endure so much agony. Was it karmic retribution for all the bad things he’d done before he knew better? Bible verse Luke 12:48 says the following: For everyone to whom much is given, from him much will be required. Because he’d been so blessed personally and professionally, perhaps it was time to honor God by spreading his word and giving to those who didn’t have the same type of access or celebrity. So in late 2016, the rapper didn’t have a full picture of his next album, but he did know it would be the most spiritually inclined record he’d compiled to date.
