![kendrick lamar pimp a butterfly tracklist kendrick lamar pimp a butterfly tracklist](https://i.pinimg.com/736x/a8/14/e2/a814e29f5557642f7fdadbe85bb8b3a1.jpg)
#Kendrick lamar pimp a butterfly tracklist full#
While I would love to go into a full track by track analysis of TPAB’s story, for the interest of time I feel it’d be best to give a slight Tl:DR version. The topics and themes that TPAB dealt with were definitely a lot to take in when I first listened to it as a seventeen-year-old, but as I’ve gotten older and re-listened to the album multiple times, the story becomes clearer and clearer. I and many other hip hop heads have interpreted this as the pimping or exploitation of black people/culture by the hands of the United States. The album’s title T o Pimp a Butterfly, while a clever nod to Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, is also a metaphor for the literal pimping of something as beautiful/free as a butterfly. TPAB is an album that deals with materialism, racism, oppression, and above all else, self-love. Instead of telling you what is literally happening in a song, Kendrick speaks in metaphors that allude to each song’s situation. If GKMC’s story is told like a movie, then TPAB’s structure is similar to that of a novel.
![kendrick lamar pimp a butterfly tracklist kendrick lamar pimp a butterfly tracklist](https://static.onecms.io/wp-content/uploads/sites/6/2015/03/kendrick-lamar_02.jpg)
This is a story far less straight forward, it was something more cerebral and conscious. This is not a day in the life of a young Compton boy who found ways to survive on the streets as we heard on GKMC. Something that I consider to be one of the shining aspects of TPAB, and something that has stuck with me profoundly. What I’d like to talk about for the rest of this post, however, is the album’s concept. Now, I could go on and on about how different TPAB sounds in comparison to Kendrick’s other projects, but by now mostly everyone’s heard it, and mostly everybody is aware of the jazziness. Working alongside producers such as Flying Lotus and Thundercat only enhances this sound even further. Elements of old school funk, jazz, and spoken word are littered everywhere on TPAB. The first time I played TPAB, it threw me for a loop. So to say that I was excited about Kendrick’s next album would be an understatement, I was beyond hyped, and when TPAB unexpectedly appeared on iTunes you can be damn sure I downloaded it in a heartbeat. Or a trip down memory lane with “m.A.A.d city”, Kendrick never fails to make each track a worthwhile listen. Whether it’s about the relationship between peer pressure and alcoholism that he expresses through “Swimming Pools”. What got me so enveloped in the Compton MC’s music was his lyricism, Kendrick has a knack to tell a story with each song. City nearly every single day, to the point where I’ve pretty much memorized the voice mail Kendrick’s mom leaves for him at the end of “Real”, one of the closing tracks to GKMC. I spent the first 3 or so years of high school bumping his past projects like Section.80 and Good Kid m.A.A.d. Up until this point, I was very familiar with Kendrick’s work, I can say that he was the only rapper other than Eminem and Kanye who I legitimately “stanned” over. Be warned this is a long post, so proceed with caution.ĭuring this time, I was about a third of the way through my senior year in high school. This is an album that to this day, I consider to be the best rap album I’ve heard in the past 8 years and Kendrick Lamar’s best album in his discography. Whether or not TPAB came out ahead of its set date or not, I still wasn’t prepared for what I was about to witness. An error caused by Interscope Records made the album available in its entirety on Itunes and Spotify. The following article was originally published on my now-defunct Wix website in 2018.ģ years ago today, Kendrick Lamar’s third studio album To Pimp a Butterfly dropped eight days ahead of its March 23rd release date.