![]() Its most significant guest spot comes from a rapper who’s been dead nearly 20 years, in the form of an imagined conversation between Lamar and Tupac Shakur using a sample from a 1994 Swedish radio interview with Lamar’s voice pasted over journalist Mats Nileskär’s. ‘To Pimp A Butterfly’ is 79 minutes long, prone to outbursts of jazz and spoken-word poetry, and its name is a loosely worded play on Harper Lee’s To Kill A Mockingbird. It’s a grim reality that makes its presence felt on ‘To Pimp A Butterfly’ – Lamar’s insanely sprawling, seething follow-up to ‘good kid…’ – though arguably it’s an even more personal work than its predecessor. Exploring the dangers of being a thoughtful youth forced to come up hard on the streets of Los Angeles’ gangster-rap capital, the Compton MC’s 2012 major label debut, ‘good kid, mAAd city’, told the story of a young man at war with himself, in a community at war with itself.įast-forward to the present, and that war has become endemic, the lie of a ‘post-racial society’ peddled in the wake of Obama’s first presidential win brutally exposed by the acquittal of 17-year-old Florida teenager Trayvon Martin’s killer, and nationwide unrest following police killings of African-American men in Ferguson and New York. ![]() Kendrick Lamar might be the new king of west coast hip-hop, but don’t think it’s a crown he’s wearing lightly. ![]()
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