Having not really listened to much hip-hop in my lifetime, my thoughts of it are the only stuff I have listened to MTV out of pure boredom. It seems very limited musically. Obviously people like N.W.A and Kanye West are the only ones I’ve listened to that have ever really had their own sound. The rest I’ve listened to anyway just sounds like one big continual sound that is used by everyone.
It’s upon hearing To Pimp a Butterfly for me that it shows how much musical ground Kendrick Lamar covers.
Upon hearing the album it sounds like a mad mix of free jazz, funk, doo-wop and rock. Apart from a couple of tracks, the album doesn’t really rely on samples which helps to really retain a free and loose sense of the album.
From opening track “Wesley’s Theory”, is certainly setting the scene for probably the oddest mish-mash of music ever, which features a contribution by jazz bassist Thundercat, but it shows how inventive Lamar can and how his openness to accepting other forms of music which places him out as a unique artist.
The highlight for me is the track “These Walls” which shows Lamar revealing himself out to the listener in a very vulnerable way. Lines like “These walls want to cry tears, These walls happier when I’m here, These walls never could hold up, Every time I come around demolition might crush” could be a metaphor for Lamar seeing himself as an object struggling to hold itself together and trying to exist during the sudden onslaught of fame.
To Pimp a Butterfly is certainly the most politically and socially conscious album that has been released in a long time. The album provides Lamar with a commentary on the racial treatment of the African-Americans in America and just a black man trying to exist in a country that certainly has experienced its phases of racial prejudice.
It certainly raises the comparisons in my opinion to Bob Dylan. On first inspection, it looks odd, but the more you look it becomes much clearer, at least to me anyway!
While certainly being different sides of the same coin, both their basics are the same. Dylan certainly had the same way of writing like Lamar, evaluating all that was around him in socially and introspective terms.
While Dylan always claimed he never wrote political songs, he always showed an eye for change, seen in such songs as “The Times They Are a-Changin'” and “A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall”. He also had an eye for introspective senses like in “Most of the Time”.
Kendrick Lamar certainly already showed his introspective on the album but he lets loose on the another high point of the album “The Blacker the Berry”. Vicious lines like I’m African-American, I’m African,I’m black as the moon, heritage of a small village, Pardon my residence, Came from the bottom of mankind” and “you hate me don’t you?” shows Lamar angrily tackling racism in a way that hasn’t been done before.
The idea of trying to get along where Lamar knows that that is an idea that is far too late and destroys lyrically the system that has been created for the black man that still exists for in 21st Century America.
On final inspection To Pimp a Butterfly shows an artist that is not afraid to go outside the rap and hip-hop cliches that exist and is determined to forge his own path. The album is definitely a genre-crossing album that can entice any music fan.
To quote Bob Dylan “All I can do is be me, whoever that is”
Album highlights: “King Kunta”, “These Walls”, “The Blacker the Berry” and “i”
Nostalgic Beat 
