Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly is a modern day masterpiece. The album is archived in the library of congress, taught in college courses around the world, and it is forever engraved in black history. Lamar, commonly known as a rap and hip-hop artist, uses Jazz to root To Pimp a Butterfly and take modern black music back to where it began. The sounds of the instrumentation, specifically the saxophone bleeds into the first two tracks of the album, while paralleling the album’s commentary on black lives in America
For instance, Lamar opens the album with Wesley’s Theory, describing the institutionalized racism that black people face and white people profit off of. The outro features a striking scream building: Tax man comin’, tax man comin’. The song ends with a faint saxophone attempting to start, but it can’t get any sound to continue. Almost broken sounding, like a door creeping open. The door then kicks open to the beginning of For Free? The saxophone orgasms into a beautifully rich opening. The sound transitions into frantic drumming patterns over a woman’s spoken word. The woman is depicted as only loving Kendrick for his money and fame, a materialistic form of love. Kendrick then responds with “This dick ain’t free”. He stands up for himself, he will not be objectified not only by the love, but by the music industry and by America as well.
Lamar’s Jazz influence is imperative to find the sounds and environment of the album. It’s chaotic, improvisational, ever-flowing, broken, held back, beaten down. Just as the people we read and how the black audience that Kendrick is speaking to has been treated for generations. The saxophone and Jazz empowers the words of standing up against the oppressor. Similarly to how Jacobs stands up to Dr. Flint or How Indigo never lets judgement dictate her imagination and the south in her. This speaks to the reality that the White man has always profited off of the black man, rooted in slavery, continued in music.
Discussion Question
Kendrick speaks frequently on the album regarding the white man profiting off of the object of the black man. Explain the difficulty of this process when it comes to music. Music can be a great tool to express one’s message, but at the end of the day, it is a business and those in power still profit from that business. The books we have read in this course, the same can be said for. How can the message continue to be sent without those in power benefiting financially from the product?