The sprawling cast of characters on To Pimp a Butterfly didn’t always get this luxury, even Kendrick himself.Ī few of the songs are retreads. He’s not just a caterpillar being pimped or a flawed man playing a role in some tortuous allegory he’s a real person peering over the precipice, and Kendrick both understands him and is him. Even when the man drives away, sparing his rival’s life at the last second, it’s beautifully ambiguous. Kendrick inhabits the character effortlessly, from the rationalizations, to the anger, to the glee of willfully becoming what society says he is. “Now I’m drunk, at the intersection parked/ Watch you walk inside your house/ You threw your briefcase all on the couch,” he gloats.
“Justice ain’t free, therefore justice ain’t me,” he declares, rationalizing his coming revenge. Placing himself behind the eyes of a heartbroken man on the way to murder his rival, Kendrick barks out a drunken verse, casually swerving through a whirlpool of black American rage. This isn’t “Wesley’s Theory,” this is Blade unsheathing the katana. “Get Top on the phone” he declares, summoning his benighted label boss before launching into a tongue-tying marathon of a verse that boasts five flows (!) and a blitzkrieg of searing taunts. It’s the perfect scene for his dreaded (and sexist) temptress Lucy to make a cameo, but instead of decrying the darkness, Kendrick embraces it. “I see jiggaboos, I see styrofoams,” Kendrick wails, gasping out his verses, the air seeping from the room. The song reeks anguish, from Kendrick’s shrill voice to the sinister, pulsating bass. “Get God on the phone,” he yells, slipping into a pained screech, a manic sax and fluttering piano arpeggios swirling around him. “untitled 02” is a funereal death march, Kendrick descending into the abyss.
#Kendrick lamar untitled unmastered story full
untitled unmastered breaks that pattern, allowing its various scenes to be fully rendered, each idea given full life.
To Pimp a Butterfly depicted him as a failed messiah, beaten down by a swarm of enemies, the greatest of which was his own imperfection. good kid, m.A.A.d.city presented him as a neutral observer who was slowly sucked into a life of vice and crime and gangs, rescued at the last minute by Jesus and Top Dawg. Section.80 presented Kendrick as a product of the Reagan era, a rebel railing against a world designed to exterminate him. This isn’t just a collection of b-sides: this is Kendrick’s What If version of his own mythology, flaws as alternate histories, unrealized retcons.Įach of Kendrick’s previous albums has played out like the relaunch of a cape comic. But that’s precisely this album’s beauty: instead of shying away from the long shadow of To Pimp a Butterfly, untitled unmastered happily embraces that shared DNA, reveling in the subtleties that set it apart. Each song is time-stamped and untitled, stillborn inside the To Pimp a Butterfly session in which it was conceived. In the wrong hands, this line would have been self-insulating, insurance against some future transgression, but in Kendrick’s hands the line is a sincere invitation to take the blemishes seriously, to look onto a disfigured face and see the defects and not the dimples.įeaturing many of the same collaborators, themes and sonic templates as To Pimp A Butterfly, untitled unmastered necessarily lives in that album’s shadow. “Look at my flaws, look at my flaws,” Kendrick Lamar pleads on “untitled 06,” wooing a lover by highlighting his imperfections.
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