Kudos to writer Marcus J. Moore who takes readers into the world of music icon Kendrick Lamar. What I gained was an appreciation for the way Kendrick navigated the streets of Compton, California growing up. The gang thing was serious at that point, and probably still is now. It made the environment the Kendrick and his crew found with Top Dawg Entertainment an important cocoon and incubator for his musical development. It’s also gratifying to see how Moore explodes, through the course of this telling, the myth of Black genius. While Kendrick was talented, he also worked incredibly hard and that comes across throughout the book.
When he gets to To Pimp A Butterfly, Moore writes:
To Pimp a Butterfly was revolutionary in the way it included jazz and other traditional forms of black music. Jazz was thought to be for older people, performed by gray-haired veterans in smaller clubs to particular audiences. Kendrick’s album took the lid of that: these musicians were the new cool, more likely to show up in CO L.A. Dodgers baseball hats, knitted beanies, African dashikis, and, well, raccoon suits. This wasn’t the 1950s and they weren’t John Coltrane, Herbie Hancock, or Charlie “Bird” Parker. “They didn’t use jazz samples, and they didn’t need old jazz musicians,” [pianist Robert] Glasper said of the To Pimp a Butterfly sessions. “That’s the ‘real hip-hop meets jazz’ right there. That was something I was already doing in my world, but for Kendrick to do it, it changed everything. It had everybody.”
And this is a beautiful passage on the doors that TPAB opened:
Artists of his ilk don’t usually create sonically challenging art like this; for the most part, once they find a working formula for their music, and sell a bunch of records as a result, they tend to stay in that lane to ensure their financial security. There’s rarely an impetus for going beyond the scope of what’s expected. So for Kendrick to create such a record was incredibly brave, and it set the course for others to do the same. It gave greater name recognition to the musicians in its liner notes, and be cause of its dense jazz textures, Kendrick and the jazz experts on To Pimp a Butterfly have been credited with bringing the genre back from obscurity. To Pimp a Butterfly harkened back to the jazz of irs heyday-the hard bop of the fifties, and the funk fusion of the late sixties and early seventies-and brought the music to a younger audience. Because of Butterfly’s adventurous nature, and perhaps due to the newfound interest in jazz, Kamasi Washington released The Epic soon after. To Pimp a Butterfly made it okay for Washington to put out such an ambitious project at a time when attention spans were shorter; a three-hour record, of any kind, likely wouldn’t exist before Kendrick’s project. “That record changed music, and we’re still seeing the effects of it,” Washington told Pitchfork. “It went beyond jazz; it meant that intellectually stimulating music doesn’t have to be underground. It can be mainstream. It went beyond everything else, too: harmonically, instrumentation-wise, structurally, lyrically. I feel like people’s expectations of themselves changed, too. It just didn’t change the music. It changed the audience.”
The other thing I’ll note is that reading this book made me want to listen to Kendrick’s entire discography. The credit for that, I believe, goes not only Moore’s journalism chops, but his deep appreciation and respect for both hip hop and the space that Kendrick Lamar created in it, all of which is apparent throughout.
Bottom line: A worthwhile read for anyone who wants to dig deeper and understand how a young man from Compton became a game-changing musical artist.
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