Photo by Jessica Lehrman
"If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you." This sacred insight, attributed to Jesus of Nazareth in the Gospel of Thomas, pulsates within every track on offer in Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly. A missive of militant transparency, it chronicles afresh Lamar’s tried and true conviction that giving lyrical voice to his deepest fears, anxieties, and resentments is the surest path to shaking free of them. "I could never right my wrongs ‘less I write it down for real," he once explained in "Poetic Justice" on good kid, m.A.A.d city. But this time around, he puts a diviner point on it: "My rights, my wrongs, I write ‘til I’m right with God."
He embraces this process of bringing it all forth with such exuberance, good humor, and relentless self-deprecation that no moment—be it anger, disillusionment, or megalomania—is allowed to dominate. With "u", for instance, a screaming hotel room meltdown in which he comes to the crushing conclusion that he’s thrown away his ties to family and neighbor in exchange for a mass market relationship of pseudo-intimacy with strangers, the shame spiral is suddenly interrupted by a knock on the door from a Spanish-speaking housekeeper who’s trying to finish a shift. Other lives go on and even crowd themselves in amid the audio of his angst. One degraded self-conception is interwoven with another or made to counter it. Bouts of suicidal depression in "u" are referred to in "i" as one more mood contended with, rebuked, and overcome ("I went to war last night"). And the compassion he struggled to have for himself is offered as a clarion call, an imperative, to be communally applied.
"I know there is a devil, because he talks so loud," Prince once announced on Lovesexy’s "I No". And where Prince named the deluding spirit Spooky Electric, Kendrick Lamar opts for Lucy (read: Lucifer) who appears not only as a corrupting influence that would keep his imagination captive in comparison, competition, and condescension when it comes to his peers and predecessors. Lucy also promises homeland security for friend and family in exchange for his affections. Righteousness is endlessly complicated. "For Sale (Interlude)" highlights that evil ("Misusing your influence…Abusing my power") is too elusive to ever be resisted once for all. If Lucy can quote scripture with ease, the all-pervading confusion with which he contends won’t stop outside church buildings: "They say if you scared, go to church/ But remember, he knows the Bible too." Being true, or in Lamar’s phrase Mandela-like, involves deep discernment and consistent dismissal of many a false signal. In this sense, the album is like an experiment in self-examination.
In her novel The Dispossessed, Ursula K. Le Guin makes a distinction between explorers and adventurers: "The explorer who will not come back or send back his ships to tell his tale is not an explorer, only an adventurer; and his sons are born in exile." With a constant determination to dramatically lyricize his setbacks and missteps, Kendrick Lamar has long opted to be an explorer. As early as "Fuck Your Ethnicity" on Section.80, he made clear that the table he was spreading was set out for all comers also in process: "Know that this fire that’s burning represents the passion that you have." To Pimp a Butterfly’s "Mortal Man" continues this vocation ("Let my word be your earth and moon") but he poses a question that’s different from the question of fame. He wants to make sure people are truly picking up what he means to lay down: "Is this relationship a fake or real as the heavens?"
Or as he also puts it, "When shit hit the fan is you still a fan?" And this is the question he tells us a prophet has to ask to even be a prophet. Are we really interested in the worlds to which he’s bearing witness? Are we receiving his witness at all? There’s many a precedent for such a move but an especially apt one is Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, whose narrator offers his own singular experience as one black man in a world ordered according to the rules of white supremacy in the hope that readers might see or sense their own experience—their own voice in a tale candidly told, a door left open a thousand times now made visible. Radically open-handed telling true, he imagines, is probably his only possible method and his only hope. "What else could I do? What else but try to tell you what was really happening when your eyes were looking through?" asks the Invisible Man. Maybe we will see. Perhaps a call is being successfully transmitted: "Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?"
This open-ended question is deeply in sync with Kendrick Lamar’s album-ending exchange with Tupac Shakur. Having drawn Tupac’s voice into the conversation through 20th century recordings, they’ve discussed sanity, survival, and the hopes of the world. Lamar offers his own vision (The "Only hope we have left is music and vibrations") and offers an account of the caterpillar, destroying its surroundings in an effort to get born, and contrasts it with "the talent, the thoughtfulness, and the beauty of the butterfly." There’s misunderstanding, resentment, and exploitation in the attempt, on the part of the caterpillar, to pimp the butterfly, to only see and use it perversely. But, as Lamar sees it, what’s yet to be widely understood is that the caterpillar and the butterfly are one. What might Tupac—or Tupac’s devotees—make of that? Tupac?
With this question a gift of spirit’s been set in motion and a site is made ready and available for all takers. Perhaps the form of life Lamar conjures here, will somehow inform our own. "Everything’s bullshit but the open hand," Bruce Cockburn once sang. And Lamar’s hands are open. Perhaps, on the lower frequencies, he speaks for you.
David Dark is the author of The Sacredness of Questioning Everything. He teaches at Tennessee Prison for Women and the School of Religion at Belmont University.