A decade on from the release of K.dot’s essential album, John Hayden looks back.
The 2025 Super Bowl halftime show was not so much a concert as a searing statement of intent, consolidating Kendrick Lamar’s position as spokesman for a culture as he tackled social issues while showcasing his virtuoso logorrhea, churning through his Grammy-gobbling back catalogue with ruthless efficiency.
The stage was set for subversion with MC Samuel L. Jackson — "Uncle Sam" — dressed in red, white and blue, welcoming an audience of more than 127 million to "the great American game". When Jackson interjected between songs, it was to lambast Lamar — "Too loud. Too reckless. Too ghetto. Mr Lamar, do you really know how to play the game?" — a pointed reference to the cultural divides ravaging The Land of The Free. Before the climax, Lamar noted "40 acres and a mule / this is bigger than the music," a phrase that set the internet scrambling for meaning, and harked back to a time before the beef, before he was anointed and a concept K.dot explored on his third LP, released 10 years ago today.
Debut LP
Section. 80 (2011) and 2012’s
good kid, m.A.A.d City cemented his reputation as a dead-eyed documenter of the grim realities of growing up gang-affiliated in Compton. 2012 also saw the rise of Black Lives Matter, in response to the shooting of Trayvon Martin, and between December 2014 and May 2015, there followed albums shaded by the senseless deaths of he and other unarmed Black people at the hands of law enforcement — D’Angelo’s
Black Messiah and
The Epic, by Kamasi Washington. The former, a direct response to the uprising in Ferguson Missouri, channelled 1970s soul, while the latter’s sprawling mix of gospel and jazz emitted the spiritual essence of Black America. It was into this context which Lamar’s magnum opus —
To Pimp A Butterfly — emerged.
The cover art — a stark, monochrome image of shirtless black men on the White House lawn, standing over a white judge with crude black crosses scrawled over his eyes — is an incendiary signal of the audacious state-of-the-nation address contained within. Opening track Wesley’s Theory (featuring funk icon George Clinton and his avant-garde acolyte Thundercat), opines how the trappings of fame engulf those who "ain’t pass economics in school", as K.dot personifies the charms of White America ("what you want you?/ A house or a car?/ 40 acres and a mule?/ A piano or guitar?") Here, as at the Super Bowl, Lamar alludes to a proposal for post-Civil War reparations to formerly enslaved African-American soldiers, intended for them to gain financial independence. That this was brutally overturned is explored on the scintillating slice of slam poetry For Free? (Interlude), where, over free-form jazz courtesy of Terrace Martin and Robert Glasper, America is cast as a needy lover ("I picked the cotton that made you rich"). King Kunta — named for the lead character in Alex Haley’s slave odyssey Roots — takes this conceit even further over the most sinewy of basslines, grappling with the price of fame in an America divided, where the king of the slaves nonetheless remains a slave in a country overseen by "Democrips and Rebloodicans".
Such righteous declamations concerning American apartheid continued —
Institutionalised, Alright, Momma and
These Walls all had their genesis in a 2014 trip to South Africa, as does the gut-wrenching modern parable
How Much a Dollar Costs, where, buttressed by Ronald Isley’s beatific bridge, Kendrick reflects on his dismissal of a homeless man before guilt — and an epiphany of Old Testament proportions — overwhelms him. He continues to effortlessly fuse the personal and political on
The Blacker The Berry, the aural equivalent of a roundhouse kick to the head. Here, "the biggest hypocrite of 2015" ferociously dismantles racial stereotyping before focusing his laser-sharp lens on a truly devastating final couplet that tackles black-on-black violence. The album’s bleak outlook is offset by a thrilling excursion through black music history, pinballing between rap, jazz, funk, soul and freeform scat freakouts.
Such is ... Butterfly’s seismic impact, that it has been added to the Library of Congress, while its fearless musicality explicitly inspired Bowie’s swansong Blackstar (2016). Though the Pulitzer Prize followed (for 2017’s DAMN.), alongside other accolades in his annus mirabilis of 2024, the legacy of his third LP — where he shouldered the weight of messianic expectation with compelling candour and contemplation — remains chillingly prescient in the not-so-United States.
