In 2015, Lamar released his third studio album, To Pimp a Butterfly. The album debuted at number one on the Billboard 200 chart and quickly reached platinum status. It was named album of the year by Rolling Stone, Pitchfork, and Billboard. At the 2016 Grammy Awards, Lamar won Best Rap Album, Best Rap Song (“I”), and best Rap Performance (“Alright”), and “These Walls” won Best Rap/Sung Collaboration. The album was nominated for Album of the Year (it lost to Taylor Swift’s 1989), and “Alright” was nominated for Song of the Year (it lost to “Thinking Out Loud” by Ed Sheeran). Rolling Stone praised the album (and D’Angelo’s Black Messiah, released that same year) for bringing “radical Black Politics and for-real Black music [. . .] in tandem to converge on the nation’s pop mainstream.” Micah Singleton tries to describe the significance of the album, and of Lamar’s presence in rap history:
To Pimp a Butterfly is perfect. There’s no other adjective that can properly convey its greatness. To Pimp a Butterfly is an immaculate amalgamation of rap, jazz, funk, soul, and spoken word. It cannot be restricted by a single genre. It’s the latest evolution of Black Music, and it’s nothing short of genius. (Black Music, inhabited by the likes of Curtis Mayfield, James Brown, Prince, the Fugees, Andre 3000, and D’Angelo. A land where the natural barriers of music don’t exist. A place where the main goal is the advancement and protection of the culture).
If Lamar’s debut had been overshadowed by Macklemore’s (white) pop-rap, the follow-up album solidified not only Lamar’s status as the greatest rapper alive (as many of the reviews claim), but as the black community’s chief spokesperson, and one on the vanguard of black musical aesthetics. Daniel L. Williams posits both Lamar and D’Angelo as black Messianic figures, part of a history of black cultural producers starting with Frederick Douglass and W.E.B. DuBois and stretching through Tupac and Kanye West. He writes: “One may view this [messianic] representation as a tactic of self-fashioning meant to neutralize controlling images of slavery through notions and references to divinity” (2). This representational strategy—the artist as messiah, leading the oppressed to freedom—comes right on the heels of the emergence of the Black Lives Matter movement. Among other laurels conferred on Lamar, President Obama said “How Much a Dollar Cost” was his favorite song of 2015. In The Guardian, Seth Colter Walls argued that Lamar may have helped to resurrect jazz.
In short, Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp A Butterfly appeared in the right place at the right time, and in many ways, defined what it meant to be black in 2015. It transformed how we talked about popular music and its role in our society.