And while that album was certainly rooted in the specificity of Lamar’s life, I often regarded it as about macro themes, however unfairly I came to those terms. were not necessarily meant to live together, they present a looser and more unexpected approach to the themes on Butterfly. It exists within the same universe of To Pimp A Butterfly, the same throughlines of Afrofuturism, jazz, the recollections of spirituals infused into contemporary life, and yet because the tracks on untitled unmastered.
feels whole it doesn’t feel like a random selection of tracks. While demo collections can often feel uneven and incohesive-they are the tracks that didn’t make it to a single or album- untitled unmastered. It’s indifferent to the expectations heaped on a follow-up because it was recorded at a different time. Butterfly is too, but somehow the cacophonous jazz-influenced album failed to grab me and I came away feeling that Butterfly was too weighed down by expectation and by Lamar’s own desire to say something of importance that it felt too careful, too calculated in a way.īy virtue of being a collection of demos, untitled unmastered. city, the specificity upon which Lamar spoke of Compton, his childhood, his adolescence it was and still is a remarkable album. I still love listening to good kid, m.A.A.d. What if my general indifference towards Butterfly spread to these songs and then ultimately spread to Lamar himself? I didn’t want to be in a place to dismiss Lamar wholesale simply because I happen to be highly contrarian towards a largely white male world of music criticism (though, to be honest, we should all be so skeptical to such pillars). city about to download To Pimp A Butterfly, even knowing that this release is a collection of demos from the Butterfly sessions. with a mixture of apprehension and excitement, the same excitement I had as a big fan of good kid, m.A.A.d.
So I approached the release of untitled unmastered. None of this is Lamar’s fault, to be sure I should be hating the game and not the player, but the fact remained the same: when push came to shove, I put on Vince Staples over To Pimp A Butterfly, I put on Drake or Future or BeatKing on over To Pimp A Butterfly. There was something about its universal praise, its anointment as an “important” album by, let’s face it, a largely white community of music writers that kept holding it and Kendrick Lamar up as the model of what rap should be, wagging a finger to the other rappers who don’t explore similar themes and sounds. For regular readers of my hip-hop column, Da Art of Storytellin’, you know that I have a fraught relationship with To Pimp A Butterfly, an album I respect greatly but yet I still can’t get myself to listen to it.
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