Illmatic or It Was Written? Ready to Die or Life After Death? Slim Shady LP or Marshall Mathers LP? Food & Liquor or The Cool? good kid, m.A.A.d city or To Pimp a Butterfly?

The prophecy has been foretold, and foretold, and foretold. The savior, who drops two classics, then disappoints us, and if he’s truly the savior, makes up for it in the long run (see: Nas). But I’m not going to postulate about the future for Kendrick, instead lets appreciate what this particular prodigy has done. When I first heard To Pimp a Butterfly I was positive it was better than GKMC. This was what I had been waiting for, where parts of GKMC left me yearning for just a little more, I now felt satisfied.

TPAB is not an album you can taste in one sip, or even one glass. It requires intensive, diligent and repeated consumption. You will change your mind again, and again, and again, about elements of it. Second albums by the prodigious rap star are always sprawling attempts to recapture the spirit of the first, while proving that they can do even better. They usually lash out at a force bigger than themselves and puff out their chest at anyone trying to tell them anything. This is where Kendrick separates himself. Where most have taken this moment to give the world an angst-y middle finger and stomp up their gorgeous marble spiral staircase and slam their heavy double doors, Kendrick only blames himself. With armor-piercing self-awareness, he blames himself for even the possibility that fame and wealth has changed him, for even the potential for him to be corrupted. It’s a bleak but cautionary parable from a future self, sent to forewarn of the self-loathing guilt that will await him should he betray Compton. Don’t play the victim, be responsible for “U” he infers; this is a common theme throughout.

After a year full of #BlackLivesMatter and #ICantBreath you’d think Kendrick would aim some, if not most, of his fire-breathing passion at institutional racism on his 16 track, hour-plus slam poetry funk record. But somehow he didn’t. It’s perplexing at best, and irresponsible at worst. Okay, to be fair there is “The Blacker the Berry”. But it’s hard to tell how much of that anger is aimed at himself, and how much is at the system that “hates him” when he begins and ends the song with calling himself a hypocrite. His stream-of-consciousness flow wrestles with issues of black self-love and hypocrisy throughout the album. Symbolically, on “i” he addresses the importance self-esteem, and then when the dramatized live crowd causes a ruckus he lectures them about the word “nigga”. It’s clumsy, but it’s also about perspective. About when you’re in the heat of the moment, step back and see the bigger picture. Where GKMC weaved its way through the nooks and crannies of the city, TPAB weaves through the psyche of young Kendrick like a parasitic epiphany; an epiphany that is heavily centered on Black unity and cultural appreciation.

The sounds that exude from this album seem to come from every aesthetic of African-American musical contributions. Nods to the early jazz, nods to reggae, to funk, west coast, east coast, down south; like a Outkast produced Tupac album ghost-written by Saul Williams and recorded in Harlem on a 100 degree day. Basically it sounds fucking sick. And smart. Like Kendrick and his producers put painstaking amounts of thought into every note of this album and spent months just listening to music to find what they wanted. But the magic of Kendrick is how easy he makes it sound. It’s like he’s so good at rapping it doesn’t even sound like rapping. Like rapping bores him, he’d rather talk to you, but he doesn’t know how to talk without rapping. You have to periodically remind yourself not to engage in a conversation with the voice inside your iPod. It’s simultaneously vehement and laid-back. Every song is so new and different from the last that you’d think it’d hurt the album as a whole, yet theirs this chaotic ethereal cohesion. And maybe that’s what the album really wants to say. How life is chaotic and its sprawling and it’s full of contradictions, but deep down on some intangible hardly perceptible level, there’s this cohesion, that says we’re all in this together. Yes, it’s cheesy; Kendrick is a surprisingly cheesy guy (“How Much a Dollar Cost?”). But he’s genuine, and he’s created a brilliantly challenging piece of work. Where Tupac was impossibly bi-polar, and where Nas lacked the aesthetic wit, Kendrick is a self-aware curator of his own free-to-the-public high-art gallery.

So, IS To Pimp a Butterfly better than good kid, m.A.A.d. city?? Much to my surprise TPAB actually made me appreciate GKMC more. In moments where TPAB was testing my patience, I could quickly find solace in the soothing rhythms of “Bitch, Don’t Kill My Vibe” or defibrillate myself with “m.A.A.d. city”. The butter-smooth medley of that album became clearer to me. It’s a more focused effort, but that’s only because with Butterfly he’s focused on 100 things, and he’s battling with us every step for that divine clarity. It’s a grand Interstellar-ian attempt at an all-encompassing masterpiece that every great artist attempts once in his or her career. It’s what Nas wanted It Was Written to be, and almost what The Marshall Mathers LP was. It’s caught somewhere between the shadow of it’s predecessor and transcendent magnum-opus.