Prestige has been chasing the Compton rapper Kendrick Lamar ever since he broke through in 2011—first, in hip-hop, when he was the protégé of Dr. Dre, and then, beyond. His major-label début, “good kid, m.A.A.d city,” was deemed an “instant masterpiece”; his most recent release, “D.A.M.N.,” an “instant classic.” He has been hailed as a “literary genius” and a visual one. His lyrics have been annotated by the Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Michael Chabon, and he himself collected the Pulitzer Prize, in music, in 2018, becoming the first pop artist ever to do so.
Much like Kanye West before him, critics and fans view Lamar as an unparalleled virtuoso who pushes boundaries with each new project, his coronation to the pantheon of great contemporary artists not so much an “if” as a “when.” These accolades, obviously, aren’t without merit. Lamar is a prodigiously gifted lyricist and performer who consistently makes bold aesthetic choices. He deploys lacerating wordplay, nearly frantic in its motion yet piercing in its lucidity. When his verbal skills combine with his fine-tuned hood morality, Lamar opens a window onto an imperilled, alienating existence: what it’s like to navigate the territorial Compton streets with a sixth sense for trouble.
Read an excerpt in this week’s issue.
Both West and Lamar have been christened with the glow of Black genius, which the writer Jason Parham defined as “an uncanny power to awaken our deepest and most sacred sentiments.” The Roots drummer Questlove connects this genius to extraordinary insight into the everyday Black struggle: “Anyone who is Black that started in meagre or so-so conditions that are not that of the privileged of the world—when they finally transform to a higher level, it is guilt they feel. Having survivor’s guilt. And that is one thing that every Black genius wrestles with.” For Lamar, survivor’s guilt came to a head in 2015, in the form of “To Pimp a Butterfly,” where he grappled with celebrity and civic responsibility—the internal conflicts and the external pressures, the tension between materialism and spirituality. It is an album that begins with a Wesley Snipes parable on the exploitation of the Black artist and ends with a phantom Tupac interview. “We ain’t even really rappin’,” the late rapper says from beyond the grave, with his living heir apparent listening intently. “We just letting our dead homies tell stories for us.”
The intersection of Black genius and Black strife is the focus of a new book, “The Butterfly Effect: How Kendrick Lamar Ignited the Soul of Black America.” The writer Marcus J. Moore places the rapper on the list of historic Black musicians who “spoke to us and for us.” “They created music in which we could see our full, beautiful selves, and they helped us remember that we weren’t second-class citizens, even when the world tried to render us invisible,” Moore writes. “America can beat you down if you let it, but through Sly’s howl, Curtis’s falsetto, and D’Angelo’s hum, you felt the beauty and bleakness of black culture.” Moore points to Black genius itself as an act of dissent. “Sometimes that’s what protest is. It isn’t solely about picket signs and clever chants, it’s about the full breadth of the experience, about wading through the misery and finding light through it all.”
The beauty and bleakness of Black culture are on full display in Moore’s examination of Lamar’s musicianship. The book ties his radical music and its incredible growth curve to the shooting death of Trayvon Martin, in 2012, then a travelling apprenticeship with West during the “Yeezus” tour, in 2013, and finally a trip to South Africa to learn about Nelson Mandela, in 2014. Here, Lamar’s breakthrough is presented as a turning point for modern Black artistic expression, not just in America but in Africa as well, ushering in what Moore describes as the “most fertile period of socially conscious black music” since the nineteen-seventies. Lamar—like Dave Chappelle and LeBron James before him—becomes a crossover star so transcendent that he embodies the American ideal of upward mobility.
Lamar’s career is still unfolding, thus making him difficult to evaluate and scrutinize. At thirty-three, he has conquered nearly every cultural sphere, and that success has made him somewhat impenetrable. His peerless genius is a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy. There has been little need for criticism but little room for it either. The white-hot reverence for his work can, occasionally, blot out valid grievances. On the “To Pimp a Butterfly” closing track “Mortal Man,” his hero worship of Michael Jackson extends to the denial of abuse. Subsequently, in 2018, Lamar threatened to pull his music from Spotify in response to a new policy punishing abusers like the late rapper XXXtentacion and the disgraced R. & B. icon R. Kelly. Though Lamar has been praised for the ethics of leadership displayed in his work, he has remained silent throughout a summer of protests and riots.
Moore’s cultural history is less concerned with exploring the contradictions and complexities of Lamar’s life and career than with weighing its outsized impact. The book pieces together the notoriously private rapper’s background—his N.B.A. aspirations, his working-class roots, his experience of the L.A. riots, and, at five, his early exposure to gun violence—illustrating both the connective tissue of Black experience and how Lamar drew upon it to become a generational voice. Here are just some of the threads used to make a case for Lamar’s significance: the white Seattle rapper Macklemore’s absurd rap Grammys sweep, in 2014, the public outcry in response, and his subsequent public apology to Lamar; Lamar’s controversial BET performance, in 2015, and his war with conservative commentators such as Geraldo Rivera; and Lamar’s unforgettable Grammys return, in 2016, when he performed in a blue jumpsuit along a chain gang. In each case, Moore spells out what these events say about the politics of race in public space. He identifies Lamar as the unlikely point of intersection between the Pulitzer Board and the Disney conglomerate—an artist capable of clearing the barrier to entry into highbrow culture and also radicalizing the music of a billion-dollar cat superhero franchise. Principally, he points out how Lamar’s rise runs parallel with that of the Black Lives Matter movement and counter to the rise of President Trump.
The trouble with chronicling genius is that, if not careful, the process can quickly veer into hagiography. The most resonant chapters in Moore’s book are less focussed on kingmaking than on craft and coöperation: the “lesser” influences that spark inventiveness, such as the high-school English teacher, Regis Inge, who brought poetry into Lamar’s life and fostered his interest in creative writing, or the instrumentalist Terrace Martin, who introduced the saxophonist Kamasi Washington and the pianist Robert Glasper to the “Butterfly” sessions. It is in these snapshots that we learn how talent only becomes genius when nurtured. One passage illustrates how the indie-rap empire that Kendrick now fronts, Top Dawg Entertainment, is the byproduct of so many coincidences that its success begins to feel like destiny, when in fact it has also been made with hard work.
Top Dawg Entertainment became the support system that allowed Lamar to reach his creative peaks. His artistry bloomed in combination with Martin and the producer Sounwave, and his sound was refined under the stewardship of the engineer Derek Ali. His skills as a lyricist were sharpened by the competitive, albeit friendly, atmosphere of Black Hippy, the supergroup that formed in 2009 with Jay Rock, ScHoolBoy Q, and Ab-Soul. The visual acumen displayed in his videos was heightened by his creative partnership with Dave Free, who co-directs with him in the Grammy-winning “The Little Homies.” And none of this would have been possible without Top Dawg himself (a.k.a. Anthony Tiffith), who provided structure and oversight, creating the space where Lamar grew into his personality. “This was boot camp and domination was the ultimate goal,” Moore writes, and it’s as if running that gauntlet prepared Lamar for greatness.
In essence, this is the story of how Lamar became the kind of rapper who could make a paradigm-shifting album like “To Pimp a Butterfly,” and how “To Pimp a Butterfly,” in turn, pushed the pop landscape toward jazz and soul sounds and made space for more radical forms of Blackness in entertainment, for rule-breaking. “That record changed music, and we’re still seeing the effects of it. It went beyond jazz; it meant that intellectually stimulating music doesn’t have to be underground. It can be mainstream,” Washington told Pitchfork, in 2017. “It just didn’t change the music. It changed the audience.” Moore’s enthusiasm for Kendrick’s work jumps off the page, and while that occasionally drifts into hyperbole and conjecture, it fuels a deep desire to trace the music’s genealogy. In so doing, the book explores how hip-hop culture is inextricably linked to the Black American experience. An entire section is devoted to victims of police brutality, their stories, their cases, and the injustice of acquittal after acquittal for the cops involved. The Wu-Tang Clan rapper Method Man, who grew up on Staten Island, speaks of the prohibited chokehold that killed Eric Garner in the borough, in 2014, as if inherent to life there. Another of the victims, Michael Brown, was an aspiring rapper himself and a Lamar fan. Though Kendrick’s controversial take on Brown’s death is somewhat glossed over, the book is constantly putting into context how the rapper’s art is a product of the same trauma and working in service to the Black communities that experienced that trauma.
Of course, it is always dangerous to make any kind of definitive claim about artistic genius. There is no real barometer, and the atmosphere can change quickly. Those who proclaimed Kanye a genius years ago may feel differently today. In a 2018 essay, “Kanye West and Why the Myth of ‘Genius’ Needs to Die,” the critic Jayson Greene wrote, “The larger cultural insanity of genius twists all of us. To believe in genius is to believe in saviors. It is to lie in wait for cult leaders to arise. Elevating geniuses automatically subjugates the rest of us.” As Marjorie Garber put it, in the 2002 essay “Our Genius Problem,” “The pursuit of genius is the pursuit of an illusion.” This is especially true in the arts, where the fruits of collaboration are too often credited to singular talent. Moore is constantly trying to strike a balance between honoring Lamar’s artistry, acknowledging his many inspirations and allies, and placing him at the center of something bigger than himself. He is described as possessing both types of genius—natural and learned, brilliant and industrious—and as an auteur of near-flawless creative vision, but also as the product of a network of creators and as the living legacy of the tangle of Black geniuses that came before. He is spoken of as just short of a savior here—the bestower of instant classics. But at this stage, it is impossible to know just how much of his “genius” is transitory. That’s the thing: only time can tell.
