For him, success is a minefield of temptation and responsibility that he didn’t foresee. Kendrick is interested in interrogating what “it” means. But the hard part is keeping it,” he misses the point. When Kendrick’s mentor, Dr Dre, pops up on the first song to say, “Remember, anybody can get it. If good kid, mAAd city was a bildungsroman then To Pimp a Butterfly (among other things, it’s a riff on Harper Lee and a metaphor for art versus commerce) is a morality play. It also triggered a profound spiritual crisis. The album earned him a platinum disc, four Grammy nominations, fans including Kanye West, Chris Rock and Taylor Swift, and guest verses for everyone from Eminem and 50 Cent to Imagine Dragons and Dido. With 2012’s good kid, mAAd city, an audacious concept album about his dicey adolescence, Kendrick brought a leftfield sensibility to a mainstream platform and became hip-hop’s new hero: tough, agile, erudite and questioning. That’s the place I’m putting the listener in.”
I had to roll with this record for two years but it was a fun experience. The process of me making it is the same process the listener’s going to have to deal with, and that’s rolling with it. “I know it’ll be challenging for a listener who doesn’t know my music. I wonder what a listener who discovers him that way will make of an album as dense, relentless and discomfiting as To Pimp a Butterfly. When we meet, Kendrick heads the Billboard top 100 via a guest verse on Taylor Swift’s single Bad Blood. Recently, Kendrick visited a New Jersey high school where the album was being used to teach students about “the dichotomy of black culture in America” and accepted a Generational Icon award from the California state senate. One critic called it “The Great American Hip-Hop Album”. On the review aggregator website Metacritic it is one of the most acclaimed albums ever with a 96% score. When it came out in March, it felt like the album hip-hop had been waiting for. But nobody has unpacked the implications of that transition as thoroughly as Kendrick does on his remarkable third studio album, To Pimp a Butterfly. The ambitious MC’s path from violence and deprivation to fame and wealth is the genre’s ur-narrative. Hip-hop is obsessed with the distance between Then and Now. I’m sure it’s real for a lot of artists who grew up in neighbourhoods like that.” “The instinct to get out the way when you hear a popping sound, that’s real for me. “I don’t know if somebody threw a rocket at a trash can or what, but it made a loud-ass popping sound and everybody who was in the car with me ducked,” he remembers.
In a split second the successful 28-year-old rapper disappeared and the wary teenager from the streets of Compton, California resurfaced. When I mention this to Kendrick Lamar, he nods and says: “That’s real.” Recently, he was making the video for his new single, Alright, when he was startled by a loud bang. The report estimates that 30% of young people in urban “combat zones” suffer from some form of PTSD. L ast year, the director of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention presented research demonstrating that “youth living in inner cities show a higher prevalence of post-traumatic stress disorder than soldiers”.