To Pimp A Butterfly
Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp A Butterfly album was made specifically to empower and educate listeners on prevalent Black issues in society. For a conscious rap album, the piece garnered positive critical attention while also topping charts. The Grammys awarded him “Best Rap Album of 2015” for the piece; but gave “Album of the Year” to Taylor Swift. Recently, renowned Black artists, like Solange and Frank Ocean, have pulled their works from Grammy evaluation because they feel the people making the decisions on awards are not appreciating Black work. Granted the judges did grant Lamar that award in 2015, they were still critiqued harshly for not appreciating Black work the preceding and subsequent years.
Thus, by unpacking, analyzing, and linking scholarly evidence to Kendrick Lamar’s themes of institutional racism and Black self-esteem within the album To Pimp A Butterfly, I argue that Kendrick Lamar is a modern Black leader.