Best albums of 2015: No 1 – To Pimp a Butterfly by Kendrick Lamar

Kendrick Lamar’s 2012 breakthrough, Good Kid, MAAD City, was a great album: meticulously crafted, weighty, hugely entertaining, a platinum seller that topped critics’ best-of-the-year lists. But it still couldn’t quite prepare you for what he did next. To Pimp a Butterfly was sprawling, anguished, wilfully contrary. It certainly wasn’t the first latter-day album to be compared to black music’s legendary, turmoil-riddled state-of-the-nation addresses – Marvin Gaye’s What’s Goin’ On, Curtis Mayfield’s There’s No Place Like America Today, Sly and The Family Stone’s There’s a Riot Goin’ On. But for once the association didn’t seem like hyperbole.

Just as Sly Stone’s decision to strip away his music’s bubbling, bright optimism perfectly caught the pessimism of 1971, To Pimp a Butterfly was the right album by the right artist at the right time. Broiling with post-Ferguson anger and despair – “You hate my people, your plan is to terminate my culture / You’re fucking evil” – complicated and claustrophobic, riddled with disquiet and self-doubt, desperate to work out what the answers might be but unable to come to any real conclusions, any meaningful reaction beyond a scream of horror.

Almost every time something optimistic or bright happened – the familiar braggadocio of King Kunta, These Walls’ detour into lubricious bedroom funk, the hopefulness of the chorus of Alright, sung by Pharrell Williams – it was quickly snatched away, or deliberately short–circuited: as it progressed, King Kunta’s self-aggrandising turned increasingly haunted and bleak; sex provides no real escape from anxiety and desperation; Alright’s positivity struggled to be heard against a backdrop of murmuring voices, agitated flurries of sax and uneasy harmonies. Uneasy, agitated, bleak, desperate: To Pimp a Butterfly sounded like 2015 frequently felt.

Moreover, it sounded like the work of an artist simultaneously at the end of his tether and at the top of his game. Lyrically dexterous and skilled enough to make even the hackneyed and deeply unlovable topic of the pressures of success sound compelling (how much of the album was concerned not with current events but gazing inwards understandably tended to be overlooked); musically ambitious and omnivorous, the album’s touchstones constantly shifting from late-1960s jazz to 1970s funk to 1990s hip hop.

Of course, To Pimp a Butterfly was the kind of album that music critics traditionally love. A knotty, difficult follow-up to a million-selling success, pocked with bursts of skronking free jazz and prepared to risk accusations of self-indulgence; an album that clearly had Something To Say about the times in which it was made, from social injustice to social media; its lyrics densely packed with enough allusions to keep the correspondents of genius.com busy for weeks. Of such things are five-star reviews and admiring plaudits from other artists frequently made. To Pimp a Butterfly got plenty of both – Prince proclaimed it “pure”, Tony Visconti suggested it was among the inspirations for Blackstar, David Bowie’s forthcoming jazz-fuelled return to more avant garde waters. But more striking was the fact that such an apparently uncommercial album, light years away from current trends in hip hop and spiritually closer to the alt-rap of Blackalicious or Bahamidia than anything else in the charts, was a huge popular success. No 1 on both sides of the Atlantic, it shifted half a million copies in three months in the US alone.

The cynical response would be to say that was a result of hype. Certainly there was a great deal of ink spilled on To Pimp a Butterfly in the aftermath of its release, just as Lamar had predicted (“Once I finish this witnesses will convey just what I mean,” he wryly noted on The Blacker The Berry). But by August, when Alright had begun to take on the appearance of a genuine protest anthem, the kind of thing people spontaneously sing at demonstrations – Black Lives Matter protesters in Cleveland chanted its chorus at police who pepper-sprayed them – it didn’t really look that way. The truth may be that Kendrick Lamar produced something so potent that it leapfrogged the usual considerations of commerciality and connected with a mass audience. It hardly needs underlining that this almost never happens: proof that To Pimp a Butterfly was something special.