A new book looks at the rapper's music and its poetic power
Usually, a musician gets a biography in the twilight of their career. It's a chance for fans to sit back and see how the artist evolved over decades.
Marcus J Moore, who has written about soul, jazz and hip hop for The New York Times, Pitchfork and others, was aware of this prevailing attitude — that you need to wait a while to take stock of a career.
"And I'm like, 'Well, let's not because you never know what's gonna go on," Moore told Double J.
Loading..."You've seen it this year. You've had premature deaths of people like Chadwick Boseman, Kobe Bryant, and people like that. Why are we waiting to give people their flowers? Let's just do it now."
That's what pushed Moore to write his first book, The Butterfly Effect: How Kendrick Lamar Ignited The Soul of America. It's a cultural biography of the Grammy- and Pulitzer-winning rapper that places his chart-topping, genre-pushing work in a broader context — in particular, it's relationship to genres like jazz and to the contemporary movement for racial justice.
"I got the idea for the book probably about three years [ago]," Moore said.
"It was a random day in Brooklyn. I was working full-time at Bandcamp. And I was going to lunch listening to To Pimp A Butterfly. And I'm like, 'Man, there's a book in here somewhere'."
Moore wanted to know how Kendrick came to work with people like singer Anna Wise, the multi-instrumentalist Thundercat, producer Flying Lotus, and the contemporary jazz musicians Robert Glasper and Kamasi Washington, an esoteric mix for a young guy who grew up on gangsta rap.
He also wanted to explore Kendrick's career leading up to that point — his youth in Compton; his earliest experiences in music; his break-out major label debut, good kid, m.a.a.d city; and what Moore calls Kendrick's "profound impact on a racially fraught America".
"I'd already played it a bunch when it came out," Moore says of To Pimp A Butterfly, Kendrick's third album, released in 2015. "But then when I had to go back and research [the book], it really cracked my head open.
"I'm still getting a lot from it. I'm still in love with the musicianship. I'm still in love with the poetry that's on it. I'm still in love with the honesty, too. Because, I mean, if you dig into it, he's talking about some serious stuff. He's talking about depression, survivor's guilt, the trappings of fame.
"Even when I listen to it now, I can understand why he doesn't give a lot of interviews these days, because you don't realise until you go back and listen to his music that he put a lot of his own personality into it."
When the album was released in 2015, the United States was reeling from several recent high-profile killings of young black men by authority figures.
It was in this charged environment that 'Alright', one of the singles from the album, became a soundtrack to the Black Lives Matter movement, which at that time was gaining international significance.
Kendrick performed 'Alright' from the roof of a graffitied police car on stage at the 2015 BET Awards, a powerful image that prompted predictable outrage from US conservative media. (He later sampled Fox News host Geraldo Riviera on his 2017 album DAMN..)
'Alright', partly inspired by the struggle Kendrick saw while spending time in South Africa earlier in his career, was powerful because of its simplicity, Moore said.
"You have Kendrick just with this very simple message, 'We gonna be alright'. And you repeat that enough and it becomes a mantra, it becomes sort of meditation, so to speak.
"I feel like that's the long-lasting impact. Because he's not implicitly saying, 'Hey, everything is messed up out here. And we're struggling'. He's saying, 'No, let's look beyond that. We're gonna be OK, we're gonna get past it'. Because, us as black people, we always go through challenges like this. And we always come out on top."
Moore spent a lot of time immersed in Kendrick's world while researching the book. One of things that surprised him, from talking to people in the rapper's orbit, was that Kendrick seemed in many ways unchanged by his status as one of most important figures in hip hop.
"He'll come to the studio, in the old white t-shirt, the basketball shorts and flip flops, like he's not Kendrick Lamar. He'll walk down the street like he's not Kendrick. People around him are like, 'Yo, dude, you can't just go down the street; you just have to move in a different way'.
"So, I think the thing ... that surprised me the most was that he's still very much the same guy."
Moore believes that the complexity of Kendrick's work, fusing jazz, hip hop and soul and finding space for many different kinds of music fan, will be key to his longevity.
"He was the perfect blend of old school and new school," Moore says.
"He catered to the gangsters and he catered to the backpackers and music nerds. He's this generation of talent that I feel like people are going to be listening to for a long time.
"You can listen to To Pimp A Butterfly, and all his music, 20 years from now, and you'll probably get something different from it every single time."