The album’s instant canonisation owed something to the recent rise of Black Lives Matter, for which the song Alright became an anthem, but Lamar’s obsession with hypocrisy and complicity makes for a more complicated message. “It didn’t just change the music,” Washington testifies. The record propelled jazz musicians Thundercat and Kamasi Washington into the mainstream, while influencing everyone from Beyoncé to David Bowie. Like Gaye, he exploded his genre’s horizons.
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Like Marvin Gaye with What’s Going On, Lamar assembled a crack team of musicians to soundscape a panoramic, proudly black statement about American injustice through which he could make peace with his own stardom. The strongest chapter documents the painstaking creation of To Pimp a Butterfly. Giddy superlatives serve rappers better than biographers. Having achieved “a rise that we’d never seen before, the likes of which we’d never see again”, Lamar is now “almost a mythical being or a supernova”. Even as he praises Lamar’s verbal precision, his own prose is hobbled by industry jargon and incoherent metaphors: how can hip-hop be “tethered to the flames of burning buildings”? One chapter is titled A Star Is Born, a cliche that doesn’t even function as an accurate allusion. If there is a way to rewire this flawless ascent into a compelling narrative, then Moore hasn’t found it. Lamar’s father once told him: “I don’t want you to be like me … I never want you to make those mistakes.” The rapper is far too tough on himself to agree, but from the outside it might look as if he has made no mistakes at all. The friends and collaborators interviewed by Marcus J Moore in The Butterfly Effect have nothing to report but his phenomenal dedication to his craft, bringing to mind the joke about the job candidate who says that his worst quality is perfectionism. Blessed with a steady partner, a loyal crew and profound religious faith, he has been unscathed by drugs or feuds.
Once a shy, stuttering kid, he is quiet, watchful and uncannily wise. Eight years later, he could boast of three classic albums on the trot, a forest of trophies (including the first Pulitzer prize for music ever to go to a pop artist), and plaudits from Toni Morrison and Barack Obama.
Since the last day of 2009, when he dropped his battle-rapping K-Dot alias and became more personal on the Kendrick Lamar EP, Lamar’s career has arced skywards. His albums aren’t gangster movies or political manifestoes but morality plays. It’s this ethical struggle, beyond even his virtuosity as an MC and storyteller, that makes Lamar so admired. The poem that winds through 2015’s To Pimp a Butterfly describes him breaking down in a hotel room on tour, tormented by survivor’s guilt and the responsibilities of success. Such incidents explain the questions that convulse Lamar’s work: Why him? How can he justify his good fortune? While an earlier generation of Compton MCs, including Lamar’s mentor Dr Dre, exaggerated or invented their criminality, most of the conflict in Lamar’s lyrics is internal. He got an early break as a hype man for the rapper Jay Rock in 2010 after his predecessor was shot dead by gang members for wearing the wrong-coloured T-shirt. He raps about drama that didn’t quite happen, or happened to someone else: the friends in prison or in coffins, for whom fate turned left instead of right while Lamar not only survived but thrived. Kendrick Lamar Duckworth is drawn to these crossroads moments. “If Anthony killed Ducky,” Lamar concludes, “Top Dawg could be servin’ life/ While I grew up without a father and die in a gunfight.” His albums aren’t gangster movies or political manifestos but morality plays Lamar recounts a potentially fatal altercation in the 1990s between his father, Kenny Duckworth, and Anthony Tiffith, the man who would later launch his career through Top Dawg Entertainment. After they burgle a house, police sirens enter the mix and Lamar imagines being arrested for the first time, but there’s a characteristic twist: “They made a right, then made a left/Then made a right, then made another right/One lucky night with the homies.” There’s a similar what-if quality to Duckworth, the final track on 2017’s Damn. Billed as a true story, it describes an eventful day the 17-year-old Lamar spent under the influence of his more erratic friends in Compton, Los Angeles. T he Art of Peer Pressure, a standout track on Kendrick Lamar’s 2012 album Good Kid, MAAD City, is a nail-biting account of disaster averted.
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