To Pimp a Butterfly
| Kendrick Lamar
To Pimp a Butterfly
Butterfly is the third studio album by American rapper Kendrick Lamar. It was released on March 15, 2015, by Top Dawg Entertainment, Aftermath Entertainment and Interscope Records. The album was recorded in studios throughout the United States, with production from Sounwave, Terrace Martin, Taz "Tisa" Arnold, Thundercat, Rahki, LoveDragon, Flying Lotus, Pharrell Williams, Boi-1da, and several other high-profile hip hop producers, as well as executive production from Dr. Dre and Anthony "Top Dawg" Tiffith. The album incorporates elements of jazz, funk, soul, spoken word, and avant-garde music and explores a variety of political and personal themes concerning African-American culture, racial inequality, depression, and institutional discrimination. - Wikipedia
Critic Reviews
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Unsung Sundays
To Pimp A Butterfly is, right now, the most important album of the decade.
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pluggedin
It's a provocative, unusual and unsettling album, one that's drenched in honesty and self-critique … and obscene and bitter lyricism.
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No Ripcord
It is an album that can be, even deserves to be annotated song-by-song, line-by-line.
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Skiddle
Jimmy Coultas is wowed by Kendrick Lamar's joyous new release.
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The Ithacan
It’s creative and captivating.
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pluggedin
It's a provocative, unusual and unsettling album, one that's drenched in honesty and self-critique … and obscene and bitter lyricism.
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The Line of Best Fit
The result is a really excellent album: uncompromising, thoughtful, and with enough buried complexities to keep people arguing for years to come.
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Pitchfork
The dense and complex follow-up to good kid, m.A.A.d city is wry, theatrical, chaotic, ironic, and mournful, often all at once.
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The Verge
Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly exceeds the best work of his idol.
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The Gaurdian
Challenging but gripping
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Genius
This album shows how unique Kendrick is compared to his contemporaries.
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Complex
Ultimately, Complex awarded Kendrick’s latest album
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Billboard
Because, despite the bold declarations, beautiful beats and brash imagery, it's not an announcement, it's a conversation.
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Chicago Tribune
The music brims with frayed edges and conflicted characters who try to parse the meaning of black empowerment.
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Consequence of Sound
He isn’t going to let doubts stop him from making groundbreaking music.
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Hip Hop DX
Ambitious in its attempt to inspire a generation to change.
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Rockhaq
A lot to love and to be honest, not much to dislike.
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Alt Citizen
It’s Lamar’s duty to point out these hypocrisies, even if they’re not necessarily the things his fans want to hear.
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DJ Booth
That record changed music, and we’re still seeing the effects of it.
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Vulture
A record that finds liberation from present ills in the studio craftsmanship and heaving, live-band energy of the past.
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Medium
‘To Pimp a Butterfly’ should be unpacked like schoolwork, assessed like an exam and cherished like a newborn.
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Vibe
All Kendrick wants to do is stretch the wings that have been cramped up under him for a while.
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Truth Renaissance
An artistic work that deserves to be examined because it forces our nation to take an introspective look
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Tiny Mix Tapes
This is my last word: respect.
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Rolling Stone
The Compton MC’s second major-label album is a masterpiece of fiery outrage, deep jazz and ruthless self-critique.
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NPR
He wasn't just a skilled lyricist, but a vivid storyteller able to create scenes with vivid detail and intrigue.
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TIME
Lamar wants nothing less than greatness, and To Pimp a Butterfly is yet another step forward on that path.
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The Quietus
To Pimp A Butterfly stands as a fearless and uncompromising manifestation of Lamar's desire to push the culture of rap forwards.
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Entertainment Weekly
Lamar operates in the same boldly visionary idiom as the Purple One, expanding the boundaries of the hip-hop empire and daring other aspirants to the throne.
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AV Club
It’s not easy to admit but I think the reality is that I was impressed, and remain impressed, by the album and its ambitions more than I actually feel connected to.
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All Music
To Pimp a Butterfly is as dark, intense, complicated, and violent as Picasso's Guernica, and should hold the same importance for its genre and the same beauty for its intended audience.
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NY Daily News
It's in every way an expansion of Lamar's vision, with far more exciting, funky and outgoing music to accompany it.
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SYN Media
I would recommend this album to anyone, it’s definitely worth listening to.
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GQ Magazine
Rest assured that Kendrick's new record is a very, very special one.
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Sputnik Music
"We ain't even really rappin', we just letting our dead homies tell stories for us."
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Drowned in Sound
This is an important – a very important – piece of work that will stand the test of time.
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Fact Magazine
Lamar is selling revolutionary ideas with a song and dance, in a medium that delivers the message. It may be the most important lesson he’s learned from Tupac.
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SPIN
Kendrick Lamar returns with the great american hip-hop album, ‘To Pimp a Butterfly’.
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Irish Times
A record for the times we’re in.
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Treble Zine
To Pimp a Butterfly is complex, both lyrically and musically.
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The Telegraph
Despite its dense mesh of diverse influences this is a vividly contemporary album, says Neil McCormick.
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Austin Chronicle
Incredibly, for the first time, the audacious urgency of rap flattens out into a reduced essence while becoming, at once, a medium completely subservient to its message.
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Rap Analysis
To Pimp A Butterfly is the greatest rap album of all time.
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USA Today
To Pimp a Butterfly is Kendrick Lamar’s masterpiece.
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PopMatters
To Pimp a Butterfly is the result of one man’s sprawling journey, but it’s meant to empower us all to take our own.
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DIY Magazine
Lamar’s work continues to place itself among the best.
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Exclaim!
Arguably it's the nexus between planes and automobiles — the mundane and fame — in which Lamar's sophomore major label album To Pimp A Butterfly wholly exists.
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Daily Campus
Kendrick Lamar’s 'To Pimp A Butterfly' is the best album of the decade.
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LA Times
What they’ll find is dense, ripe for exploration.
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All Music
To Pimp a Butterfly is as dark, intense, complicated, and violent as Picasso's Guernica, and should hold the same importance for its genre and the same beauty for its intended audience.
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The Line of Best Fit
The result is a really excellent album: uncompromising, thoughtful, and with enough buried complexities to keep people arguing for years to come.
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Skiddle
Jimmy Coultas is wowed by Kendrick Lamar's joyous new release.
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The Line of Best Fit
The result is a really excellent album: uncompromising, thoughtful, and with enough buried complexities to keep people arguing for years to come.
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Skiddle
Jimmy Coultas is wowed by Kendrick Lamar's joyous new release.
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No Ripcord
It is an album that can be, even deserves to be annotated song-by-song, line-by-line.
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Unsung Sundays
To Pimp A Butterfly is, right now, the most important album of the decade.
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Financial Times
In this adventurous and engrossing album rap competition is a spur for a greater prize.
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Slate
Poetry aside, in its sprawl, its engagement, its tough tenderness, its “overwhelming blackness,” its spirituality, its specific musical reconnection of hip-hop to jazz and the neo-soul movement, and its general too-much-ness, the work of art to which To Pimp a Butterfly most begs comparison is—of course—D’Angelo and the Vanguard’s recent likeminded monsterpiece, Black Messiah.
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Timeout
Kendrick kills it with a brooding rap masterpiece.
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Louder than War
This is a seminal album and guaranteed to go down as one of the all time greats.
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Music Feeds
TPAB is daringly conceptual, albeit more loosely so than Lamar’s breakthrough ‘movie’, good kid, mAAd city.
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The Student Vanguard
This album is wrapped so tight in concepts, and musical themes, that you will take away something valuable on each listen.
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Slug Mag
Few albums are this salient in their time, this complicated, this beautiful, this true.
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KWVA
Out of every album I listened to this year, there is a clear favorite distinguished in my heart and mind.
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LYFZTYL
It is frenetic, and unnerved, and tempestuous—a stupefying odyssey through a glut of torment, injustice, and creeping self-doubt.
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Irish Examiner
Kendrick Lamar’s second album is a weird, wonky juggernaut of righteous indignation.
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Decade Magazine
Just when people thought he couldn’t top it, he fucking did and released an album so unimaginably good it fucking rocked the rap community.
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Blackman Voice
It’s a refreshing and inspiring album.
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The Lamron
Kendrick Lamar is a visionary.
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Student Edge
To Pimp a Butterfly isn’t as consistently excellent as its cinematic predecessor good kid. m.A.A.d city. Still, it’s home to some of the best musical moments of recent memory
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KEXP
To Pimp A Butterfly starts exactly where good kid left off.
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Vox Magazine
Kendrick Lamar wars with himself on his third studio album.
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The Denver Post
Kenrick Lamar might be one of the best rapper’s in the game (and he’s certainly shirked the industry’s dreaded “sophomore jinx”) but he’s still a human being.
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Cisternyard
Kendrick Lamar has gotten rid of all the rules.
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Music Connection
With great power comes a greater responsibility and Kendrick Lamar exercises his position honestly.
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cleveland
I have a feeling true hip-hop fans will be revisiting "To Pimp a Butterfly" quite some time.
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Music OMH
Beneath the stark duality of self-confidence/self-loathing here is a more complex internal dialogue between the extroversion of Lamar’s role as rapper and his personal introspection.
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Dead End Follies
TO PIMP A BUTTERFLY is a terrific, proud, creative and important hip-hop record that'll be bound to influence several young rappers in the future.
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Buffalo News
It’s an overwhelming album. But then, these are overwhelming times.
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Mojo 4 Music
Compton rapper channels revolutionary ire via free jazz and ’70s funk.
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Atwood Magazine
It’s going to be years before we really know if this album will truly be a bonafide classic; but what we know right now is that it’s pretty fuckin incredible.
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Stereochampions
We'll be talking about this one for a while.
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Golden Plec
He’s made his masterpiece, and the amount of time everyone will spend poring over its many nuances and complexities should give him ample time to figure out where he goes from here.
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The Pop Break
Give it time, patience, and close attention—I’m sure this album will only improve with age, and we’ll discover more nuggets of knowledge deep within its crevices for years to come.
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The DePaula
A monumental record, “To Pimp a Butterfly” is destined to be experienced again and again to dig deeper into its wisdom.
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All Hip Hop
Overall this is an excellent album.
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The Gavel
"To Pimp a Butterfly" is a masterpiece.
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Edmonton Journal
Captivating. Heartbreaking. Triumphant. Unforgettable.
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Earbuddy
A masterpiece in any way you want to measure its worth.
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The Roundup
Another’s review of this album can’t describe the depth, the complexity, the finesse of this album.
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Soul in Stereo
Trust me, you need to hear this.
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Oxford Student
It is this intricate overlaying of influences and styles that makes the album so compelling.
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Bonafide
While To Pimp a Butterfly would be a great album on the strength of Lamar’s vocal performances alone, its music sets it up as one of the most definitive artistic statements of recent memory.
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Gigwise
One of the truly great hip-hop albums of recent times.
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Tn2 Magazine
It’s a brave album, even more so than his previous full-length effort good kid, M.A.A.D city.
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Queenmobs
The experience of listening to To Pimp A Butterfly is to be un-stuck in time, to experience the past, present and the faint suggestions of the future at once, a swarm of voices all vying for attention, all speaking in different tongues yet all saying the very same script.
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Backseat Mafia
The album is a sound riot revolution, a nonviolent protest. Kendrick Lamar is a genius and the album To Pimp A Butterfly is bone-chilling perfection.
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Focus Hip hop
This album is fucking incredible.
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Under the Radar
He's at his most engaged and interested when he's making music that digs deep into his personal headspace, sins and good deeds alike, as a way to connect with listeners outside of the mainstream rap feedback loop of—what he perceives to be—hood dreams, drug dealing bravado, and misogyny.
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Montreal Rampage
Congrats, King Kendrick. You did what I thought would be impossible, matching and then surpassing the quality of your already stellar catalogue.
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Half Cloth
To Pimp A Butterfly is as remarkable for its thick, gorgeous, quilted soundscape as it is for the novelistic psychological journey that takes place over it
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Royal Purple News
It’s pretty darn good.
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NDSMC Observer
It’s an album that will be heard by a lot of people, and, hopefully, listened to, considered and understood by just as many.
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Impact 89FM
To Pimp a Butterfly will undoubtedly become a powerful thread in the cultural fabric of America for years to come.
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Amherst Wire
Delivery, lyrics, production, the storytelling effect and theatric interpretations were the key factors to his sensational follow up.
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The Student Playlist
Crucially (and this is what everybody wanted to know) it’s easily as good as the predecessor that made him so popular.
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Las Vegas Weekly
To Pimp a Butterfly will make a lasting impression on damn near everything.
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The Young Folks
We’ll be loving, thinking about, and talking about this one for a long time.
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The McGill Tribune
All of this is on display in his new, game-changing album, To Pimp A Butterfly, making it more impressive that the album feels of a complete piece rather than just a collection of songs
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Swendling Wordpress
Proving itself to be one of the most complex albums of the year (and a new classic in the world of rap), hundreds of rap fanatics have written evaluations on To Pimp a Butterfly.
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