Kendrick Lamar has an idea. Next week he’ll attend the Grammys ceremony in LA, where he’s nominated for a near-record 11 statues for his groundbreaking 2015 album To Pimp A Butterfly. Everybody wants to know what’s next for him. Well, he has an idea. Those of us who’ve been following Mr. Duckworth since he was known as K.Dot always knew there was something special about the kid from Compton, but I’ll be damned if we could have forseen a time when an offhand comment to a writer would turn into a headline.
In a new profile for Billboard ahead of Monday’s Grammys broadcast, Kendrick tells us that he really does want to win this time around. This may initially seem out of character for our hero, a guy who doesn’t come across as the type who needs mainstream validation. But then you have to consider this album’s subject matter, and what it means to so many people. And you look around at what’s going on in America, and you sort of understand. So yeah, Kendrick has an idea. I’m sure he has a bunch of them. One of them might turn into his next album, or he might abandon everything he thought he knew and go left. Whatever happens, we’re here for it.
“As far as content, what I want to get across, I have an idea,” he says. “But even that’s still premature. Once I get back in that studio, things evolve into other things.”
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Perhaps not. But then again, the story of Lamar’s career is one of improbable trendsetting -- of transforming the marginal into the popular, of smuggling counterculture into the cultural mainstream. He was a darling of the cognoscenti -- the leading light of the Los Angeles-based Black Hippy collective, a favorite of rap-Internet nerds -- before his 2012 major-label debut catapulted him aboveground and made him a star. That album, Good Kid, M.A.A.D City, was riveting and ambitious, a gangsta bildungsroman about Compton street life whose cinematic sweep justified its heady subtitle: “A short film by Kendrick Lamar.” His second album aimed even higher. To Pimp a Butterfly, released last March, is a monument to maximalism, based, seemingly, on a determination to cram in as much music, as many ideas and emotions, as its 78:51 running time will bear. There’s hip-hop and soul and funk and jazz, autobiography and agitprop and history and reportage, politics and punchlines, exultation and anger, joy and suffering, James Brown and James Baldwin. It was a self-conscious tour de force, and an undeniable one, instantly canonized by critics. It reached No. 1 on the Billboard 200 and has sold 797,000 copies and counting, according to Nielsen Music.
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To Pimp a Butterfly has elevated Lamar, a diminutive (5-foot-5) 28-year-old who raps in a cartoon pirate’s rasp, to a plateau that few musicians attain. He is not just pop’s most acclaimed artist. He is the de facto leader of a left-field movement that is galvanizing hip-hop. He has stepped into the heroic-prophetic role previously occupied by some of American music’s most illustrious figures: Aretha Franklin in 1967, Marvin Gaye in 1971, Chuck D in 1989. In fact, the arrival of To Pimp a Butterfly at a moment of intense national reckoning with issues of racial justice has made Lamar the kind of music idol who transcends music. To be sure, he’s a fearsome rapper, capable of out-spitting anyone alive. But he also is an existentialist bard whose work can sit comfortably alongside acclaimed literary voices of present-day black protest, writers like Claudia Rankine and Ta-Nehisi Coates.
Perhaps most surprising: Lamar is the toast of the music biz. On Feb. 15, the industry will gather for the 58th annual Grammy Awards at Los Angeles’ Staples Center, just 14 miles due north of Compton. Lamar goes into the ceremony with 11 nominations, one shy of Michael Jackson’s record dozen in the post-Thriller year of 1984. Those nominations represent the unlikely consensus that has formed around Lamar, uniting bizzers and bohemians, Taylor Swift and Black Lives Matter protestors. The recognition is “long overdue,” says Pharrell Williams, who co-wrote and co-produced “Alright,” which is up for four Grammys. “His music is a part of the conversation,” he adds, crediting Lamar’s “fresh approach” to addressing “exhausted subjects.”
Says Lamar: “The album just had a deeper impact than I expected, because it touched so many homes, and not just in my own community. I guess I’m just speaking words that need to be heard in these times.”
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