The images of the burning streets of the United States have proliferated again on the screens. America, that immense social melting pot that championed the cultural development of the 20th century, collides with itself again. Riots caused by the death of George Floyd, strangled with his knee by agent Derek Chauvin in Minnesota, have set the country on fire, facing the biggest wave of protests since the murder of Martin Luther King in 1968. As early as 2014, very Similar occurred after the murder of Michael Brown, an unarmed African American young man who was killed by a police officer in Ferguson (Missouri) and who was released after the trial. So just a year after the Brown case , Kendrick Lamar published To Pimp to Butterfly .
There are records that capture the psychology of the times as sophisticated temperature gauges. To Pimp to Butterfly is one of them. If there are, it is because behind there are artists who rise above the rest, capable of gutting the bowels of a society to expose their guts and vital organs with all the disease they carry inside. Lamar, the best rapper of the 21st century, the only one of his kind to get a Pulitzer Prize, has been since he debuted in 2004 rising to offer the most accurate overview of the condition of being black in the United States in these times. It is not only To Pimp to Butterfly, a masterpiece that defines an era, but also its predecessor good kid, mAAd city (2012) and its later DAMN (2017). No one displays so cruelly, with so many puns and enveloping sounds, the cruelty of being black in an America where racism is still institutionalized, starting with Trump, a president who manipulates the discourse in favor of white supremacy, an arsonist of the White House that already in the nineties, as can be seen in the miniseries This way they see us , gave hate speeches as a New York billionaire against blacks in the famous case of the five in Central Park, where he was wrongly accused five Harlem minors from a brutal attack on a white woman.
In the wake of the Ferguson race riots, To Pimp to Butterfly measured the harmful temperature in the United States. It was 2015 and Barack Obama was still there, but the problem was structural. Today, just five years later, it is still in force. Kendrick Lamar continues to sound current. His music continues to be the best glimpse of the moral psychology of African-Americans, of those thoughts that arise from racial tension throughout the nation and that end up abruptly uncovering in the face of cases of police brutality.
As blues, jazz, and soul were in decades past, rap is the loudspeaker that currently strives most to show the complexity of the African-American condition. Its urban sounds have been part of damaged black skin since its birth in the Bronx. It is worth remembering: the streets of the South Bronx, impoverished and abandoned like ghettos at war, burned in the mid-1970s when that dangerous and thunderous music in parks and parties that was called hip hop was born . Music that made blacks aware of themselves again. And he did it in a more radical way than predecessor genres: hip hop forced them to observe from the sidelines. He explained clearly that they were not and would not be.
Kendrick Lamar sings of the existence of being black from within the barrier. With compositional talent, he collects a whole trail of observations that come from the emergence of hip hop until today, connecting reality with his narrative fantasy. Thus, like any great work, To Pimp to Butterfly goes from the particular to the general. The individual perspective of its creator becomes an encyclopedic reflection of the American black race in the 21st century. The story of the rapper himself returning home, after achieving success and proclaiming himself as the "king of New York" in the world of hip hop, ends up passing as an account of the black condition. He is the Negro with his search for identity, his battered faith, his consolidated rage at social injustice and his contradictions with his own community (“Why did I cry when Trayvon Martin was on the street / When gang wars make me kill more Negroes me? ", sings in The Blacker the Berry in reference to the kid shot dead in Miami in 2012).
Why listen to Kendrick Lamar now? Because his music reflects that, if the system is broken, there are impulses to want to do something really drastic that shows that the system is not acceptable. Something drastic as a groundbreaking sound, rap, free jazz and spoken word coming together in To Pimp to Butterfly . In other words, hip hop from the West Coast converges, that environmental G-funk of Los Angeles -his birth city- adding collaborations of godparents such as Snoop Dog or Dr. Dre, the improvisation of contemporary jazz with musicians who participate as Kamasi Washigton, Robert Glasper and Thundercat and the strength of the recitations on these funds in the purest style of The Last Poets and Gil Scott-Heron. All, not to mention the appearance of George Clinton, master of funk, in the first cut and the shared production of Flying Lotus, great-nephew of John Coltrane and Alice Coltrane and jazz-electronic talent. In other words: Lamar brings together a polyhedral story of black pride in a work that enjoys an absorbing fluidity of sound, such as Marvin Gaye 's monumental What's Going On . And if it has this virtue and it is also monumental it is because it moves in the field of the psychological, of internal thought, of the human power behind it.
A power that takes the lingo from the street and unfolds it like a puzzle. Without determined order and with an ambitious socio-political criticism. Doreen St. Felix, the New Yorker's African American cultural journalist , defined Lamar as "a modern griot." The griot is a storyteller in Africa, someone who comes from oral tradition and tells stories like a poet or a traveling musician would. She is fascinated by how she tells it, by her particular way of capturing attention. The rapper from Los Angeles is the griot of the streets full of blacks and about to explode in dozens of American cities, using many words with various meanings, giving them more symbolic charge, to always spin them madly or plunge like deep-cut daggers into the idea of America. In the idea of the United States seen from the barrier of African-Americans. An idea that is sung with rage in To Pimp to Butterfly (a title that admits more than one meaning and plays with the idea of “chulear” to the butterfly, being the black butterfly that accepts the system and forgets the harsh conditions that the caterpillar passes in the city). Rage because as James Baldwin said: "To be a black in this country and to be relatively aware of it is to be in a rage almost all the time."
The case of George Floyd seems more than a cause the drop that has filled the glass. The underlying cause of the revolts is white supremacy, discrimination, that issue that the United States has failed to resolve since its founding. Issue that with Donald Trump as president does nothing more than enter a dead end, increasingly eroding one of the most solvent democracies in the world, in a possible paradigm shift in the 21st century.
Again, the US is on fire for racism. Time to put Kendrick Lamar on volume 10.