Kendrick Lamar: To Pimp a Butterfly (2LP) [INTERSCOPE]

Why you'll love it

To Pimp a Butterfly won the Grammy for Best Rap Album, topped countless best-of-the-decade lists and sits at No. 19 on Rolling Stone's 500 Greatest Albums of All Time. "Alright" became an anthem.

This edition

• 2LP set, 16 tracks
• Interscope pressing
• Gatefold sleeve

About the album

Kendrick Lamar took a life-changing trip to South Africa during the downtime after the dust settled on his smashing 2012 major-label debut, Good Kid, M.A.A.D City, and the experience left a sufficiently deep mark on him that he decided to follow up that enormously ambitious "concept album" with ... another enormously ambitious concept album.

"I felt like I belonged in Africa," he told an interviewer at the time. "I saw all the things that I wasn't taught." To Pimp a Butterfly, which arrived in March of 2015, thus seeks to understand the Black experience in America through Lamar's newly enlightened eyes, while simultaneously paying homage to the history of Black music in America that led us to hip-hop: everything from free jazz, classic soul, gospel and '70s funk to Miles Davis and P-Funk and Sly and the Family Stone. George Clinton, Thundercat, Kamasi Washington, Flying Lotus and Snoop Dogg all pitch in.

It's an exhilarating record and, rightly enough, wound up at the top of myriad year-end "best of" lists, with numerous critics labelling it an "instant classic." Again. Kendrick Lamar had gone two-for-two.

"The Great American Hip-Hop Album."
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Also at Kops: more Kendrick Lamar on vinyl · browse Hip Hop / R&B

Tracklist

Listen

On Interscope, first out in 2015.