Lamar’s Kunta’s Groove Sessions were a string of live performances that once and for all established his powerful charisma and old school appeal in front of adoring fans. It is his inimitable talent as creative director that makes Lamar so unique and so valuable few rappers working today are capable of making records such as this.” In the year since TPAB’s release, that album has already become a byword for real and meaningful hip-hop, an alternative to the boastful bullshit that many less imaginative artists recycle on an album-to-album basis.

Last year, Lamar made a pointed statement with his political, revolutionary masterpiece To Pimp a Butterfly, summoning mid-century jazz, golden era funk, abstract experimentation, and the ghost of Tupac Shakur to craft a deliriously original work that captured and ruminated upon the current cultural unrest of the black community.Īs we wrote when we placed TPAB on the top slot of our countdown of 2015’s best albums: ”Musically, Butterfly is a kaleidoscope, dizzying in spectrum and brilliance, one minute shuffling along bebop lines, the other minute blasting us with aggressive punk hop, early-’90s G-funk, or laid back R&B. After all, the Compton rapper has positioned himself somewhere in the no man’s land between the old and new schools of hip-hop: on one hand relied upon by the old guard as a rare beacon of hope for young rap music in strange, autotuned times, and on the other hand expected by many fans to deliver the sort of highly listenable, funny, relevant music that mainstream listeners expect from an artist who has collaborated with Taylor Swift on Number 1 singles and whose second album sold 242,000 copies in its first week. Kendrick Lamar has a way of starting conversations and ending debates.

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