The Butterfly Effect

by Marcus J. Moore

  In its finished form, “Wesley’s Theory” opens To Pimp a Butterfly—with Clinton as a feature—as a cautionary tale about the perils of success and the recklessness it could bring. The “Wesley” here is actor Wesley Snipes, who in 2010 was convicted of tax evasion and sent to federal prison for three years. Yet Kendrick wasn’t evoking Snipes’s name as a diss, but as a symbol of what can happen to black men in the United States without proper financial education. Kendrick suddenly had more money than he’d ever had before, and with that came the impulse to spend it, especially if you had grown up where he did. If you came up broke, on and off food stamps, you felt like you’d arrived once you earned thousands, let alone millions, of dollars. But public schools never taught you how to manage money—at least not in black neighborhoods—so Kendrick had had to figure it out on his own, and fast. Because he’d always kept to himself, and because his rampant tour schedule led to even deeper insulation, “Wesley’s Theory” made Kendrick sound paranoid, like Uncle Sam was coming any minute to wash away his good fortune. Though if making it big scared Kendrick as a black man, at least he had one major ally who’d been through something similar. “Remember the first time you came out to the house? You said you wanted a spot like mine,” Dr. Dre recalled via voicemail on the song. “But remember, anybody can get it, the hard part is keeping it, motherfucker.”

  “Wesley’s Theory” inspired To Pimp a Butterfly’s album art, which made a powerful statement on its own. Against foreboding shades of gray, Kendrick and his friends—most of them shirtless—flash stacks of cash with their faces beaming. They’re expressing the utmost joy and reassurance, as if they’d endured hell and achieved their own version of the American dream. They’re in front of a photoshopped White House; on the ground before them is a dead, white judge with his eyes blacked out. In the middle is Kendrick, smiling wide and holding an infant child. He looks relaxed, comforted, free. For him, this was real life and what fame was all about: sharing it with the Day Ones who still called him Dot.

  The song and cover represent the very moment Kendrick signed his major-label deal, right when the sense of achievement sets in and he felt he needed to spread the wealth. “It’s going back to the neighborhood and taking the folks that haven’t seen nothing and taking them around the world,” Kendrick told MTV News of his mind-set. “Whether you want to call them ignorant or not, they need to see these things—whether it’s the White House, whether it’s Africa, whether it’s London.”

  It seemed Kendrick’s heart was in the right place; that he couldn’t save everyone was eating him alive. That explains a song like “u,” a moody, two-part saga near the album’s middle that walks listeners right into the hotel room where Kendrick almost lost himself. It’s easily the rapper’s most vulnerable track, with raw lyrics delving into the suicide he contemplated, and the younger sister he couldn’t guide. She got pregnant with her first child as a teenager, and Kendrick blamed himself for letting it happen: “Where was your antennas? / Where was the influence you speak of? / You preached in front of one hundred thousand but never reached her.” On the song, Kendrick rhymes from the perspective of a naysayer, possibly a close friend or family member, or even the negative voices in his own head. Kendrick simply couldn’t quell the doubt that laid heavily on his heart, and “u” depicted the mood swings he battled, and the frayed relationships that he had trouble restoring. The session for that song was disturbing. “He just walked in, turned all the lights off, and he walked into the booth,” engineer Ali told Revolt TV. “And he didn’t come out for three hours.” Said Sounwave, “Everyone who walked in that session had tears in their eyes.”

  The tracks were just about done for To Pimp a Butterfly when Terrace Martin called in his friends to add live instrumentation to the beats. One time in particular, the musician was in the studio playing the music of Willie Bobo, a legendary Latin and jazz percussionist, when the sound caught Kendrick’s ear. “He walks in one day like, ‘What is that?’ ” Martin recalls. “He’s like, ‘That shit dope!’ ” Then the two started talking about jazz when Martin asked Kendrick if he’d seen Mo’ Better Blues, the 1990 Spike Lee film in which actor Denzel Washington plays a fictional New York jazz trumpeter named Bleek Gilliam. Kendrick hadn’t seen the movie, so they watched it. There’s a scene near the end where Spike Lee’s character, Giant, is assaulted in the alley behind the nightclub as the band plays a frenetic jazz breakdown onstage, all drum fills, undulating bass, and surging trumpet wails. “Our eyes opened up because the power of that music got the point across real quick. Because of that music, that scene was so intense,” Martin says. “Kendrick was like, ‘Man, we need to do some shit like that.’ ”

  That night, the producer drove to his home in Porter Ranch and wrote a song similar to what they’d heard in the pivotal Mo’ Better Blues scene. But he didn’t want to use a drum machine or anything synthetic. He played a demo on his baby grand piano and texted the file to Kendrick: “I wanted to give him a melody that felt like some type of alarm clock, like tension was building.” Over the next couple of days, Martin got the musicians together: Robert “Sput” Searight on drums, Brandon Owens on bass, Craig Brockman on organ, Marlon Williams on guitar, and Robert Glasper on piano. “Kendrick walked into the session and we started playing that motherfucker,” Martin recalls. “Everyone’s eyes lit up in the whole room. Everybody there was like, ‘What the fuck is this?!’ I felt good about the music, but when I saw him happy, I said, ‘I’m ’bout to really go in on this motherfucker.’ It was recorded in one take. That’s how we made ‘For Free?’ ” Martin left and came back to the studio an hour later; by then, Kendrick had started putting words to it. “This. dick. ain’t. freeee,” Martin recalled in his best Kendrick voice. “And I said, [gasp] ‘Oh my God.’ We ’bout to piss these motherfuckers off. I said, ‘Thank God, it’s about to get uncomfortable for people.’ And I loved that.”

  Though Martin resists taking credit for To Pimp a Butterfly’s jazz-leaning sound, he was responsible for bringing in some of the genre’s biggest names. Before that record, a name like Robert Glasper’s wasn’t well known in the mainstream, even if his 2012 LP, Black Radio, won the Grammy Award for Best R&B Album. He was hip-hop’s best-kept secret, and only one of two guys—trumpeter Roy Hargrove being the other—who blurred the lines between rap, jazz, and soul, and made it cool for younger people to embrace older genres of music. In the mid-2000s, Glasper worked with famed rappers like Mos Def and Q-Tip, and alongside soul mavens like Erykah Badu, Maxwell, and Bilal. He could perform it all: at the helm of the Robert Glasper Trio, he skewed closer to hard bop and traditional covers; as leader of the Robert Glasper Experiment, he became more electronic and abstract, blurring the lines among jazz, rock, and electronica. But while Glasper’s name rang bells with niche audiences, he wasn’t considered a mainstream star at first. “I was known as the ‘crossover dude,’ ” he says today. “I’m the first non-singing R&B artist to win the Grammy for Best R&B Album. When I won, it gave everyone a different kind of hope, like, ‘Oh, we can do outside-of-the-box stuff.’ But when To Pimp a Butterfly came, it was perfect timing for everyone involved.” Working with Kendrick gave him the chance to ascend in his own career. “When good kid, m.A.A.d city came out, I was obsessed with that record. I told Terrace, ‘Bro, for the next record you gotta get me on something,’ ” Glasper recalls. At the time, Glasper was working on his Black Radio follow-up, Black Radio 2, and asked Martin to introduce him to Kendrick because he wanted to get the rapper on a track.

  The pianist soon traveled to L.A. to record a live album called Covered at Capitol Studios. Once there, he got a call from Martin. “He was like, ‘Yo, you still here in L.A.? I’m at Dr. Dre’s studio with Kendrick right now. We need you for this song. Can you come through after you finish recording?’ I got in an Uber or a Lyft and headed over. When I got there, they were doing the song ‘For Free?’ ” Kendrick had never seen Glasper play live, but the rapper liked what he saw, and once “For
Free?” was finished, he asked the pianist to play on other album tracks. “He told the engineer, ‘Yo, pull up so and so. Pull up ‘Mortal Man.’ Then he’d tell me to play what I heard. So I’d listen once, then I’d play. I did that for eight songs in a row.” In the liner notes for To Pimp a Butterfly, Glasper’s name is listed as a contributor to five tracks, the last of which was “Complexion (A Zulu Love).” “At this point, Thundercat was there. He showed up in a raccoon suit with a tail and everything, but he acted like nothing was wrong,” Glasper remembers with a laugh. “Like, ‘Are you a mascot or… ?’ ” In a separate phone conversation, the producer Mono/Poly—who contributed to the 2016 follow-up, untitled unmastered EP—remembers the same exact story about Thundercat: “Terrace was like, ‘Oh, he’s serious right now,’ kind of joking about it, and for some reason, I was there and I said, ‘Watch, whatever they make today? It’s gonna be a hit. Whatever Thundercat does this day in this studio.’ Even though it was so silly, I just knew everything was gonna work out. That’s when they started adding more to ‘These Walls.’ ” (“These Walls” won a Grammy for Best Rap/Sung Performance.)

  Glasper was in the zone for “Complexion (A Zulu Love)”: “They hit record and I played it down. When the tape stopped, I kept going. That was the vibe. I changed the chords a little bit. When I looked up, Kendrick was looking at me through the glass like, ‘Keep going.’ When I walked out of there, he was like, ‘Man, that was dope! On that part I’mma bring a whole new beat onto it and I’mma rap in a different voice.’ That became the Rapsody part. That part happened because I just kept playing. I literally kept playing, which made him say, ‘Oh shit! I’mma add a different bass line and different drums.’ Everything happened so fast—‘Play on this, play on that.’ ” To get Rapsody on the song, Kendrick’s manager, Dave Free, called producer 9th Wonder, who owns Jamla Records with Rapsody as his featured artist. The idea for Kendrick and Rapsody to work together had been brewing since 2013, a day after the “Control” verse. “9th hit me like, ‘Dave just hit me, and Kendrick wants to send something.’ I was like, ‘Wow,’ ” Rapsody told MTV News. Then in January 2014, 9th and Rapsody met at House Studio in Hyattsville, Maryland, and recorded the verse for To Pimp a Butterfly. In keeping with the song’s concept, she decided to fasten the idea of “Complexion” to her own upbringing as a brown-skinned woman in a country preoccupied with hue. “I’m not like the red-bones, ya know?” Rapsody told Vevo. “Light skin… I thought [was] more beautiful when I was growing up. That’s what I saw in the videos. I might be outside playing all day, or my sisters would come in and be like, ‘Ooh, you done got black’… in your head you think something’s wrong with being dark.”

  There was so much music being recorded during the Butterfly sessions. And if you were around, even if you played an instrument, Kendrick might snag you to add to the album in other ways. The first voice you hear—after a crackling sample of singer Boris Gardiner’s “Every Nigger Is a Star”—is that of Josef Leimberg, a trumpeter who played on the majority of Butterfly. On “Wesley’s Theory,” he orates the album’s mission statement; on “For Sale? (Interlude),” he’s the antagonist who chastises Kendrick: “What’s wrooong, nigga? / I thought you was keeping it gangsta / I thought this what you wanted.” In an interview, Leimberg says his vocal inclusion was pure happenstance. “He had heard my deep voice, I was talking to Terrace in the studio, and he said, ‘Man, I gotta get that voice on my album,’ ” he recalls. “It wasn’t until weeks later that Terrace called me and said that Kendrick remembered that. He had me come in to do some vocals, some spoken-word shit. He coached me the whole time I was recording those vocals. He knew exactly how he wanted certain inflections here and there.”

  Inside the studio, there was a feeling that Kendrick was making a classic, but because he and the guys were so focused on work, they ultimately eschewed any such notions and simply wanted to put out a long-lasting record. Aesthetically, the vibe was different; the studio space was superb, and as Anna Wise remembers, even the food and beverages were scaled up. Gone was the fast food; in were specialty salads and customized menus. The musicians all applaud Kendrick’s genius, saying that he’s a guy who doesn’t rest on his laurels. Yes, he’s talented, but he’s always trying to improve, or at least give the public something it hadn’t heard before. And he didn’t settle for one or two takes on songs. “There are the people who it just comes easy to and there are people who work at it. Kendrick is both,” Kamasi Washington told Pitchfork in 2017. “He can instantly write a song that’s dope as hell, but then spend the time to meticulously work it out and make it perfect. You usually get only one or the other. He’d be sitting there watching me write string parts. Not a lot of people would care.… But he’s always in the studio giving you ideas, and his instincts are incredible.” Upright bassist Miles Mosley agrees. Washington called him to the studio near the end of the recording process to play on “How Much a Dollar Cost” and “Mortal Man.” “He asked me to grab Big Momma, my upright bass,” Mosley recalls. “I threw it in the car and went right over.” Once there, he didn’t know what the songs were; Washington and Martin would cue up certain parts of the track and ask Mosley to add bass to that specific section. “It was very open-ended. There weren’t any preconceived notions,” he says. “You didn’t know what was happening, but you could tell something was happening. You could tell that they were in there working super intensely, and it was attached to a bigger purpose.”

  To Pimp a Butterfly was revolutionary in the way it included jazz and other traditional forms of black music. Jazz was thought to be for older people, performed by gray-haired veterans in smaller clubs to particular audiences. Kendrick’s album took the lid off that: these musicians were the new cool, more likely to show up in L.A. Dodgers baseball hats, knitted beanies, African dashikis, and, well, raccoon suits. This wasn’t the 1950s and they weren’t John Coltrane, Herbie Hancock, or Charlie “Bird” Parker. “They didn’t use jazz samples, and they didn’t need old jazz musicians,” Glasper said of the To Pimp a Butterfly sessions. “That’s the ‘real hip-hop meets jazz’ right there. That was something I was already doing in my world, but for Kendrick to do it, it changed everything. It had everybody.”

  Ryan Porter saw the Butterfly sessions as a way to give new life to what were already great instrumentals from the likes of Taz Arnold, Sounwave, Rahki, and Whoarei. They had a song like “King Kunta” to work with, which was created by Sounwave and Thundercat as they watched the Japanese anime Fist of the North Star and ate from Yoshinoya, a Japanese fast-food chain. Because Sounwave was such a jazz head, and because that was the sound he and Kendrick were using for To Pimp a Butterfly, the original beat to “King Kunta” was incredibly jazz-centric, “with pretty flutes,” Sounwave once told the Recording Academy. Kendrick said he liked it but to “make it nasty,” he recalled. “I added different drums to it, simplified it, got Thundercat on the bass, and it was a wrap.” Kendrick didn’t want it to sound like hip-hop; it had to be rough and straight-up funk. He asked Sounwave to start peeling away all the jazz elements, and in its finished form, “King Kunta” is a dusty loop that sounds like Rosecrans Avenue in summertime Compton. The beat itself pays homage to a Compton rapper named Mausberg, who in 2000 released a song called “Get Nekkid.” Kendrick’s song has the same hard drums, synth chords, and deep bass line, and was meant to salute a talented musician who never made it big. The title nods to a slave named Kunta Kinte, the protagonist in Alex Haley’s novel 1970s Roots. In the novel, Kunta gets his foot cut off for trying to run free; Kendrick used that as a metaphor to combat hate. “No matter what type of acts or sword you’re bringing my way,” he told NME, “you’ll never cut down the legs that’s running by the forces of God.”

  Lyrically, Kendrick took cues from another black music legend—one Mr. James Brown, the Godfather of Soul, the Hardest Working Man in Show Business. Brown was an architect of modern black music, and in a way, a pioneer of hip-hop music. The poet Gil Scott-Her
on is credited with bridging the gap between rap and poetry, but Brown—with his restless funk grooves and call-and-response style, is one of black music’s foremost icons. Kendrick channeled Brown on “King Kunta” and employed the same cadence, flipping a line from “The Payback” into a diss of other rappers who use ghostwriters instead of writing their own bars, a cardinal sin in hip-hop. “I can dig rappin’,” he spit, “but a rapper with a ghost writer? / What the fuck happened?”

  Then there are certain points in the song that seem to refer to the new crowd beginning to form around Kendrick: the song depicts the rapper’s triumphant return to Compton after years of being on the road and seeing new things. Upon his reentry, the same people who doubted his ascendance are the first ones shouting his name throughout the city. That goes back to what Matt Jeezy says about the nonbelievers who criticized Kendrick in 2009 for eschewing gangsta rap for other forms of music. They shunned him and questioned his newfound direction. So, on the hook, when he asks, “Bitch where you when I was walkin’? / Now I run the game, got the whole world talkin’,” he’s pointing his finger squarely in the faces of those people, proclaiming himself as the king—of West Coast rap, of Compton, of hip-hop as a whole. At that point, who could deny it—Drake, maybe, but while he crafted viral pop hits, he wasn’t digging deep like Kendrick. He kept us at arm’s length and chose surface-level topics that didn’t resonate beyond Spotify streams. Kendrick and TDE were trying to make music that would last forever in history books and school syllabi. For the song, Terrace Martin blended eras, genres, and geography. “You could take the energy of Quincy [Jones] with Michael [Jackson], the harmony of Stevie [Wonder],” Martin once told Revolt. In that way, he continued, “These Walls” felt like “Human Nature,” a hit Michael Jackson song from his 1982 album, Thriller.