The Butterfly Effect

by Marcus J. Moore

  Early in the show, Kendrick—dressed in a black dress shirt and black dress slacks with black-rimmed glasses—won Best Rap Album for To Pimp a Butterfly, an award that was announced and fittingly given to him by West Coast legend Ice Cube. Taylor Swift was there again, in the front row, clapping profusely as Kendrick ascended the stage to collect his trophy. When Cube announced Kendrick as the winner, everyone from actor Don Cheadle to hip-hop legend Run (of Run-DMC fame) stood and applauded the young man for what was a monumental feat. Kendrick was the toast of the Grammys, and his peers genuinely wanted him to win. Now onstage, with industry leaders in one room and a captivated TV audience at home, Kendrick flashed a big smile, took his award, and stepped to the microphone.

  “Kenneth Duckworth and Paula Duckworth,” he began. “Those who gave me the responsibility of knowing and understanding, accepting the good with the bad, I will always love you for that. Whitney [Alford, his significant other], I will always love you for supporting me and keeping me motivated.… ‘Top Dawg,’ us eating you out of house and home, we’ll never forget that. Taking these kids out of the projects out of Compton, and putting ’em right here on this stage to be the best they can be. This is for hip-hop.… We will live forever, believe that.”

  Kendrick was a big winner that night, taking home five Grammys. And while he didn’t win the award for Album of the Year—that went to Taylor Swift for 1989—Kendrick was easily the talk of the night. And it wasn’t because of any text messages he received from a peer. He had a performance—the performance of the Grammys that year.

  Before the show, Kendrick had a very clear vision of what he wanted to do with this production. It had to be his grand coming-out party, bigger than the set he did with Imagine Dragons two years earlier. The 2016 show had to make a strong statement and be one of the grandest shows ever in the Grammys’ long history. The message needed to be bold and fearless. Much like the album that brought him to this awards show, it had to make people uneasy, if not angered by the history of slavery and the prison pipeline woven into the fabric of the United States.

  Kendrick found a photo of a chain gang on an unnamed road in Miami, near the South Florida Reception Center, captured on November 21, 1995. The group was mostly black, their hands and feet bound by handcuffs and shackles. He sent the photo to his stylist, Dianne Garcia. “This is my inspiration,” Kendrick told her. “I want them [the performers] to look like this.” The image meant a lot to him; he’d openly spoken about the history of incarceration in his family, and as he planned this epic showing, Kendrick still had family and friends locked behind bars. So this set was for them and people like them, those stuck in the system, and those who’d just gotten home and were trying to reassemble their lives, fighting against a society that still sought to keep them shackled. It was one thing to hear it on To Pimp a Butterfly, but to see the history right there on that stage was something different. Never before had an artist used that platform, with mostly white faces in the foreground, to be so brazen.

  There he stood the night of the show, his face damp and tattered with concern. He was in a crisp prison-blue shirt, dark blue jeans, and fresh white sneakers. His shoulders were taut and there was a dip in his step as he sauntered to center stage. He lifted his hands, his wrists and ankles bound by bright silver chains. It was quiet—deathly quiet—and when Kendrick moved, you could hear the shackles clatter in the stillness. There was a black microphone stand, and Terrace Martin wearing a matching prison-blue shirt, blowing the sax in a cell onstage to Kendrick’s left. As the tension mounted, Kendrick had a bold declaration for those in attendance at the awards show. “I’m the biggest hypocrite of 2015,” he asserted. He repeated himself, this time more forcefully than before, punctuating his resolve. “I’m African American / I’m African, I’m black as the moon, heritage of a small village / Pardon my residence.”

  The lines opened the rapper’s hit track “The Blacker the Berry.” The song was a relentless Fuck you to assailants of black culture, and with all its bleak dissonance, the track was delivered boldly to the millions tuned into the Grammys. “You hate me, don’t you?” Kendrick declared. “You hate my people, your plan is to terminate my culture.” The song escalated into a spirited number with backup dancers and a bonfire, and Kendrick stumbled from one side of the stage to the next as if in a dream state. He was connecting the prison pipeline to his own roots as a black man, sending the message that we didn’t come from incarceration. We were more than the chain gang, deeper than the prison blues in which they trapped us. Society would have you believe that we weren’t worthy of equal treatment, but Kendrick was breaking down the narrative surrounding his people on the grandest platform possible. To come out there in chains took immense bravery, and to break out of them to songs like “The Blacker the Berry” and “Alright” was equally courageous.

  Kendrick had the idea to transform his chain gang into a crew of African dancers when he transitioned to the gig’s second sequence, and to have them bathed in paint that was only visible in black light. In the third part of the performance, Kendrick unveiled what was then an unreleased verse, one that delved into his true feelings on the killing of Trayvon Martin and the piece of his soul he lost on that fateful night four years ago: “On February 26, I lost my life, too… / And for our community, do you know what this does? / Add to a trail of hatred / 2012 was taped for the world to see.” As the song progressed, and the instrumental grew more furious, Kendrick matched the energy with equally fervent bars that rose almost to the point of collapsing. Right as he concluded, the lights dropped out. Behind him was a life-sized geographical picture of Africa; in the middle, in regal font, read one word: Compton. It was the one true capital of Kendrick’s heart.

  The people spoke loudly that night: when Kendrick stopped rapping and the lights clicked off to illuminate the Motherland, the audience—made up of industry types and fellow musicians—stood with a thunderous ovation that rippled through the room: Common clapped and hollered like a proud father; Rev. Run peered toward the stage with a slight look of disbelief etched across his face. Kendrick just stood there, motionless and stern, taking in the moment. He was studying the crowd, looking at the expressions and hearing the adulation. His face remained serious, focused, still in character. In that moment, in those six minutes in the Staples Center, again just a few miles from Compton, Kendrick’s life changed forever. It was when he became royalty, when he rose to the pantheon of cornerstone greats, when his visage seemed destined for the Mount Rushmore of music. But this was hip-hop and it was black as fuck, the type of hip-hop that hasn’t always been supported by the academy. This wasn’t the sort of rap made to be palatable. It was Kendrick bending the culture yet again, stamping his card as a once-in-a-generation talent, the likes of which we’d never see again. It was the night that America finally caught on to what Kendrick was all about. On this night, he became the king.

  * * *

  No one was supposed to hear the secrets, at least not in their semifinished forms. Leading up to To Pimp a Butterfly’s release, Kendrick had teased the project by performing tracks that wound up not even being on the album. Those songs felt even more casual and bathed in warmth. It was the first glimpse into his thinking for To Pimp a Butterfly, even if the ideas weren’t fully formed as yet.

  After the Grammy performance, professional basketball legend LeBron James tweeted “Top Dawg” Tiffith to release the untitled tracks that Kendrick had been performing on TV. James was easily the most influential figure in the National Basketball Association and one of the most visible celebrities on the planet. So when he pressed Tiffith to release the tracks, the Top Dawg CEO listened. “Dam my nigga u on my head 2.…” he tweeted. “The fans been killing me.… Give me a few days 2 think.” A little more than a week later, Tiffith took to social media to announce the surprise release of untitled unmastered., an eight-track EP of demos recorded during the Butterfly sessions. Presented in rough form, the record finds Kendrick sketching out ideas over acoustic
guitars and in spoken-word form. At times playful, the EP offered a rare peek into Kendrick’s creative brain and just where he was going for To Pimp a Butterfly. But these weren’t throwaway tracks: the song he performed on Colbert lands here as “untitled 03 | 05.28.2013.” The song “untitled 05 | 09.21.2014” sprawls into an expansive jam session, produced by Terrace Martin, with Anna Wise on vocals and Thundercat plucking the bass. Martin started hearing the whispers the Thursday before the EP was set to drop. “There was word around the camp like, ‘Yo, we’re about to drop the secrets,’ ” the producer told Billboard. “We’re about to drop the blueprints,” he recalled Sounwave telling him. That was a rare occurrence for Kendrick and for TDE as a whole: they never gave peeks behind the curtain, but untitled unmastered. offered the sort of fly-on-the-wall perspective that fans craved of Kendrick and the squad.

  The rapper had been serious-minded in recent years, but on this project, he was toying with the idea of head being the answer (to what is still anyone’s guess), and commanding more attention as a producer fully in charge of his artistic vision. “Who doing the drums?!” he shouts from the vocal booth near the end of “untitled 02 | 06.23.2014.” “Man, put that nigga on the drums, man!” The songs were recorded fairly early in the Butterfly process, before Martin called his friends Robert Glasper and Kamasi Washington to take part in the album’s creation, so he was pretty much the everything-man for the record’s jazz-centric elements. The track “untitled 08 | 09.06.2014.” was coproduced by Thundercat and Mono/Poly, both of whom had connections to the L.A. beat scene and have created music together for a decade as friends. Mono/Poly, who’s known for otherworldly blends of psychedelic trance music, one day got a text from Kendrick to send him some music for To Pimp a Butterfly. Through Thundercat, the duo sent the rapper a batch of instrumentals, and the rapper jumped on a simple loop of vintage funk drums with the bassist playing chords atop it.

  “That was the simplest thing I’d ever did,” Mono/Poly tells me. “It wasn’t anything I was super psyched to show Kendrick, but that’s the thing he jumped on.” Neither this song nor the other instrumentals he coproduced with Thundercat made the cut for To Pimp a Butterfly, but it resurfaced on “untitled 08 | 09.06.2014.” as one of the EP’s best tracks. “What really made me respect him more was when he got on it so quick, and made it so much better than what I thought anyone was gonna make it sound like. They were up super late, like early morning and shit, working on it. I was like, ‘This dude’s dedicated.’ ”

  There was so much music being created during those sessions that one song just sort of melded into the other, and it was tough to keep track of who played what and when. “That’s how in sync that whole crew was through TPAB,” Terrace Martin continues “We started walking alike, talking alike, playing alike, eating alike. We were like Voltron: one thing, one force. That’s one thing you hear on this record—how much of a brotherhood we did have. I had forgotten about all this shit, it was just a blur of good music with my brothers.” For Kendrick, Martin, and the players, they hadn’t heard these tracks in almost two years. They were evolving so quickly that once Butterfly came out, they were already on to the next sound, searching for something new. So to hear the songs on untitled was to travel back in time, to an era in which they were all in the studio at once, before they changed the world. In that way, untitled was a bittersweet reminder that To Pimp a Butterfly was a specific moment in time that couldn’t be replicated. Of course there would be imitators, but those songs—on that album, with those players, and that cover, it was lightning captured in a bottle. They were all still friends, invested in each other’s lives and their respective well-being, but for the next project—whenever it would land—they needed different personnel and a new vision.

  To Pimp a Butterfly and untitled unmastered. helped Black America soundtrack its way to a higher state of consciousness, and, if only for a little while, it helped make sense of the country’s present gloom. But as the hype of those records began to fade, a bigger, scarier threat began to emerge. And this wasn’t just a threat to black people in the United States, it was a danger to humanity at large.

  On June 16, 2015, Donald J. Trump announced that he was running for president of the United States, ending some twenty years of speculation. “We are going to make our country great again,” he told a crowd of supporters in his native New York City. Announcing his run at the fifty-eight-story Trump Tower in Midtown, the businessman positioned himself as the anti-Obama, even taking shots at the president in his forty-five-minute address. “He’s actually a negative force,” Trump claimed in his announcement. “We need somebody that literally will take this country and make it great again. We can do that.” The term, Make America Great Again, echoed that tone of another entertainer-turned-politician, Ronald Reagan, who in 1979 had made it the hallmark of his presidential run. They both borrowed the phrase from Adolf Hitler, who in the 1930s said he wanted to “make Germany great again” and blamed Jews, socialists, and communists for what he thought was the country’s deterioration. Because some didn’t know the history, the phrase seemed to be innocuous, a push to return the United States to a panacea of peace and prosperity. Much like saying “All Lives Matter,” the term “Make America Great Again” felt like a push from conservatives to shun the cultural progress the country had made over the past eight years, when a black man was president and his cabinet was diverse. Trump appealed to workers in Middle America who felt their jobs were evaporating and were worried about making ends meet. He spoke in broad generalizations, offering so-called tidbits on the job market that he really couldn’t prove. And when he wasn’t doing that, he said things that simply weren’t true.

  Trump had never served in Congress, on a city council, or even a school board. He simply didn’t have the gravitas to build relationships strong enough to handle being president of the United States. Trump was vulgar, far different from Obama, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, or any of the men who served as president before. He thumbed his nose at political correctness, claimed that America had gotten too soft and needed someone in charge who knew how to talk unsympathetically. Trump was a caricature, and media outlets covered his antics, perhaps thinking he had no shot at the job he sought. The thinking went like this: Once Hillary Clinton won the U.S. presidency, in a landslide, we’d all look at Trump’s candidacy with a laugh, as a blip on the radar. That was the media’s mistake; in its push for content, Trump was a slam dunk for news outlets who sought clicks and ratings bumps. He just kept hanging around, and in November 2015, Trump hosted an episode of Saturday Night Live, the long-running NBC sketch comedy show, much to the dismay of protesters who lamented his appearance. “Trump is a Yuuuge Racist,” read one sign. “NBC Repent,” read another.

  It’s too easy to say that Trump’s appearance helped him become president, but between his outlandish Twitter persona and opportunities like this, he quickly became part of the narrative, and then it became usual to see him and to hear his rhetoric. It sent the wrong message at a time when activists were protesting his candidacy and many late-night hosts were taking the threat of a Trump presidency more soberly. Online, viewers were furious with media pundits for helping humanize such a person.

  Indeed, Trump was a lightning rod, and to fawn over his persona was to be guilty by association. Try as we might, it was impossible to tune him out, and his ascendance was all the more puzzling. For one, he was racist: In 1973, Trump, as head of the Trump Management Corporation in New York City, was sued for racial discrimination by the Department of Justice for not renting to black tenants. In 1989, he took out a full-page ad in the New York Times, asking for the return of the death penalty in the case of the so-called “Central Park Five” (now the “Exonerated Five”), a group of young teenagers who were falsely accused of beating and raping a jogger in Central Park. The boys were arrested and coerced into false confessions that landed them in prison. Even after they were exonerated in 2002, Trump remained steadfast, insisting that the boys were sti
ll guilty. He refused to apologize, and in the years following the incident, Trump used the same racist rhetoric to rally a base that finally had the platform to openly spew hatred. If elected, he vowed to build a wall along the southern border of the United States and ban Muslims from coming into the country. This was the kind of man we were dealing with, a complete danger to civil and foreign relations, who could unravel all the goodwill the country had attained during the Obama years. Still, no reasonable person could hear his views on women and minorities and think he should be the U.S. president, right? Despite all the protests, all the vitriol he spat, all the hollow, rambling speeches, his chances of winning were slim to none… right?

  9

  Mourning in America

  I’d never heard Hyattsville that quiet—ever. On the morning of November 9, 2016, the day after Donald Trump shocked the world by becoming the forty-fifth president of the United States, the city felt remarkably still, like a close relative had died. We were trying to process the despair of the previous night; foolishly, we all assumed we would wake up to the nation’s first woman president. There had been feelings of optimism and overconfidence, and as the vote counts had begun rolling in, and the night shifted to morning, the country’s tenor—at least in the East, West, and certain portions of the South—slowly began to shift. As Election Day waned, we started to realize that things were quickly changing for the worse, and that our lives as we knew them would never be the same. Nonetheless, Hyattsville had never been this immobile; usually, even at seven o’clock in the morning, there’d be some semblance of activity in the bustling Arts District. But the air felt a little gloomier, a little colder, and the clouds seemed to hover just a bit lower.