The Butterfly Effect

by Marcus J. Moore

  We couldn’t fathom what had just happened; the city couldn’t, either. Hyattsville is a smallish area just outside the northeast border of Washington, D.C. The city, like the county it is in, is majority black and mostly Democratic. So on the voting line, there was an overwhelming feeling that Hillary Clinton had this: there was no way she was losing to that dude, who said those things, and grabbed women by their you-know-what. Clinton was endorsed by almost every major newspaper in the country, and she’d won the popular vote the night before by a record margin. Meanwhile, Trump was endorsed by the Ku Klux Klan and seen as a proponent of white supremacy. Clinton was thought to be a shoo-in, a battle-tested politician who’d dealt with the absurd many times over and surely could handle someone like Trump. But that’s where many of us fell down on the job: we took him lightly, and as that was happening, the would-be president centered his campaign in battleground states whose voters felt left behind by the so-called American dream. Unlike Clinton, he made it seem like he was there for them. Working-class whites felt left behind by a globalized economy that valued college degrees over blue-collar work, and by growing diversity that reduced the power of white men. Seeing Obama in power for eight years also didn’t help; they sensed that the America they once knew and controlled was slipping away. So when Trump came through, with his gruff shit talk and plainspokenness, he was thought to be a beacon of light for a class of people who’d rather it be 1936, not 2016.

  Both the Washington Post and the New York Times went with a simple headline: “Trump Triumphs.” The New York Daily News opted for a more dramatic headline (“House of Horrors: Trump Seizes Divided States of America”). On the cover of the L.A. Times in big type: “STUNNING TRUMP WIN.” Indeed, it was a stunning upset, and there was a feeling that Trump somehow stole the White House with the help of Russia, which reportedly spread propaganda on social media and hacked Clinton’s campaign to induce mistrust in American democracy. Minorities wept openly; it seemed the country had made its decision, and that we needed to go somewhere, anywhere, else. Hysteria ensued since here was no longer an option; when Trump won, many of us said we were moving to other countries, because the place we’d known to be home finally showed it wasn’t that at all. It never really was, and to live under Trump’s rule didn’t feel safe. If law enforcement had been a threat in recent years, what was going to happen with Trump in office and bigotry so out in the open? It felt like we didn’t have any allies. We were scared, angry, shocked, and disillusioned. Overnight, we went from feeling empowered by the president to feeling despised by the president-elect. We didn’t quite know how to process what had happened: What do we do with the fear? The sorrow, the anger, the frustration? How do we swallow that, pick up the pieces, and move forward? What could we tell our children, especially those who’d known only Obama as president? How could we explain the tears?

  Up the street in the neighborhood coffee shop, we traded grave looks and tepid shrugs, not really addressing the elephant in the room. We wallowed in the haze, dousing it with drip coffees and chai lattes, falling into our respective work routines and soldiering on as best as we could. Yet no amount of caffeine could wash this away: this was a national nightmare with dire global implications. The joke was on us and it wasn’t funny anymore.

  Trump’s racism emboldened other racists who had lain dormant during the Obama years. Between his talk of the border wall and his long history of bigotry against black people, suddenly you started to see more incidents of vandalism in cities that hadn’t had those problems before. The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) reported an immediate uptick in harassment in the first ten days following Trump’s election, counting 867 hate incidents. According to the SPLC, the number of hate incidents increased in almost every state; most of the incidents took place on university campuses and in elementary, middle, and high schools. A few of these incidents were against white nationalists (the group that actively supported Trump’s behavior), but the vast majority of these crimes were done to commemorate Trump’s election as president. In Silver Spring, Maryland—a city just up the road from Hyattsville—a rector at the Episcopal Church of Our Saviour discovered a sign offering Spanish services had been ripped and vandalized with the words “TRUMP NATION WHITES ONLY,” according to Time. I covered education for a local newspaper in Montgomery County for almost four years (from 2007 to 2010), and these sorts of incidents hadn’t happened in Silver Spring during my time there. “Montgomery County—it’s not the kind of place where racial incidents happen, but since last Tuesday they’ve been increasing in number,” parish administrator Tracey Henley told Time in 2016. “A year ago,” Henley continued, “it wasn’t possible to be a racist bigot and get elected president. People now feel free to say racist things that they wouldn’t have said before.”

  Like it or not, this was the new America. That, or the old America was waking up. This was the America that our elders used to tell us about, where a short walk to the grocery store meant being harassed. Our parents and grandparents had struggled with such racism, but to minorities who grew up in the 1980s and ’90s, this level of discrimination was totally new. If you’re not white in the United States, you’re deemed “other” and treated differently, but this harassment bit harder than anything in recent years, and a walk outside meant life or death—depending on where you were. Still, in cities like Hyattsville and other left-leaning towns throughout the country, there was a glimmer of optimism, although it was tough to fully embrace at the time. Maybe the election was just a blip and somehow we’d “be alright”? Maybe that was the American dream for which our ancestors prepared us: that, when the horizon looks bleak, the only thing we can do is to hold firm to our ideals and do our best to weather the storm. But who knew? We couldn’t see that far ahead; our emotions were too raw, our future too dim. One thing was clear following Trump’s win: he was going to undo all of Obama’s work, just because he could. The would-be president was driven by ego and a tremendous will to be recognized for—well—everything. Kendrick struggled to reconcile what had just happened in America. “We all are baffled,” he told i-D back then. “It is something that completely disregards our moral compass.” Obama also had a tough time reconciling what had just happened in the election. In The World as It Is, a book written by former Obama adviser Ben Rhodes, the author remembered the president’s dejection. He wondered why the American public would vote for a “cartoon,” and the results made him question if he’d miscalculated his work in office. That was the Trump effect: his victory made us question everything we thought to be true.

  Trump’s election made Obama’s departure much more bittersweet. It’s one thing to pass the baton to someone with some level of decency and political acumen, but to have a hardened white supremacist running the country is quite unusual. And over the next two months, we looked to Obama for the last time as commander in chief and wondered what was next. We struggled with the words last and final: his last White House Correspondents’ Dinner, the final time he’d speak to the press corps. It’s possible that we took the Obamas for granted; we were so used to grace and maturity in the White House that we assumed it would be there forever.

  * * *

  During this time, Kendrick was noticeably silent, occasionally popping up to do an interview here and there, but he largely stayed out of the public eye. He had been incredibly busy in 2015, and with the dust fully settled from To Pimp a Butterfly and untitled unmastered., Kendrick went back to the lab, to his home in Los Angeles to conceptualize his next steps. But there was no telling just what that would be, or how he’d follow his first two major-label releases.

  “I have ideas,” Kendrick told producer Rick Rubin for the October 2016 GQ cover story. “I have a certain approach. But I wanna see what it manifests. I wanna put all the paint on the wall and see where that goes.” Kendrick was twenty-nine years old and even further removed from the grind of trying to make it in the music industry, yet he remained focused and kept his ear attuned to what was next. So just like
he’d done for Butterfly, he toiled away on new material that could’ve been something grand or nothing at all. Kendrick is a scientist in that way; he’ll write, throw away, conceptualize, and tinker with ideas, and those songs either fit into some sort of coherent project or they sit in the vault to never be heard again (unless LeBron James nudges him to release the secrets). Kendrick still had childhood trauma, survivor’s guilt, and isolation to work through, and the closer he got to thirty, the clearer he became about what ailed him and what he needed to do to heal. Your brain shifts to this level of atonement the closer you get to that age; right away, the pleasures you sought as a youth no longer make sense, and nights at home with your loved ones ring louder than being out at some club with nothing but trouble to get into. For Kendrick, that meant spending more time with Whitney, to whom he’d reportedly gotten engaged in 2015. For the first time in at least three years, Kendrick had a little while to actually sit down and enjoy what he’d accomplished. True to the rapper’s nature, he wasn’t going to rest for long.

  Kendrick started talking about the idea for his next album as he created To Pimp a Butterfly, though at the time, it was just a series of rough concepts that didn’t really gel together. While Butterfly was meant for the entirety of the black race, and though Kendrick thrived on such ambition, he wanted the next album to be a little closer to the ground—like a culmination of everything he’d released to that point, yet with God firmly at the center. His most notable work had referenced the divine to some degree, but he’d never delved into it for the entirety of an album. On good kid and Butterfly, God arrived at the precise moment Kendrick needed Him most, just when his life was taking a sharp turn. The rapper had hinted toward it, most notably on good kid’s “Sing About Me, I’m Dying of Thirst” and Butterfly’s “How Much a Dollar Cost,” but he hadn’t fully dissected his own spirituality. Kendrick was reverting his focus inward, back to his old neighborhood, and back to the people doing the groundwork to make it better. If his earlier albums spoke to those in his peer group, his subsequent work was to address his current stature as a community leader. He had different muses now—his little niece, who lights up when she sees him on TV, and his cousin, Carl Duckworth, a member of the Hebrew Israelites, who encouraged him to know his merit as a spiritual being. Once again, he was trying to move beyond hue: on To Pimp a Butterfly, red and blue didn’t matter, only black—black skin and black people. Now he was in search of something even deeper; no matter your complexion, all believers—whether black, white, or brown—must answer to God.

  The albums good kid and Butterfly registered as avant-rap, and it’d been a while—probably since the old K-Dot days—that Kendrick rapped for the sake of rapping. And he wasn’t in a rush, either; with those two records on his résumé, the lyricist bought himself more time to fall back and figure things out at his own pace. One thing was for sure, though: the new album couldn’t sound like anything on To Pimp a Butterfly. “We needed to do the opposite of what our opposite thoughts were,” Terrace Martin told the Recording Academy.

  Kendrick was in a zone and simply couldn’t stop working. One thought led to the next, then to something else. In years past, when he struggled publicly with his mental health, Jesus was there as a salve, a way out of the despair that gripped him and his friends who were suffering in the city. He, like other believers, called on God in his darkest moments, when life-or-death situations were on the horizon and he needed an immediate lifeline—like on “Bitch, Don’t Kill My Vibe” (“I am a sinner who’s probably gonna sin again”), and on “Alright” (“If God got us then we gon’ be alright”). Perhaps because he’d become a lightning rod for political pundits, and because he never wanted to be a political pundit himself, Kendrick had isolated himself. Even after he’d done so much for others and released music to lift an entire race, he seemed to think people didn’t care about him. In his mind, he’d prayed for so many others, but these same people weren’t praying for him. It’d just been interview after interview, tour after tour, incessant feature and appearance requests, and much of it had grown formulaic. It was easy for Kendrick to feel abandoned. In a 2015 interview with Billboard, he talked about the rapture: “We’re in the last days, man—I truly in my heart believe that,” he said. “It’s written. I could go on with Biblical situations and things my grandma told me. But it’s about being at peace with myself and making good with the people around me.” Kendrick’s parents weren’t especially religious and he wasn’t raised in a church. Much of what he knows about Jesus and the Bible came from his grandmother, whose mix of real talk and religious teaching helped cultivate the precocious young man. In his music, Kendrick hadn’t yet discussed how God resides through everything—through the peaks and valleys, the tragedy and the triumph. God is there as a calming spirit, a guide, a spiritual conduit between this world and the afterlife. For Kendrick, God was the way to stay connected with his grandmother and with close friends who were murdered in Compton. He saw God as a protector and a way to stay centered as the world spiraled out of control. In years past, he’d presented God as his salvation alone, but he’d never openly questioned the higher power about why people suffer, and specifically, why he had to endure so much agony. Was it karmic retribution for all the bad things he’d done before he knew better? Bible verse Luke 12:48 says the following: For everyone to whom much is given, from him much will be required. Because he’d been so blessed personally and professionally, perhaps it was time to honor God by spreading his word and giving to those who didn’t have the same type of access or celebrity. So in late 2016, the rapper didn’t have a full picture of his next album, but he did know it would be the most spiritually inclined record he’d compiled to date. It was also Kendrick’s most direct, the one that addressed the state of the world at large head-on, and stripped away some of the veneer that characterized good kid, m.A.A.d city and To Pimp a Butterfly. For the first time, he wanted to write about what was happening right here and right now. “We’re in a time where we exclude one major component out of this whole thing called life: God,” Kendrick once told the New York Times’ T magazine. “Nobody speaks on it because it’s almost in conflict with what’s going on in the world when you talk about politics and government and the system.”

  In late August 2016, Kendrick and his creative team were in New York City looking for artistic inspiration. There, they clicked play on singer Frank Ocean’s newly released studio album, Blonde, and were taken by the vocalist’s vulnerability and the stark way in which he presented his art. Blonde, unlike Ocean’s previous album, channel ORANGE, was almost entirely piano and voice; the recessive soundtrack allowed his vocals to shine through, giving us an unbridled glimpse into his life. Like Kendrick, Frank Ocean had become a star in 2012 with his major-label debut. Kendrick and the team played Blonde nonstop for a whole day, then they had a jam session that Sounwave and the producer DJ Dahi—who last worked with Kendrick on good kid, m.A.A.d city—convened. They cut a song, a woozy, surreal number—that eventually became “YAH.,” where Kendrick namechecks Geraldo Rivera and Fox News for misrepresenting the “Alright” performance and takes the temperature of a ravenous public that wishes to know more and more about the increasingly reclusive musician. Wrote Kendrick, “Fox News wanna use my name for percentage… / Somebody tell Geraldo this nigga got some ambition.”

  Not long after the election, Kendrick wrote a verse for a then-untitled song that pointed the finger at the current state of America: the war it initiated with other countries, the borders that Donald Trump was obsessed with, the murder allowed by its leaders, and the capitalism that kept us divided by class. “The great American flag is wrapped and dragged with explosives,” he wrote. “Donald Trump’s in office / We lost Barack and promised to never doubt him again / But is America honest, or do we bask in sin?” The verse became the last on a song called “XXX.,” which would arise near the end of his next album, the directly titled DAMN. The LP was meant to be a victory lap of sorts, a grand coronation for the Great
est Rapper Alive who might very well be the Greatest Rapper of All Time. But it wouldn’t be a Kendrick album without complicated themes to wade through, so while he wanted the LP to feel sharper than anything he’d done as a mainstream MC, he also wanted to give listeners food for thought that could be unpacked decades down the road. DAMN. needed to have the same intensity as To Pimp a Butterfly. If his previous records presented his neighborhood and race to music aficionados and crate diggers, Kendrick’s next work was meant for nightclubs and street ciphers. “We wanted to make it for all arenas—car, we want you to be in the club, or just flying listening to it and just vibing to it,” he once told Big Boy on his radio show. “That whole approach was from the jump. At the same time, we wanted to have something in the lyrical content where it connects, where it’s not just lyrics, but it’s something you can actually feel. It’s stories that you can feel, emotions you can feel, and emotions you can relate to.” For a while, the album was going to be titled What Happens on Earth Stays on Earth, but was switched to DAMN. to capture the record’s true energy. It’s probably the loudest album Kendrick had released to that point, and with all its aggressive music, the LP just screams “DAMN” when assessing it. Then, with all the contradictory feelings woven throughout the LP, the phrase “Damned if I do, damned if I don’t” began to surface. The phrase spoke to how Kendrick was feeling those days. The opening song, “DNA,” is where he sheds his old skin, unpacking the dichotomy of past and present lives in a hail of a never-ending flow. This was a new, meditative Kendrick, but don’t get it twisted: that Zen could still snap at the drop of a dime, and the days of poverty made him more eager to dominate music. Simply put: he’d been broke before and he wasn’t going back to that.