Analysis Of To Pimp A Butterfly By Kendrick Butterfly

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Recommended: Protest music and its impact on racial issues

“We gone be alright.” On July 28, 2015, a large group of activists repeatedly chanted these four words during a police harassment protest at Cleveland State University. This chant was inspired by the eponymous song from Kendrick Lamar’s album To Pimp a Butterfly, and this is not really a surprise. In 2015 To Pimp a Butterfly grew to be the successor of the great hip-hop albums from the late eighties and early nineties, an era in which iconic artists like Tupac Shakur and Niggaz Wit Attitudes crafted politically charged songs that moved a nation. In this essay I will argue that Kendrick Lamar’s album To Pimp a Butterfly has become a musical landmark in America’s struggle for racial equality. It fulfills an important political role by addressing
On To Pimp a Butterfly Kendrick Lamar does not fail to address a single one of them. Police brutality is of course the most evident, most present and most media covered issue in the United States, and Kendrick criticizes it in many of his songs. For example in the song “Alright,” with the lyrics “we hate po-po, wanna kill us dead in the streets fo sho” referring to the many killings of African-Americans by white police officers. Other issues, such as an unjust criminal system and unequal taxes, make up the new coded racial appeals, as Ian Haney Lopez mentions in his book Dog Whistle Politics, and are also very relevant in contemporary America. In “The Blacker the Berry” Kendrick Lamar criticizes the United States for being an incarceration nation, and for the fact that they provide too little opportunities to African-American males, thus forcing them into criminality, which eventually gets them locked up. In “Wesley’s Theory” he attacks the United States unequal tax system and blames the government for the increasing wealth gap. All these issues come together in one term; institutional racism. This institutionalization of people of color in the prison system, education system, housing finance system, et cetera, is what Kendrick Lamar criticizes in the song “Institutionalized”: “I’m trapped

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