To Pimp a Butterfly

Kendrick Lamar turned "pimp" into a verb for what the industry does to Black artists, and won five Grammys saying so.

To Pimp a Butterfly, Kendrick Lamar's third studio album, was released on 15 March 2015 by Top Dawg Entertainment, Aftermath and Interscope, ahead of its announced date. It entered the Billboard 200 at number one with 363,000 units, 324,000 of them traditional sales, then the second-largest sales week of the year, and it gave Lamar his first chart-topping album. Critics received it as an event: a dense, jazz- and funk-built record about fame, guilt, depression and Black survival, threaded by a poem Lamar recites in pieces between tracks and closed by "Mortal Man," in which a 1994 Tupac Shakur interview is cut so that Shakur appears to answer him.

The title is the reason the album belongs in this archive. Lamar told MTV in 2015 that the working title had been Tu Pimp a Caterpillar, an acronym for Tupac, and that he changed the last word because "I just really wanted to show the brightness of life and the word 'pimp' has so much aggression." He then defined the verb: "For me, it represents using my celebrity for good. Another reason is, not being pimped by the industry through my celebrity." To Rolling Stone, whose March 2015 cover story called the album "honest, fearful and unapologetic," he said the title "will be taught in college courses someday." The album's closing poem makes the metaphor explicit: the caterpillar is the artist consumed by his environment, the butterfly the talent the world wants to own; to "pimp" the butterfly is to exploit it.

That usage sits at the far end of a line this archive traces. In street speech the pimp is a man who lives off women's sex work; in 1990s and 2000s rap the word became a boast; in Pimp My Ride it became a verb for decorating a car. Lamar reverses the polarity. The pimp in his title is not the rapper but the system: record labels, celebrity, the "Lucy" (Lucifer) who tempts him on "For Sale?" and the industry that, as he raps on "Wesley's Theory," profits from Black talent and discards it. The album does not glamorise the trade; it borrows its vocabulary to name exploitation, and it is one of the few mainstream uses of the word that treats being pimped as the condition to escape.

The reception matched the ambition. "Alright" became a protest anthem during the Black Lives Matter demonstrations of 2015 and 2016; Lamar told NPR that "four hundred years later, we still need that music to heal." At the 58th Grammy Awards on 15 February 2016 the album was nominated for Album of the Year and won Best Rap Album, with further wins for Best Rap Performance and Best Rap Song ("Alright") and Best Rap/Sung Collaboration ("These Walls"); Lamar took five awards that night and closed his acceptance by naming Snoop Dogg and Nas: "This is for hip-hop." The album has since been certified platinum and is a fixture of decade-end and all-time lists.

ALSO KNOWN AS
Kendrick Lamar Duckworth (performs as Kendrick Lamar)

STATUS
Living

ERA
2015–present

ASSOCIATED WITH
Compton, California; Top Dawg Entertainment; Aftermath; Interscope; Tupac Shakur; Black Lives Matter

STANDING
Documented