I first heard the name Kendrick Lamar while riding shotgun in my best friend’s whip in March of 2013. 

We were on the way to a Seattle venue called Lo-Fi, where a couple of local DJs called “Emerald City Soul Club” would be spinning mid-20^th century doo-wop and R&B records at a monthly event known as Soul Night. With my mind somewhere in between appreciation of the past and anticipation of whatever the night would hold, I took immediate notice of the way this artist’s altered vocals soared across an expansive soundscape before finally settling into a tightly wound rap parable about the perils of peer pressure. Usually I’m drug-free—but shit, I’m with the homies. 

My first instinct was not to ask “Who is this?,” but, instead, “Where is he from?” The facility displayed with such disparate musical styles on this one track made me want to fixate the voice somewhere in a familiar geographic frame-of-reference. The voice belonged to the 21^st century—that much was clear: but where did it come from? “Compton. And his name is Kendrick Lamar,” came the reply. I later learned the cut I heard is called “The Art of Peer Pressure,” and that Kendrick came up as a protégé of Dr. Dre, who has significant musical roots in funk styles of the 70s. The track came and went quickly on this cobbled together playlist, but it was impressive for the way it seemed to draw such strong links to the history of black music: the artist’s familiarity with yesteryear’s forms doubled-back around to the present, and felt futuristic.

Its message cast a shadow on the entire night. I was on my way to listen to soul music because I don’t like what so much of mainstream rap brings out of people on the dance floor—but “The Art of Peer Pressure” reminded me why I love Hip-Hop.

It wasn’t until later that year that I’d follow-up on the voice I heard in that car—and it was an accident. Caught up in the hype of Drake’s upcoming album Nothing Was The Same, I read an article in which a journalist questioned whether or not the multi-platinum part-time crooner would respond directly to the challenge issued by Kendrick’s combative verse on “Control.” As a 30 year old rap fan, I came of age as a listener at a time when the best rappers were all but expected to clash directly: not by sniping at one another passive-aggressively in the press, or by slap-boxing in a night club, but with their livelihood—with their lyrics. Jay and Nas did it a decade or so earlier, and both of their careers were rejuvenated as a result. Smelling blood, I downloaded that new Drake, did a little research, and had discovered that Kendrick recorded a classic called Good Kid, M.A.A.D. City while I wasn’t looking.

I downloaded that one too, and I feel like I’ve listened or thought about at least one track from either of those albums every day since downloading them. That was late 2013, and so much has happened since then to put the historical experience of Blacks in America at the center of a renewed discussion about appropriation, civil liberties, and the value of “All Lives” under a militarized and irresponsible police force.

With Trayvon Martin’s fatal gunshot wounds still fresh in our minds, news of the deaths of scores of unarmed black men, women, and children have only recently subsided somewhat in the American imaginary. In their place has been put critical conversation about the cultural gifts brought to bear by a people living through what scholar Douglas Massey has called “American Apartheid.” Between Ava DuVernay’s Selma, Nas’ Time is Illmatic documentary tour, Beyoncè’s continued dominance, D’Angelo’s Black Messiah, Lupe Fiasco’s Tetsuo & Youth, and Barack Obama’s speech on the occasion of the 50^th anniversary of Bloody Sunday, has America ever seen as broad and multifaceted a display of Black Excellence in as short a period of time as the one displayed since the murder of Mike Brown? Into this context, Kendrick Lamar has released his 3^rd album, To Pimp a Butterfly.

It’s so tempting to think of Kendrick as a throwback. The album’s artwork, which circulated a week or so before the album’s surprise early release on Monday, March 16^th, 2015, recalls 1915’s Birth of a Nation, a reversal of D.W. Griffith’s racist caricatures of blacks where, in Kendrick’s version, African-Americans find the means to celebrate their marginality. Musically, To Pimp a Butterfly wears black traditionalism on its sonic sleeve. “The Art of Peer Pressure” seems to be the prototype for an album that veers boldly through thoroughfares of the last half-century of black music. At this sonic barbeque, Sly and The Family Stone are introduced to Dilla. Coltrane eats collard greens with Betty Davis. And Duke and Louis sit off to the side somewhere, drinking bourbon from red solo cups like proud granddads, happy to see the work they put in wasn’t for naught: on To Pimp a Butterfly, Kendrick has come into his own as both bandleader and soloist. “We’ve been waiting for you,” says the chorus on “Momma,” as Kendrick exudes joy over his hard-won inclusion into his own tradition. “I know everything—I know history,” he raps. We’ve been waiting for you.

The album begins with a filtered vocal of Boris Gardiner’s anthem “Every Nigger is a Star,” as Kendrick stunts with outsized boasts that could’ve been borrowed from a Blaxploitation film. The chaotic “For Free” interlude that follows plays like a scene from a late 80s Spike Lee joint. Here and elsewhere on the album, Kendrick’s lyricism is at once soaring and dense: one can choose to have his personal sonic attack register literally—as text—or musically, as his voice becomes one more instrument in a rap album whose production rivals and exceeds Jay Z’s immaculate American Gangster. Coming from a rapper who called his last album “A Short Film by Kendrick Lamar,” the clarity of Kendrick’s links between black film and black music on To Pimp a Butterfly feel too well drawn to be coincidental.

But before we see Kendrick as a young Frederic Jameson in blackface who offers empty postmodern exercises in place of coherent storytelling, it should be pointed out that one of Kendrick’s transcendent strengths is the way he gets us to look forward by looking back. With aching harmonies that recall Nas’ 2004 “War,” Kendrick’s “For Sale” transmits all the stages of Springtime attraction: the anticipation, the highs, and the anxieties of separation in the midst of a connection that has no choice but to mature or die in disappointment. On “Alright”—my personal favorite track on an album of instant classics—Kendrick’s Illmatic 2.0-level of lyricism is made more potent by free jazz and a barbershop quartet sample. The historical approach enhances the message, lending it weight it wouldn’t have had otherwise: the sweetest sounds of the black experience have been sung by artists who lived with the bitterness of exclusion, but the energy of Kendrick’s aesthetic won’t allow us to wallow. “Nigga, we gonna be alright,” asserts Pharell on the hook, in what feels like a remix of a Negro spiritual:

When you know,
We been hurt, been down befo.’ Nigga?
When our pride was low, lookin’ at the world like, “Where do we go?” Nigga?
But nigga, we gonna be alright.

I’ll remember To Pimp a Butterfly for the way it ties together emotions arising from social and individual abandonment, memory of a “golden era” that wasn’t any better than the present, and loyalty to the people we hold dear, no matter their imperfections.

Drake’s “Jungle” hit me in the heart earlier this year, as its narrator asked “Are you down for the cause?” in a heartbreaking phrase that takes flight, peaks, and drowns in drums like the jaded expectations of a people whose hopes for liberation can only be realized artistically, and not in racist institutions. For all their publicized animosity, it feels like Drake and Kendrick were on the same page in at least this respect: when Kendrick asks “When shit hit the fan, is you still a fan?” on “Mortal Man,” he may as well be talking directly to the droves of casual rap fans who couldn’t care less whether or not the people who gave them the gift of Hip-Hop have enough money for rent in gentrified neighborhoods.

Understand that people love Hip-Hop for hosts of reasons, and have pretended to love it for even more. For kids who came from conservative homes in the 2000s, Kanye’s canny self-consciousness resonated at a time when so much of Indie Rock was mired in self-parody. In the 90s, Bad Boy and Death Row produced images of black empowerment—capitalism with a slick sense of style—during the long boom of the stable Clinton 90s. Going back to the 80s, white suburbanites identified with Public Enemy’s disruption of a “greed is good” era that stood for nothing so it could buy everything.

This is all well and good—once it gets moving, any medium will attract a bandwagon. But some of us love Hip-Hop. Period. Love Hip-Hop, as Puff said in 1999, “Because Africa Bambatta was def.” Because we find well-crafted 16s structurally attractive. And because we know what went into flipping a sample you’d never imagine you would bob your head or dance to. Maybe we were attracted to Hip-Hop at first for what it represented—but we’ve grown to love it for what it is. There’s a difference.

Like with all genuine love, we somehow still have high expectations even though we’ve been kicked in the teeth repeatedly. In the 90s, we watched our best lyricists die senselessly in their primes. With a void to fill, we waited for Jay and Nas to return to their first-album forms, only to watch them waft for a time in shallow careerism. Women who wanted strong female role-models watched as, one by one, contenders for the throne were chewed up and spit-out by a misogynistic industry that could only appreciate them as assets, but not as whole human beings. And if you’re an immigrant, differently-abled, or gay, there’s a good chance you’ve tuned out mainstream Hip-Hop completely. Who could blame you? Being the butt of countless punchlines wouldn’t sit well with anyone.

But for those of us who have a faint memory of Rakim’s reign, who still saw Nas’ genius through an inconsistent string of albums, and who rode with Lupe when he was at his most obtuse, Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly is the reward.

For rap fans and champions of democracy, even blacker days are in the offing—but I have a feeling we gonna be alright.