To Pimp a Butterfly Review

Everything said in its favour is true. The band is extraordinary, live bass and horns and keys playing arrangements no rap record had attempted at this scale, and the writing is ambitious in a way that fully deserves the respect it gets. The man who wrote Alright and the closing conversation with a dead legend's recording is operating at the very top of the form. So the disagreement here is not about craft, and it is not about importance.

It is about the thing this site grades last, which is whether you put the record on. Seventy nine minutes of dense, deliberately uncomfortable music, sequenced to be worked through rather than enjoyed, with a poem stitched across it that resets the mood every time momentum builds. u and For Free are performances designed to be endured. That is a legitimate artistic choice and it is also the reason this album sits on the shelf. Graded on standing alone it would be near the very top. Graded honestly on how often it gets played, it lands here.