To Pimp a Butterfly, an ode to South Africa’s identity politics

Along with being a modern rap masterpiece, Kendrick Lamar’s brand new album boasts a few references to the beloved rainbow nation. From Complexion (A Zulu Love), concerns of a Zulu/Xhosa tribal war in The Blacker The Berry, all the way down to Lamar re-imagining himself as “the ghost of Mandela.” One would be hard pressed to find another American hip-hop record that contains as much South African influences (I guess his trip down here was not in vain).

With the amount of lyrical analysis the album has already received thus far, I doubt the public is hungry for another one. What I aim to do is to draw parallels between the album’s concept/lyrical themes and South Africa’s post-apartheid zeitgeist.

The meaning of the album title has been explained countless times online. With that concept in mind, one only has to look at Marikana to see the tragic culmination of pimping butterfly, a group of men who were killed for demanding an increase of the fruits they were pimped for. The music industry provides ample and less tragic examples of this theory too. As Mzansi’s music scene is proliferated by big international labels and distributors, we have seen some of our artists being pimped out under the guise of ‘marketability’. Die Antwoord went to Interscope, while Ifani signed with Sony and later regretted it.

A theme that shows up constantly through the album is one of race and race relations. What I like is how the tracks are sequenced from Complexion (A Zulu Love) flowing into The Blacker The Berry. While the former embraces all colours, the latter triumphs in racial rage.

The narratives and sequencing of the songs coincidentally match the state of post-apartheid South Africa, from the liberation honeymoon that was marked by unflinching declarations of a rainbow nation where skin tone didn’t matter, to the recent resurgence of racial flares in schools, universities, communities and twitter (hi Zelda Le Grange). To what end these will come? We have to wait and see.

The end of apartheid came with a new struggle in tow, one of social inequality (free of race). And like in Mzansi, class discourses take centre stage on To Pimp A Butterfly. “The poor people are going to [sic] open up this whole world and swallow up the rich people,” Tupac says in a conversation with Kendrick that closes the album.

This prophesy seems befitting to South Africa where a year ago, our inequality rate was almost on the same level as Brazil’s.

On the Snoop Dogg assisted cut, Institutionalised, the Top Dog Entertainment star breaks down a story of a kid from the ghetto who suddenly finds himself in an upper class setting. What results is a monologue that shows the survival instincts of the have-nots.

Our country is well documented for its high crime rates. I will argue that this is aggravated by social inequality, where the poor are surrounded by people with materials and resources which they need but cannot have.

With our young democracy still on an evolutionary path-only God knows where it will lead- it’s amazing how an artist from across the seas can capture its identity politics as accurate as Kendrick Lamar has done in ‘To Pimp A Butterfly’.

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