Kendrick Lamar - To Pimp A Butterfly

At some unknown point people decided that the sign of a quality rock album is how concise and snappy it is. No filler allowed. Ambition is welcomed but overstepping the mark isn't. In almost complete opposition, hip-hop and rap albums are rated on their messiness. From the start they had filler tracks built into their DNA, with intros and outros and comedy skits; being ambitious and showing it off were part of the game. Which, rating on this scale, makes Kendrick Lamar's To Pimp A Butterfly, Lamar's third studio album, a grand success. Butterfly is Lamar at his most pissed off, and spilling it all onto tape; it's a kaleidoscope of ideas - some work, some don't - that's so wide in its area of attack I can't imagine anyone liking or disliking everything on it.

It was a lot easier to say what Lamar's previous album, good kid, m.A.A.d city, was about: however authentic he was being, Lamar was playing gangster (or playing with gangsters) on the mean streets. It's harder to say what Butterfly is about. It's an album about race, which is an understatement: it's easily the most angry fight against racism I've ever heard put onto tape. It's steeped in references to black history - such as Lamar's recycling of lines by James Brown and Michael Jackson, and referencing Richard Pryor infamously setting himself on fire - and Lamar sounds like he is using it all just to fuel himself up for another fight with the microphone. There's been other recent albums that dealt with race in a big way, an obvious example being Jay-Z and Kanye West's Watch The Throne, although that celebrated black culture from two people who had already risen to the top. As Jay-Z rapped, it was a celebration of "Black tie, black Maybachs, black excellence, opulence, decadence". Lamar approaches race from the opposite angle: it's all in the title of King Kunta, which matches Lamar's hostile rage with a militant backing track, by updating the title of the real life 18th century slave to that of king. Lamar might be the current king of the rap game, a level of fame a black man would never have dreamed about not long ago, but Lamar isn't forgetting all the blood spilled on the journey to get to his crown.

But for an album that bites into huge chunks of black history it's also (somewhat disturbingly) personal. On u Lamar raps "I place blame on you still/Place shame on you still/Feel like you ain't shit/Feel like you don't feel/Confidence in yourself", before turning his words on himself into a harsh self criticism, calling himself a "fucking failure". The song feels like it could be the manuscript of a weepy church confessional. The album's production - part freestyle jazz, part sorrowful piano score - matches Lamar's weirder tendencies. Almost all tracks have prologues and epilogues, with Lamar and other character speaking and playing part of a wider story; it's not all fun listening, the same way a lot of the tracks are tough listens too, but Lamar never runs out of things to say.

The best moments on Butterfly are when Lamar's outspoken side is matched by some fun beats. These Walls opens with the sound of a woman groaning, whether this is out of pleasure or pain - possibly giving birth? - isn't made clear. (By the end of Butterfly everything is mixed up: the personal, the political, the pleasurable). The music is catchy and seductive, and way sexier than anything Lamar's ever done. The walls of the title at first refer to the vaginal walls of a woman Lamar is pleasuring, but in the final verse are flipped to refer to the walls keeping said woman's baby daddy stuck in a prison cell. And when Lamar ponders "If these walls could talk" it opens things up to a lot more than prison cells and vaginas. It's songs like this that have the thoughtful groove that was heard in D'Angelo's Black Messiah from last year, only with a lot more aggression to it. As the title of Butterfly warns you, there's beauty in difficult things, but you can't ignore the ugly, messy, violent side while you're finding it. And isn't that what hip-hop is all about?