When the most important active recording artist in hip-hop unexpectedly drops a new track, we listen.
When he drops eight of them, we stop and stare.
Kendrick Lamar—alias Cornrow Kenny—has had one of the most impressive years in memory. Following the release of 2015’s instant funk/soul/rap classic "To Pimp a Butterfly," he’s toured the country with a live band, received critical adulation, been hailed as a cultural head of the Black Lives Matter movement and, most recently, closed out his sweep of the rap categories at the Grammys with a (literally) incendiary performance before getting robbed of Album of the Year.
Of course, though, when crafting such an exquisite creation as "Butterfly," there’s going to be some fat cut from the final product. And that’s where last week’s surprise release/EP/thing "untitled unmastered." comes into play. A collection of eight outtakes and demos from the "Butterfly" sessions, recorded between May 2014 and this year, the tracks show the process of rap’s most creative and significant man.
“untitled 01” opens the project with a hazy, jazzy intro until a deep voice utters come-ons to some girl. Lamar then enters from a distance, voice obscured by reverb, and delivers a two minute verse covering a modern day Revelation, an apocalypse demarcated by racism and the collapse of skyscrapers, only to end with Lamar trying to get to church—only to have a chorus tell him to live his life and whatever makes him happy, “just take it all back before the light switch.”
Lamar’s singing makes a rare appearance on “untitled 02” in a sex- and lean-soaked miasma of choruses, bridges and the all-necessary appeal to God. Midway through, Cornrow Kenny returns with a baleful verse about the trappings of wealth before exploding into a quick coda where he rightfully professes his dominance of the rap game.
The next two tracks are quick interludes, with "untitled 03" featuring a call and response between Anna Wise and Lamar about the lessons learned from various ethnicities, most notably the white man, who only desires “a piece of mine’s” and a cut of the $10.99 album sale. "untitled 04 "is a soulful and structureless song, in which Lamar whispers the plight of the poor while a chorus misleads the youth and denies welfare to the same people Lamar reps. “untitled 05” is a straight-up funk jam previewed at the Grammys, with a signature Thundercat bassline underlying the whole song while "Butterfly"-style saxophones whimper in the background. Lamar delivers bars of pure, unadulterated hedonism with guests and Top Dawg Entertainment label mates Punch and Jay Rock. “untitled 06” could have been dropped anywhere on "Butterfly,"
with a beautiful ooze of a chorus chorus by Cee-Lo Green where he duplicitously explains that “both sides are evenly odd.”
The penultimate track is a three-part suite which starts with a spaced-out confession of the incredible high that comes with the creation of art like TPAB, before proceeding into a braggadocious and sprawling verse about the size of Lamar’s… philanthropic effort. The track closes with three minutes of amorphous and unmastered audio from the studio sessions—the only three minutes of the entire project that require any patience to get through.
“untitled 08,” also known as “Blue Faces” after its performance on The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon, closes the album with a beat lifted straight out of "Butterfly"'s “These Walls.” Lamar describes the sadness that can’t be prevented by the “blue faces” of all his new hundred dollar bills, a bragging echo of the age-old sentiment that, of course, money can’t buy happiness.
While not as cohesive as "Butterfly" or "good kid, m.A.A.d. city," Lamar’s latest project still manages to convey the themes he hasn’t been afraid to approach in the past. The lyricism is there, the production is there and the track quality is too—regardless of what his label says about it being a collection of throwaways. More importantly, it shows that Kendrick might be done with the funky sound of "Butterfly," but who knows? Rap’s most interesting man can do whatever he wants at this point.
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