I just opened my laptop to the most prolific video of the year. This Kendrick album has been rippling through the entire music community for the last couple months. Changing the way that hip-hop can be translated to the rest of world. A message from the ghetto forcing the rest of the world to look at the problems that the portion of our country, that aren’t guarded by suburban gated communities, face every single day. This video encapsulates the duality of the entire To Pimp A Butterfly album.
Beginning with the poem that rings through the entire album and a very real look at the current state of affairs with in these currently not so United States. The symbolic gestures of aggression and struggle show everything from a lit Molotov cocktail being thrown at a graffitied rainbow to the tired and weathered faces of people who know the true meaning of poverty. Cash being thrown around a lit dumpster we cut straight to a man escaping an arrest only to be shot in the mother fucking back like so many individuals over the past couple months.
Cut to Kendrick in his tore up whip with his crew shouting the truth and giving the world goose bumps. Pan back to four police officers carrying said whip like Kendrick is a mother fucking prince about to get fed grapes off the vine and shit. The symbolism from this image is fucking indescribable, all I can say is what I actually said, out loud, alone in my house, “Fuck Yeah, das wha sup.”
Cut to Kendrick doing doughnuts around a fucking cop car in a brand new spotless muscle car with the most gangster ass toddler you’ve ever seen in your fucking life throwing stacks of cash out the window. Kendrick floats through the streets as if in a dream standing above the city on light polls letting the whole world know that everything will in fact “be alright.” Only to have one-time roll up and cap our hero in the chest with a fucking finger gun. As Kendrick descends back to the streets and the reality of the world, we hear the echo of the same poem that we began with to show yet again the same duality that is represented time and time again through the entire To Pimp A Butterfly album. The screen goes black then flashes to our boy lying in the streets only to look in the camera and give a smirk. There it is again….
Drop the goddamn mic, I dare a mother fucker to make a better video this year. If you could win oscars for music videos then Colin Tilly would snatch that shit in a heart beat.
