"I made To Pimp a Butterfly for you," raps Kendrick Lamar on the opening cut from untitled unmastered. It's tempting to read a lot into those words; in fact, it's tempting to delve deeply into everything about his latest release. Because when the promotionally frugal, preeminent thinking-person's rapper of a generation lets forth a largely unexpected collection of demos into a click economy of hot takes and broadcasted enthusiasm, the friction of opposites is enough to spark the kind of hopes that see meaning in everything.
No other rapper has taken up so much real estate in the past 12 months while releasing so little music and sharing as little about themselves as Kendrick. TPAB—a Grammy-winning ride of densely knotted rhymes, tangled ideas, and deep sounds—positioned Kendrick Lamar as a reluctant messiah figure, and its dialogues with self and manifestations of God resisted quick-and-easy unpacking. Now, he’s released a handful-and-a-half of song sketches in a project that's neither album nor mixtape (or even EP or LP), and seem to have even less a chance of radio play than TPAB did upon its arrival. But it feels like an extension of that album's world—an asterisk, perhaps, or an extended coda.
There's little doubt that just about all of these songs are from TPAB sessions—"untitled 03," subtitled with a date of "05.28.2013," had already been performed four months before Butterfly's release, during the the long goodbye of "The Colbert Report" with help from Terrace Martin, Thundercat, Bilal, and Sonnymoon's Anna Wise. It's classic Kendrick—a reductive-yet-sprawling fever-chill of observations on race and the music industry that mixes stereotype with history and wisdom. It's insightful and uncomfortable, if not outright offensive: Asians are linked to Eastern philosophy, Native Americans to the land, Blacks to lust, whites to greed. It's also the collection's most fully-formed song; perhaps the only one that emerges as a finished thought here.
One of the most enchanting things about this project is hearing how Kendrick manipulates his own voice before the studio modulations kick in. His vocal tics and morphs have long been technologically-aided affairs, but on "untitled 02" he's full of elastic long tails—partially gleeful Lil Wayne, wholly sanctifying choir sinner. He's crying for his bosses—both Top Dawg and God—while lamenting urban addiction and dysfunction, and contemplating mortality. "World is going brazy/ Where did we go wrong?/ It's a tidal wave/ It's a thunderdome," he sing-raps, sounding half-possessed, half-saved. For the second half of the song, he includes the firestarter verse he performed in January on "The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon." But the scorching iteration of that live performance is nowhere here—he's laid-back and matter-of-fact, but his threat just as heavy: "I can put a rapper on life support/ Guarantee that's something none of you want."
At times Kendrick is joined by other voices—TDE's Jay Rock and Punch, and Wise (again) on "untitled 05," which sounds like a long jazz-groove session made just to find the best parts; Cee-Lo Green shows up over the bossa nova breeziness of Adrian Younge and Ali Shaheed Muhammed's "untitled 06"—but, much like TPAB, untitled unmastered. is unmistakably about Kendrick Lamar. The song he's jokingly creating on the back end of "untitled 07" shows up earlier as "untitled 04," and its refrain is "head is the answer/head is the future"—which may or may not be a multiple-entendre about sex, life and spirituality. Because Kendrick is so share-averse, goofy moments like these that would be filler on other projects have the revelatory power of a posthumous recording here. It's the kind of stuff you'd find out from other artists via their social media detritus—at the end of "untitled 02" he asks who's doing drums, sounding like a bona fide jazz cat complimenting Max Roach's stick work—but Kendrick has a verve for taking giant steps backwards into an era where masters let the music speak for itself. It all feels like a jazz project, but not just because he's using jazz music.
These numbers are packed with more information and moods than the 35-minute running time suggests. On "untitled 01" he dons his robes as God's servant, talking to the Supreme Being: "[You] told me to use my vocals to save mankind for you/ [Don't] say I didn't try for you, say I didn't ride for you, or tithe for you, or push the club to the side for you." (If the song's subtitles are indeed dates of conception, this one—"8.19.2014."—suggests that Kendrick was having conversations with God about the course of his album a full seven months before TPAB actually arrived.) In execution, untitled unmastered. is a complete inversion of Kanye West's recent The Life of Pablo—it's a small and quiet statement from an artist with little to prove at this moment. Its author tempts deeper reading, but his choices and the lack of entry points—no directional song titles, no grand proclamations, no promotion—leaving nothing to deal with but the music. As with TPAB, untitled unmastered. demands to be approached on its own terms, even when you don't know what those terms are. You can't say he didn't try for you, ride for you, or push the club to the side for you.
