Can Everyone Just Shut Up About Kendrick Lamar’s ‘To Pimp A Butterfly’?

I’m talking to you, bloggers and websites. Seriously. Enough.

Dear non-hip hop journalists: Fun fact. Hip hop journalism sucks.

OK. No one likes blanket statements. But despite whatever tiny bastions of hope there are out there in a sea of otherwise mindless mediocrity, rap music writing is generally abhorrent.

In the past, this has given you guys the idea that, “Hey, we’re good writers… We like music… We kinda like some rap. WE’LL DO IT!”

Well. This created problems in of itself, and a lot of you faced criticism from folks, including me who feel that writing about rap without a deeper immersion in the culture that rap is a part of, renders most of you ill-equipped to properly recognize, understand or relay the nuances of such.

Yet, many of you valiantly attempt to fill in the enormous void created by the near-extinction of the craft of hip hop journalism.

As such, lot of you have jumped… JUMPED! to praise/analyze/pontificate/wallow/exalt Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp A Butterfly.

Let’s face it. Since a lot of you lack the depth to seek and find rap to write about that isn’t already buzzing in the public consciousness, and since most of that style of rap tends to be mainstream radio and strip-club fodder, having to eruct articulate pieces about the intricacies of some of these artists and their musical wares, must make you feel some type of way.

Lamar’s well-crafted, musical, lyrically intricate To Pimp A Butterfly must have made you squeal in mentally orgasmic delight! A chance to write about rap that you don’t secretly despise! Or perhaps, rap the likes of which you’ve never seen or heard!

Fact is, regardless how good To Pimp A Butterfly is, some of these writers are really acting like they’ve never heard a good rap album before. It’s as if they really don’t have the background or the knowledge of the full spectrum of the music they somehow are charged with writing about… Hmmm…

In any event, here’s the thing.

We don’t need ALL of you “writers” waxing analytically about the complexity and/or depth and/or greatness and/or jazzness and/or hiphopness and/or blackness of To Pimp A Butterfly.

The great thing about people being able to listen to something and absorb it and make up your own damn mind about something is that they are able to listen to something, absorb it and make up their own damn mind about it!

Social media then makes it incredibly easy to talk amongst themselves.

Why are you disguising a bloviating opinion as some kind of epiphanic think piece?

To hip hop bloggers and not-really-journalists, you’re kinda guilty as well. As I have often said, the “album review” is largely obsolete, only worthwhile when a competent writer brings to light an unknown artist worthy of sharing. Certainly not when everyone and their mother can — and in Lamar’s case, did! — listen to an album on Spotify, for free, and form their own opinion. This is particularly true in hip hop, where the quality of writing is minuscule and impartiality often non-existent.

For the bigger sites, that “review” is nothing more than a bloviating troll-trap, semi-elegantly designed to ensnare a couple of eager detractors with the expectation that they will start a free-for-all of “nanynanypoopoo, my-top-five-is-better-than-yours” arguments in the comment section and throughout your social media.

All for the love of engaging, intellectual, emotional hip hop discussion, right?

No. For page views and advertising dollars. (And straight up pay-for-post as well).

While this probably pays the bills, it is nonetheless a supreme waste of time and talent (though doing this doesn’t require much talent.) 

It does, however, further devalue the state of hip hop media, which, if you recall from the beginning of this piece, sucks.

In the end, I feel both sides of the writing-about-rap population are contributing land-fill quality content to an already Wall-E-like landscape.

So, what’s my bottom line?

Not everything needs a f*cking think piece.

(Not to mention, a piece that simply states a fairly widely agreed-upon opinion, isn’t really a f*cking think piece in the first place.)

Stop cluttering up the already-cluttered-by-crappy-rap-journalism landscape with unnecessary, repetitive, non-profound rap journalism.

To Pimp A Butterfly is a really interesting album, and to many, a classic in the making.

To others, perhaps a bit obscure.

The point is, it doesn’t matter.

I urge you: Stop writing about it if you don’t have anything worthwhile to say, some new angle.

Can’t you just let people LISTEN to an album for once? Talk about it with their friends?

Writers, if you like it, good! Listen again! Go to his concerts. Find other artists making music like him, who don’t have his resources, and support THEM.

I promise you, there are plenty of others. Write about them so we don’t have to wait so long for “another Kendrick Lamar.”

And if you don’t like the album, or Kendrick, or California, or short man-braids being done by a light-skinned woman on the cover of a magazine, fine, move on.

No love lost.

But “writers,” seriously, please find something else to write about.

And to the writers who are itching to reach the comment section, miss me with telling me how hypocritically ironic it is that I’m writing a think piece about how unnecessary think pieces are.

It’s your fault. You did this.