As Jeffrey Isaac, editor of the leading political science journal Perspectives on Politics, puts it in a forthcoming essay, “Important books help to create new research agendas … they develop ideas, over many chapters, typically in the distinctive voice of their authors… books are not standard research articles writ large, nor are they mere collections of articles.” city,” he has greater ambitions for an album. But, as with his second album, “good kid, m.A.A.d. He could probably have gone platinum just by collecting the singles to which has contributed guest verses over the last two years.
He has the equivalent of enough peer-reviewed journal articles on his CV to satisfy the stoniest heart of a job search committee. Kendrick has proven repeatedly that he can turn out astonishing guest verses on hit singles. In the terms of modern academia, this isn’t just a collection of articles or the routine advancement of normal science: This is a book. One of the first things that leaps out from listening to the album is its thematic unity and its conceptual ambition. Well, we’d be happy to welcome him aboard.) He even seems to go out of his way to express pride in being an honorary member of The Monkey Cage political science collective, declaring “I want you to recognize that I’m a proud monkey.”(What, that wasn’t what he meant there? Sorry. “To Pimp a Butterfly” extends and expands Kendrick’s relevance to contemporary political science with a direct, challenging engagement with some of its core concepts. I singled out Kendrick in part for his mastery of that hip-hop game, but also for the vision of raising the bar through the intense peer competition he outlined on his scene-shattering “Control” verse. That essay focused on the structure of the hip-hop field, including the use of mixtapes to engage specialist hip-hop communities, the complex web of alliances and rivalries revealed by song collaborations and the nature of competition between elite rappers. Last year, in “ King Kendrick and the Ivory Tower,” I used Kendrick as a model for how academics should approach the emergent public sphere. My admiration for Kendrick goes way back. And, lest you worry that you’re in for a tedious sermon, he does so without ever being less than lyrically and musically thrilling, cultivating a sound utterly unlike hip-hop’s state of the art. He exhibits a challenging ethos of self-critique as a tentative path forward. Where talented contemporaries like Drake rarely venture a thought deeper than “being rich makes me sad,” Kendrick grapples with core political theory questions of power, identity and the ethics of leadership.
But there is also a real political science dimension to the project. There have already been some great essays on “To Pimp a Butterfly” by music critics far better positioned than I am to discuss Kendrick’s place in the history and practice of hip-hop. “To Pimp a Butterfly” seizes this moment, infusing it with a complex, sustained meditation on the nature of power, identity and leadership. Cole and many other hip-hop artists have been prominent voices responding to the killings of young black men such as Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown and Eric Garner.
The moment is clearly right for artistically ambitious, politically engaged hip-hop to re-emerge.