"Mortal Man" name checks everyone from, Mandela, to MLK, all the way back to Moses"
On "King Kunta", a stomping blast of James Brown funk, he imagines himself as the titular slave from Roots, shouting the punchline "Everybody wanna cut the legs off him!/Black man taking no losses"
lamar also points out that the fans who scratched their heads at "i" had yet to hear "u" - its counterpoint on the album. "i" is the answer to "u" he says.
The latter is four and a half minutes of devastating honesty, with Lamar almost sobbing over a discordant beat, berating himself about his lack of confidence and calling himself "a ****ing failure." It's the sound of a man staring into the mirror and hating what he asys, punctuated by a self-aware hook:"Loving you is complicated"
"That was one of the hardest songs I had to write,"he says. "There's some very dark moments in there. All my insecurities and selfishness and letdowns. That **** is depressing as a mother****er. "But it helps, though," he says."it helps."
hanging over it all, of course, are the tragedies of the past three years: Trayvon martin, Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Tamir Rice. Says sounwave, "To me, the album is perfect for right now. If the world was happy, maybe we'd give you a happy album. But right now, we are not happy." Lamar - who calls the album "fearful, honest and unapologetic" - is coy about what the title means. "Just putting the word 'pimp' next to 'butterfly'..." he says, then laughs."It's a trip. That's something that will be a phrase forever. It'll be taught in college courses - I truly believe that." I ask if hes the pimp or the butterfly, and he just smiles. "I could be both," he says.
