The Butterfly Effect

May 1, 2020

Music journalist and pop culture commentator Moore tells the storyof rap superstar Lamar, who has not only won 13 Grammys but a Pulitzer Prize. And he's only in his early thirties. Here's why he moves us. With a 50,000-copy first printing.

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July 27, 2020
Rapper Kendrick Lamar is a brilliant, possibly superhuman talent “destined for the Mount Rushmore of music” according to this gushing hagiography. Music journalist Moore recounts Lamar’s rise from gang-ridden Compton, Calif., to the top of the charts, covering such milestones as the song “Real,” which “represents Kendrick’s divine awakening”; Lamar’s 2015 BET Awards show performance, wherein “he became a symbol, no longer a rapper or anything mortal”; and his latest album, DAMN., with which, yet again, “he became something else, almost a mythical being or a supernova.” On the earthly plane Moore styles Lamar as the voice of oppressed Black people in a politicized interpretation that rehashes police killings and labels Donald Trump a white supremacist. Moore sometimes writes perceptively about Lamar’s music—“It evoked barbershop convos, the feel of shabby concrete beneath your fresh Nike sneakers, and the taste of fried chicken wings fresh out of the grease”—but too often wallows in vacuous praise. (In the studio making To Pimp a Butterfly: “Gone was the fast food; in were specialty salads and customized menus. The musicians all applaud Kendrick’s genius, saying that he’s a guy who doesn’t rest on his laurels.”) Anyone who doesn’t worship at the church of Lamar will likely be put off by the tedious puffery.

September 15, 2020
The first book-length treatment of one of the decade's most successful artists. In July 2020, Kendrick Lamar achieved new headlines when it was announced that his 2012 album, good kid, m.A.A.d city, became the longest-charting hip-hop album in U.S. history, amassing over 400 weeks on the Billboard 200 album chart. That record crowned the Compton poet as fresh royalty in the hip-hop scene, which was further underscored by a fiery, confrontational verse on Big Sean's "Control." In 2015, Lamar released To Pimp a Butterfly, which struck a chord with a new generation of Black activists reveling in the international consciousness of Black struggle. Following the buzz surrounding Butterfly, Lamar was pushing into territory where only the timeless emcees live. In his first book, Brooklyn-based music journalist and cultural commentator Moore, who has written for the Nation, Entertainment Weekly, and the Atlantic, among other publications, shows that he's been around the block, pulling together hundreds of sources from interviews and headlines over the years. He convincingly shows his subject's transition from his first moniker, K-Dot, to Kendrick Lamar, as well as the development of the now-powerhouse label Top Dawg Entertainment. Early on, writes the author, "he rapped under the name K-Dot, his fire-spitting alter ego. K-Dot wasn't about uplifting communities; he wanted to decimate everything in sight. The young man had all the technical prowess, the complex sentence structures, and the natural cadence, but he didn't sound free." Additionally, the author offers an insightful history of place, a narrative element that must inform any deep reading of hip-hop culture. Throughout his career, Lamar has set an impossibly high standard of confessional intimacy and passionate storytelling (his most recent album, DAMN., won a Pulitzer). In this solid introduction, Moore uses a more general approach, a wise strategy since fans already know that Lamar is the most reliable narrator of his own story. An effective biographical portrait that will serve well until Lamar writes his own retrospective.

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October 15, 2020
Music journalist Moore's in-depth biography celebrates the life, struggles, and accolades of Compton's own, rapper Kendrick Lamar. Labeled the new king of hip-hop, the 13-time Grammy Award winner poetically expresses the pain of survivor's remorse and the experiences of being a young Black male in America. At age 33, he had already won a Pulitzer Prize for Music and was named one of Time magazine's 100 Influential People. Moore provides an authoritative account of Lamar's development as an artist, recounting how Lamar's pilgrimage to Cape Town empowered him to utilize his platform to shine a light on Black culture. South Africa also gave Kendrick the freedom to be himself, to be untethered from the nuanced racial and social restrictions of America. Sounds of South African beats mixed with hip-hop and jazz set the foundation for his album To Pimp a Butterfly, and later inspired Lamar to produce and curate the critically acclaimed music from and inspired by the blockbuster movie Black Panther. Moore's portrait of Lamar accounts for how one young man's mindful lyrics and sounds can have a profound and far-reaching impact.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2020, American Library Association.)