Photo by Jessica Lehrman

"If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you." This sacred insight, attributed to Jesus of Nazareth in the Gospel of Thomas, pulsates within every track on offer in Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly. A missive of militant transparency, it chronicles afresh Lamar’s tried and true conviction that giving lyrical voice to his deepest fears, anxieties, and resentments is the surest path to shaking free of them. "I could never right my wrongs ‘less I write it down for real," he once explained in "Poetic Justice" on good kid, m.A.A.d city. But this time around, he puts a diviner point on it: "My rights, my wrongs, I write ‘til I’m right with God."

He embraces this process of bringing it all forth with such exuberance, good humor, and relentless self-deprecation that no moment—be it anger, disillusionment, or megalomania—is allowed to dominate. With "u", for instance, a screaming hotel room meltdown in which he comes to the crushing conclusion that he’s thrown away his ties to family and neighbor in exchange for a mass market relationship of pseudo-intimacy with strangers, the shame spiral is suddenly interrupted by a knock on the door from a Spanish-speaking housekeeper who’s trying to finish a shift. Other lives go on and even crowd themselves in amid the audio of his angst. One degraded self-conception is interwoven with another or made to counter it. Bouts of suicidal depression in "u" are referred to in "i" as one more mood contended with, rebuked, and overcome ("I went to war last night"). And the compassion he struggled to have for himself is offered as a clarion call, an imperative, to be communally applied.

-=-=-=-"I know there is a devil, because he talks so loud," Prince once announced on Lovesexy’s "I No". And where Prince named the deluding spirit Spooky Electric, Kendrick Lamar opts for Lucy (read: Lucifer) who appears not only as a corrupting influence that would keep his imagination captive in comparison, competition, and condescension when it comes to his peers and predecessors. Lucy also promises homeland security for friend and family in exchange for his affections. Righteousness is endlessly complicated. "For Sale (Interlude)" highlights that evil ("Misusing your influence…Abusing my power") is too elusive to ever be resisted once for all. If Lucy can quote scripture with ease, the all-pervading confusion with which he contends won’t stop outside church buildings: "They say if you scared, go to church/ But remember, he knows the Bible too." Being true, or in Lamar’s phrase Mandela-like, involves deep discernment and consistent dismissal of many a false signal. In this sense, the album is like an experiment in self-examination.

In her novel The Dispossessed, Ursula K. Le Guin makes a distinction between explorers and adventurers: "The explorer who will not come back or send back his ships to tell his tale is not an explorer, only an adventurer; and his sons are born in exile." With a constant determination to dramatically lyricize his setbacks and missteps, Kendrick Lamar has long opted to be an explorer. As early as "Fuck Your Ethnicity" on Section.80, he made clear that the table he was spreading was set out for all comers also in process: "Know that this fire that’s burning represents the passion that you have." To Pimp a Butterfly’s "Mortal Man" continues this vocation ("Let my word be your earth and moon") but he poses a question that’s different from the question of fame. He wants to make sure people are truly picking up what he means to lay down: "Is this relationship a fake or real as the heavens?"