At this point, it should be no surprise that Kendrick Lamar's To Pimp a Butterfly is the Album of the Year on numerous lists, including this one. Upon its release, it was universally lauded. It was only March, but the writing was on the White House walls: To Pimp a Butterfly was an opus, a statement, a feat. It felt weighty, labored, accomplished. One hour and 20 minutes of big ideas handled with complexity, it was a dextrous addition to the canon of art expressing disenchantment with fame and success. It launched a thousand thinkpieces, and forced critics to think deeply about music—to the point that it was still generating back-and-forths about its merits, as late as last month, eight months after its release. Commercially speaking, it set first-week streaming records on Spotify, meaning that it was being listened to as fervently as it was being debated.

It's also Black as fuck. "Blackness" is a concept that remains fluid and intangible, but so solid that one can feel it when it’s present. And it was all over Butterfly. From the opening notes (a sample of Boris Gardiner's "Every Nigger Is a Star") to the closing—a fabricated conversation with Tupac Shakur—the album is packed with Blackness. Kendrick may not have given the public much advance warning for Butterfly’s rich sound—the luxe spillover of stripped funk and jazz grooving of Terrace Martin, Kamasi Washington, Flying Lotus, Thundercat, and many others—but he made his thematic intentions abundantly clear with the pre-release singles. The first, "i", with its Isley Brothers sample and message of self-love, was initially overlooked for its subversion; while Black folk were telling the world that #BlackLivesMatter, Kendrick turned the message inwards: "I love myself." It was the amendment to his controversial statements to Billboard magazine that veered uncomfortably close to respectability politics. ("What happened to [Michael Brown] should've never happened. Never," he told the magazine. "But when we don't have respect for ourselves, how do we expect them to respect us? It starts from within. Don't start with just a rally, don't start from looting—it starts from within.")

At a moment when his peers remained fixated on finding worth and esteem from the world and things around them—the power of celebrity, the trappings of material excess, the numbing of drugs, the escape of sexual conquest—Kendrick emerged as a grounded Black hippie. He was enthralled with all of the same things as other rappers, but not beholden to them. He escaped into pussy on "These Walls" but philosophized as he stroked: "Walls telling me they full of pain, resentment/ Need someone to live in them just to relieve tension/ Me? I’m just a tenant." When he got drunk on "u", he turned to self-loathing: "Mood swings is frequent, nigga/ I know depression is restin' on your heart for two reasons, nigga." When he gassed up his luxury vehicle on President Obama's favorite song of the year, "How Much a Dollar Cost", he encountered God in the form of a beggar.

None of these things are explicitly Black, but the lens through which they were filtered was undoubtedly so. From its vernacular to its point of view, To Pimp a Butterfly was about dealing with the survivor's remorse of escaping the poverty of Black America, while also relating to those still there. On "Institutionalized", when he took one of his hood friends to the BET Awards, he noted: "You lookin' at artistses like they harvestses/ So many Rolies around you and you want all of ’em/ Somebody told me you thinkin' 'bout snatchin' jewelry."

Nowhere is Blackness more front and center than on the album’s second single, "The Blacker the Berry". It was the song that most clearly announced Kendrick's lack of fucks about the comfort of his white audience. Perhaps it was a retort to his previous Grammy snubs; maybe it was a reaction to seeing "Swimming Pools (Drank)", his anti-drunk song, turned into a pro-drunk song in the mouths of bros. Whatever his reasoning, "The Blacker the Berry" provided white people with no entry into the song: There is hardly anything on the song for Taylor Swift to lip sync in her car unless she was going to deal with psychic turmoil of mouthing "My hair is nappy, my dick is big, my nose is round and wide/ You hate me don't you?/ You hate my people—your plan is to terminate my culture/ You're fuckin' evil, I want you to recognize that I'm a proud monkey." He labeled the song as the "emancipation of a real nigga" and, even in a society where whites regularly rub ears with the n-word, it was abrasive and unsettling.

All of this Blackness is important. Important because sometimes white people need to take a metaphorical seat—to sit down, shut up, and listen to conversations in which they are a cultural object, not the center. This is not an easy task. White people have been way too comfortable for way too long in this country, in this world. Way too comfortable with the way they choose to see reality solely through their own gaze, way too comfortable with their sense of entitlement over the planet and its resources, way too comfortable with their appropriation of culture in ways large and small, way too comfortable with the stories they tell, the lies passed off as the history of mankind. Way too comfortable with the things they pick up, way too careless with the way they put them down. But Kendrick was willing to discomfort the comfortable. He took all of the acclaim he had received as a critical darling from his major label debut—the rightfully extolled good kid, m.A.A.d city—and doubled down on his Blackness, not for the entertainment of white people, but in near-total disregard for their experience of his conversation. He was Miles Davis playing with his back to the crowd, and in that sense, it's a miracle that this record has found the audiences that it has found.

It's an album by the greatest rapper of his generation, where his rap skills are perhaps the least noteworthy talking point. An album so dense with ideas that it made the novelistic turns of his debut—a thoughtful and textured, gang culture-adjacent coming-of-age story—seem quaint and straightforward by comparison. It's an album that is on this list not only because of its merits, but because it's presumably why so many albums are not here, this year—it's not a stretch to reason that To Pimp a Butterfly had something to do with why Kanye West and Drake didn't release proper studio albums in 2015. It's an album with such gravitas that the runaway success of Adele's 25 seems inconsequential. It's not just the album of the year; it's the voice of a moment in time. —kris ex

Kendrick Lamar: "Alright"