And That’s All I Wrote

Annotations on
Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly

Wesley’s Theory“We should never gave niggas money”

For Free? (Interlude)“This dick ain’t free”

King Kunta“Bitch where you when I was walking?”

I started this project in the summer of 2024, when I finally put in a request to teach a Higher Level International Baccalaureate (IB) class. This was the last year that my workplace were doing the IB; they had run the numbers and realised that having dwindling class sizes with for it versus too many teachers wasn’t exactly economically viable. So I chose to take on this final class despite the fact that there were teachers in my department who taught the IB for years, because the only reason I’d avoided staking my claim was because I’d spent those years assuming that we’d always teach the IB. Now, with its head on the chopping block, I wanted one final opportunity to feel what it would be like to have an increased level of freedom to plan my own curriculum.

It felt a bit like stealing food out of the mouths of babes. One of the IB’s strengths is that it has a robust list of prescribed texts, taking in stuff from across the world rather than being hemmed in by the narrow-minded focus on English and American literature that defines most A-level English Literature syllabi. This includes stuff off the beaten path, such as essays, comic books, haiku, manga, letters, spoken word, and song lyrics. Still, with one hand the lord giveth, and with the other he puncheth you in the balls: while there are plenty of Spanish lyricists on their list (and a smattering of Portuguese ones too), the English-language songwriters are few and far between: Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, Stephen Sondheim, and just one rapper: Kendrick Lamar.¹

I mean, if you’re going to only include one rapper, it probably should be Kendrick Lamar. We could argue till the cows come home about other rappers who should be included, like Nas, Tupac, Andre 3000, and Earl Sweatshirt — let alone other songwriters such as Tom Waits, Fiona Apple, Nick Cave and Joanna Newsom (who’s probably the only one that would get in even if you never heard a note of her music). But the reality is that Kendrick Lamar is the only well-known high-level rapper who has — from the jump — devised every single album as individual artworks where all the songs form a singular, cohesive narrative unit.

With that in mind, I knew I wanted to focus on a Kendrick album, and I knew I wanted it to be To Pimp a Butterfly. I know fans have their favourites. In fact, if I’m being honest, my Spotify stats show that I listen to Good Kid, M.A.A.D City more often. But even I recognise that To Pimp a Butterfly is Kendrick Lamar’s masterpiece. It’s his most cohesive statement: an exploration of the American dream by a man who’s not sure if he’s the second coming or a false prophet, set to music that builds on a century of black American artists while also pushing the hip hop in a new and promising direction. And — by arriving during the final year of Obama’s presidency, during the rise of Black Lives Matter and one year before the moral depravity of the Trump era — it has become a political and personal time capsule, just as essential as Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On or Sly and the Family Stone’s There’s a Riot Goin’ On or Public Enemy’s It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back.

It’s also worth noting that I started teaching this class in the same year that Kendrick temporarily became the most important rapper in hip hop. For a few days in the summer of 2024, we all listened in awe as he tore Drake a new asshole by releasing a series of diss tracks released with such shrewd skill that it led F. D. Signifier² to point out that, in a more moral world, we would recognise Kendrick as an evil villain. Instead, he was lifted onto the shoulders of society, performing at the Super Bowl and touring the world with SZA in what felt like a moment of light and levity during the tailspin of the second Trump term.

So, naturally, I felt 2024 was the perfect time to teach a small group of white British middle-class teenagers about the alterity of the black American experience through the lens of a man who has been telling everyone he’s the greatest rapper alive since at least 2009. My syllabus included a playlist I created on the evolution of rapping from Grandmaster Caz to the present day, along with listening to Good Kid, M.A.A.D City and Cole Cuchna’s brilliant Dissect podcast. As I suspected, their ability to engage with the complexity of the album improved as the term went on; as I hoped, it gave them some aesthetic appreciation for the level of lyricism expected in even your journeyman boom-bap rapper versus the excessive praise that gets heaped on songwriters like Taylor Swift and Lana Del Rey. Most of all, however, I hope it highlighted my central thesis, which is that — while the Democrats were virtue signalling with kente cloth and middle-class white people were reading airport books about how to speak to black people as if they’re foreign animals — the easiest way to understand the experiences of black Americans is to engage with black American culture.

Notes on the typesetting

Transcribing lyrics isn’t easy, and transcribing hip hop lyrics comes with unique difficulties. Rapping is a verbal and musical art form, so you end up worrying about all these paratextual elements that don’t come into play when the words begin on the printed page — things like ad-libs, wordplay, different voices, beats, bars and stresses, all of which can only be captured using the cack-handed tools of line breaks and punctuation.

Line breaks and punctuation

In any music, there’s an interplay between the hidden heartbeat of the metre, the bounce, snap and clatter of the beat, and the gallup of the vocals that make it almost impossible to accurately transcribe with just words on the page. Of course, the alternative is to notate all of the music including the vocals, which is an equally OTT thing to do when you’re primarily focusing on the lyrics. A kind of hybrid solution, then, can be captured if we partially do away somewhat with the grammatical function of punctuation, and instead turn the line break into the main unit indicating a pause in rhythm. For an example, compare these lines:

At first, I did love you, but now I just wanna fuck.
Late nights thinking of you until I get my nut.
Tossed and turned, lesson learned—
you was my first girlfriend.
Bridges burned all across the board—
destroyed. But what for?

At first I did love you
But now I just wanna fuck
Late nights thinking of you
Until I get my nut
Tossed and turned, lesson learned
You was my first girlfriend
Bridges burned, all across the board
Destroyed, but what for?

While the lines on the left are more accurate in terms of delineating the grammatical relationship between the words, the lines on the right are easier to audiate in a similar way to the original song. And you can already see that we’re going to become pretty reliant on dashes if we continue with the heavily punctuated approach, because rappers often use anangularly poetic syntax when it comes to combining phrases rather than a prosaic one. In other words, they don’t really write in straightforward subject–verb–object sentences; there is no subject to the clause “tossed and turned, lesson learned”, while the clause “bridges burned all across the board” lacks a verb. So it would be disingenuous to punctuate these like sentences. Instead, the line breaks work as terminal marks for rhythm because they can be used anywhere within a series of words, so it reflects the fact that the two primary ways poets create rhythm on the page is through space and the implied stress of a new line.

There are also those smaller pauses, such as between the phrases “tossed and turned” and “lesson learned”. In these cases, I’ve used the comma to indicate these rhythmic pauses. Again, the thinking behind this is descriptive rather than prescriptive; you’ll find thousands of people online and IRL saying that a comma indicates a pause in speech, despite the fact that even open-minded linguistic guides like Rodney Huddleston and Geoffrey K. Pullum’s Cambridge Grammar of the English Language make it pretty clear that this isn’t the case. The reality is that people do like to use commas in this way, and not just in text messages and other forms of demotic writing: I’ve always loved the fact that Jane Austen’s famous opening line to Pride and Prejudice says: “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.” Austen’s commas make no sense in terms of traditional grammar; she’s treating the word “that” as if it introduces a relative clause, like “which”, and she simply puts a comma before “must” because it feels right to her. So I’ve opted to use commas the way Austen uses commas, as an indicator of rhythm.

Notation versus text

Working out how to transcribe the musicality of hip hop is slowly becoming its own academic niche, which writers and creatives such as Paul Edwards, Adam Bradley, Martin Connor, and — most recently — Mazbou Q coming up with inventive ways to transcribe rhythm, rhyme and pitch alongside lyrics. However, while there are some rappers who would overwhelmingly benefit from this novel approach, I feel like Kendrick isn’t one of them.

Kendrick Lamar’s handwritten lyrics for an unused third verse for “PRIDE.” from the album DAMN., shared by Top Dawg Entertainment’s president Punch on Instagram.

Don’t get me wrong; he’s obviously a musical rapper, making precise use of rhyme, rhythm and melody. But he’s not Smino; he doesn’t stretch words and melodies like Play-Doh until the line between singing and rapping becomes non-existent. Instead, like Nas or Tupac or Talib Kweli, you can tell that Kendrick writes his stuff down, since he finds ways to make words fit by switching up the rhythm or tempo in a line rather than establishing a series of melodic motifs and using a mixture of repetition and heavily slanted rhymes to create a sense of cohesion (like, say, Playboi Carti or Lil Uzi Vert). This is one of the aspects that endears him to the “real hip hop” backpackers, since it’s a distinctly non-Southern approach to rapping. Yet there are moments (like on “You Ain’t Gotta Lie (Momma Said”), where he does rap in a distinctly more melodic style, and those concessions to a more contemporary style are the ones where I’ve had to pull out the manuscript paper to show what he’s really doing in terms of dots and lines.

Grammar and orthography

Linguistically, there’s also the thorny issue of transcribing Black American English³. When someone speaks in a distinct variety of English, how much do you deviate from the linguistic prescriptivism of Standard English in an attempt to render things like phonology and grammar? Or, to put it differently, how can you make sure you don’t end up writing the libretto to Porgy and Bess?

In my view, the half-measure solution is to render all the grammar and almost none of the phonology. In other words, when Kendrick says “I remember you was conflicted”, I’m not going to correct that to “were”, since the nonstandard “was” is literally a different word; but I’m also not going to render “misusing your influence” as “misusin’ ya influence” because employing eye dialect7 creates the implication that the majority of people usually pronounce words exactly as they’re written, when the majority of North Americans actually drop the velar nasal sound at the end of “misusing” when they have to read the word aloud. As any dyslexic person will tell you, English orthography doesn’t really reflect pronunciation, so altering the spellings to reflect Black American English is just another way of othering black people and implying they aren’t normal.

Layout and voices

Finally, there are plenty of moments where Lamar relies on a polyphony of voices to to create both rhythm and dialogue within the music. In these moments, it’s not enough to simply lay the words out using the traditional top-to-bottom structure of English typesetting. For example, Anna Wise and Whitney Alford’s chants of “tax man coming!” at the end of “Wesley’s Theory” rise up in volume right as George Clinton and Thundercat singing “money, go back home” tails off. The closest way this can be approximated on the page without resorting to sheet music is to steal a trick from comic books and use a multidirectional column-and-grid layout, since it disrupts our sense of whether to read left-to-right or top-to-bottom first, thereby indicating that there are two things happening at the same time.

REFRAIN
Thundercat & George Clinton

We should never gave niggas money,

OUTRO
Anna Wise & Whitney Alford

Go back home, money, go back home.

Tax man coming, tax man coming
Tax man coming, tax man coming

The pinch being, of course, that this layout is still reliant on the annotations being read on a device that has plenty of screen space. If you’re reading this on a phone, then it will simply place everything in a hierarchical top-to-bottom shape. Of course, this adaptive design (which relies on all kinds of HTML and CSS) is still preferable to struggling even more for screen space when it comes to using staves, notes and stems. After all, critical writing is designed to help people understand things, so adopting the language of notation — which is like Ancient Greek for the average person — won’t exactly make things any easier.

Now, let’s get on with the show: hit the arrow to go back to the tracklist at the top of the page.

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Footnotes

1
John Lennon’s also in there, but fuck that, right? I mean he’s a brilliant musician, but as a lyricist he’s very much the ragged fifth training wheel on Dylan, Joni, Sondheim and Kendrick’s majestic Canyonero. As we culturally move away from the shadow of the baby boomers (who, like any generation, confuse childhood nostalgia with artistic greatness), it’s reassuring to see more people realise that Lennon’s lyrics are just… fine. They have about the same degree of occasionally brilliant wordplay, vaguely leftist virtue signalling and Freudian self-absorption as the rhymes of Kanye West — and I say that as a millennial who’s had the displeasure of watching Kanye West shit all over any childhood nostalgia we had for him.
2
Arguably the sharpest video essayist on black American culture
3
For a detailed exploration of why different linguists refer to this language variety by different terminology, check out this post from Language Jones, who’s a shining representation of how you can get invited to the cookout by simply bothering to taking up a lifelong interest in people who don’t look and talk like you