The story behind Kendrick Lamar’s ‘To Pimp a Butterfly’ album cover
To Pimp a Butterfly, Kendrick Lamar’s third album released in 2015, is iconic. More than a decade now since it first entered the world, it is remembered today as a classic work of the 2010s and, arguably, of hip-hop as a whole. It is a core part of Kendrick’s legend.
For an album to be considered truly iconic, a number of criteria, broadly speaking, tend to need to be met. It needs to be really good, first and foremost, but beyond that it also needs to, in some way, capture something of the essence of the time in which it was made. It has to be of its time and place, and it wouldn’t hurt for it to have some hit, stand-out singles, too.
Crucially, an iconic album needs a look. The cover and iconography of the album need to be memorable on their own terms, and, ideally, the visuals will intersect and interact with the music itself. The cover art is hugely important.
To Pimp a Butterfly, it’s fair to say, bears all of these traits, with its cover being an especially eye-catching and evocative part of its success. Shot in monochrome, there is a soft, nostalgic quality to the image, but its subject is extremely striking. A group of mostly men and boys, all Black, mostly shirtless, and holding up wads of cash, are on the lawn of the White House, apparently in a jubilant sort of mood.
At the foot of the image, a white man lays stricken. He’s a judge, and his death is represented crudely, with his eyes crossed out as if by marker pen.
The person behind this photograph is Denis Rouvre, a Frenchman, whose very career may offer a way of reading this particular image. Rouvre developed a reputation within the world of photography for, on the one hand, his portraits of A-list celebrities, while on the other his photos of ordinary people who don’t have any fame.
Among Rouvre’s more renowned projects is a series of portraits he took of Japanese tsunami survivors, while he is also known for photographing Senegalese wrestlers. His work, in other words, sometimes focuses on regular people while, at other times, it zeros in on celebrities such as Kirsten Dunst.
Might this fact give us a clue as to what’s going on in the To Pimp a Butterfly cover? In the background we have the White House, a visceral symbol of grandiosity and power, but the focus of the image is primarily this group of ordinary Black people, among whom stands Kendrick himself. There is a clash of worlds here, with the famous and powerful forming a key part of the image and regular people forming the rest.
Kendrick seems to have been mindful of this precise contrast, as he explained to Vice in 2016. Speaking about the album’s cover art, he acknowledged that the image had “several different meanings,” but that one of them was the contrast between his hometown of Compton and Washington DC. He seems to be dealing, on some level, with his own fame and the conflict it had engendered. He does not wish to forget his roots, while he also isn’t shying away from his new status as rich, famous and powerful.