“To Pimp a Butterfly” extends and expands Kendrick’s relevance to contemporary political science with a direct, challenging engagement with some of its core concepts. I singled out Kendrick in part for his mastery of that hip-hop game, but also for the vision of raising the bar through the intense peer competition he outlined on his scene-shattering “Control” verse.

That essay focused on the structure of the hip-hop field, including the use of mixtapes to engage specialist hip-hop communities, the complex web of alliances and rivalries revealed by song collaborations and the nature of competition between elite rappers. Last year, in “ King Kendrick and the Ivory Tower,” I used Kendrick as a model for how academics should approach the emergent public sphere. My admiration for Kendrick goes way back. And, lest you worry that you’re in for a tedious sermon, he does so without ever being less than lyrically and musically thrilling, cultivating a sound utterly unlike hip-hop’s state of the art. He exhibits a challenging ethos of self-critique as a tentative path forward. Where talented contemporaries like Drake rarely venture a thought deeper than “being rich makes me sad,” Kendrick grapples with core political theory questions of power, identity and the ethics of leadership. But there is also a real political science dimension to the project.

There have already been some great essays on “To Pimp a Butterfly” by music critics far better positioned than I am to discuss Kendrick’s place in the history and practice of hip-hop. “To Pimp a Butterfly” seizes this moment, infusing it with a complex, sustained meditation on the nature of power, identity and leadership. Cole and many other hip-hop artists have been prominent voices responding to the killings of young black men such as Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown and Eric Garner. The moment is clearly right for artistically ambitious, politically engaged hip-hop to re-emerge.

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