Description

The cover of To Pimp a Butterfly looks like a victory party in the wrong place. In a black-and-white photograph by the French photographer Denis Rouvre, a crowd of shirtless young Black men and children celebrates on the lawn in front of the White House, waving stacks of cash and bottles of champagne. Kendrick Lamar stands near the centre holding a baby. At their feet lies a white judge, his eyes crossed out with an X.

The image was directed by Lamar and Dave Free, with Vlad Sepetov on art direction, and it carries the album's arguments about money, power, race and survival in a single frame. Lamar described it more simply: he was "just taking a group of the homies who haven't seen the world" to the places they had only seen on television. The setting matters. Vice called the White House "a landmark of black oppression", a building raised partly by enslaved labour, and here it becomes a backdrop for people who were never meant to party on its grass.

The release was as sudden as the image. The album was due on 23 March 2015 but appeared on 15 March, eight days early, apparently because of a mistake at Interscope. The cover's mix of celebration and threat matched a record that moved through jazz, funk and spoken word, and it remains one of the most debated hip-hop covers of the century.

Credit

Cover photography by Denis Rouvre and Roberto "retOne" Reyes; art direction by Dave Free, Kendrick Lamar and Vlad Sepetov