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The Butterfly Effect by Marcus J Moore review – hobbled by jargon

<span>Photograph: Amy Harris/Invision/AP</span>
Photograph: Amy Harris/Invision/AP

The Art of Peer Pressure, a standout track on Kendrick Lamar’s 2012 album Good Kid, MAAD City, is a nail-biting account of disaster averted. Billed as a true story, it describes an eventful day the 17-year-old Lamar spent under the influence of his more erratic friends in Compton, Los Angeles. After they burgle a house, police sirens enter the mix and Lamar imagines being arrested for the first time, but there’s a characteristic twist: “They made a right, then made a left/Then made a right, then made another right/One lucky night with the homies.” There’s a similar what-if quality to Duckworth, the final track on 2017’s Damn. Lamar recounts a potentially fatal altercation in the 1990s between his father, Kenny Duckworth, and Anthony Tiffith, the man who would later launch his career through Top Dawg Entertainment. “If Anthony killed Ducky,” Lamar concludes, “Top Dawg could be servin’ life/ While I grew up without a father and die in a gunfight.”

His albums aren’t gangster movies or political manifestos but morality plays

Kendrick Lamar Duckworth is drawn to these crossroads moments. He raps about drama that didn’t quite happen, or happened to someone else: the friends in prison or in coffins, for whom fate turned left instead of right while Lamar not only survived but thrived. He got an early break as a hype man for the rapper Jay Rock in 2010 after his predecessor was shot dead by gang members for wearing the wrong-coloured T-shirt. Such incidents explain the questions that convulse Lamar’s work: Why him? How can he justify his good fortune? While an earlier generation of Compton MCs, including Lamar’s mentor Dr Dre, exaggerated or invented their criminality, most of the conflict in Lamar’s lyrics is internal. The poem that winds through 2015’s To Pimp a Butterfly describes him breaking down in a hotel room on tour, tormented by survivor’s guilt and the responsibilities of success. It’s this ethical struggle, beyond even his virtuosity as an MC and storyteller, that makes Lamar so admired. His albums aren’t gangster movies or political manifestoes but morality plays.

Since the last day of 2009, when he dropped his battle-rapping K-Dot alias and became more personal on the Kendrick Lamar EP, Lamar’s career has arced skywards. Eight years later, he could boast of three classic albums on the trot, a forest of trophies (including the first Pulitzer prize for music ever to go to a pop artist), and plaudits from Toni Morrison and Barack Obama. Once a shy, stuttering kid, he is quiet, watchful and uncannily wise. Blessed with a steady partner, a loyal crew and profound religious faith, he has been unscathed by drugs or feuds. The friends and collaborators interviewed by Marcus J Moore in The Butterfly Effect have nothing to report but his phenomenal dedication to his craft, bringing to mind the joke about the job candidate who says that his worst quality is perfectionism. Lamar’s father once told him: “I don’t want you to be like me … I never want you to make those mistakes.” The rapper is far too tough on himself to agree, but from the outside it might look as if he has made no mistakes at all.

If there is a way to rewire this flawless ascent into a compelling narrative, then Moore hasn’t found it. Even as he praises Lamar’s verbal precision, his own prose is hobbled by industry jargon and incoherent metaphors: how can hip-hop be “tethered to the flames of burning buildings”? One chapter is titled A Star Is Born, a cliche that doesn’t even function as an accurate allusion. Hyperbole runs riot. Having achieved “a rise that we’d never seen before, the likes of which we’d never see again”, Lamar is now “almost a mythical being or a supernova”. Giddy superlatives serve rappers better than biographers.

Related: Kendrick Lamar: ‘I am Trayvon Martin. I’m all of these kids’

The strongest chapter documents the painstaking creation of To Pimp a Butterfly. Like Marvin Gaye with What’s Going On, Lamar assembled a crack team of musicians to soundscape a panoramic, proudly black statement about American injustice through which he could make peace with his own stardom. Like Gaye, he exploded his genre’s horizons. The record propelled jazz musicians Thundercat and Kamasi Washington into the mainstream, while influencing everyone from Beyoncé to David Bowie. “It didn’t just change the music,” Washington testifies. “It changed the audience.”

The album’s instant canonisation owed something to the recent rise of Black Lives Matter, for which the song Alright became an anthem, but Lamar’s obsession with hypocrisy and complicity makes for a more complicated message. One 2015 interview (“But when we don’t have respect for ourselves, how do we expect them to respect us?”) triggered accusations of respectability politics, to which he responded that he was examining himself, not representing a movement. Having made BLM so integral to the book, Moore seems reluctant to explore how great artists are always imperfect activists.

So it goes. While Lamar never stops asking difficult questions, Moore asks too few. If you really want a better understanding of the rapper’s complexities, listen to Cole Cuchna’s excellent Dissect podcast or, better yet, Lamar’s own records. Because what do these soul-searching investigations into his past and present add up to if not an ongoing autobiography?

The Butterfly Effect: How Kendrick Lamar Ignited the Soul of Black America by Marcus J Moore is published by Hodder & Stoughton (£20). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply