Ishansh’s UChicago Essay

Prompt: “Where have all the flowers gone?” – Pete Seeger. Pick a question from a song title or lyric and give it your best answer. – Inspired by Ryan Murphy, AB’21

“When sh*t hit the fan, is you still a fan?”

I can recall with stark clarity the first time I listened to Kendrick Lamar’s 2015 album, To Pimp a Butterfly. It was around three in the afternoon on a relatively subdued Saturday, and I was sitting on my bed, headphones on, with a posture some would likely deem medically concerning. I could have been doing something else. In fact, I definitely should have been; my junior-year workload wasn’t in a hurry to melt away, and I had woken up that day intent on clearing my to-do list before dinner. However, the discourse I had heard on the album in the preceding weeks had caught my interest, and as a casual Kendrick Lamar listener, I impulsively figured I would give the record a spin.

As it turned out, the album was anything but a casual listen. I was whisked into a rich auditory experience complete with not only beautiful sonic aesthetics, ranging from funk to neo-soul to jazz rap, but also incredibly substantive lyrical content, profane yet almost literary in its scope and undoubtedly insightful in its deconstruction of the themes of temptation, self-love, and racial inequity. Tying it all together is a prominent, thought-provoking lyrical motif from the album’s closing track: “When sh*t hit the fan, is you still a fan?”

This line has a special meaning within the context of the track, of course. As explained by a poem in its final moments, the album as a conceptual whole chronicles Kendrick’s symbolic metamorphosis into a butterfly, representing his self-acceptance and marking the resolution of his internal struggle, the battle between Kendrick the artist and Kendrick the person. At the same time, however, the caterpillar-butterfly dichotomy is used to symbolize that very struggle itself. The butterfly represents the rapper in him, a supposedly beautiful creature in the form of a superstar adored by millions, while the caterpillar represents the human, a survivor who, stripped of his musical prodigy, would be frowned upon for his actions as a byproduct of his upbringing in a violent neighborhood.

Here, the source of Kendrick’s anguish lies in his self-hatred for the way the caterpillar in him has exploited, or “pimped,” the butterfly to sustain itself in a system that traps and institutionalizes art. Additionally, society’s disdain for the caterpillar side of him largely stems from racial othering; as he remarks in the album, young black men of his background are often given labels and dehumanized—until they make it into the mainstream, at which point the butterfly image of them is formed as a product of cognitive dissonance.

These two interpretations of the butterfly metaphor seem incompatible, misaligned at the very least, yet they coexist within the text. How is this possible? The answer lies in the question, “When sh*t hit the fan, is you still a fan?” Upon completing his journey of self-acceptance, the butterfly that emerges from the remnants of Kendrick’s cocoon is not the superficial image of the model musical celebrity society expects from him but a full-fledged realization of both Kendrick’s artistry and his personhood.

The difference? Despite the constructed duality of the caterpillar and the butterfly as seemingly separate personalities, they are, in actuality, one and the same. One can’t exist without the other; where earlier the idea of the butterfly existed as a presence within the mindset of the caterpillar, the caterpillar now persists the same within the butterfly. By the end, Kendrick embraces the caterpillar and uses his platform to rationalize its existence, challenging those who encourage a separation of his two sides. Hence: “When sh*t hit the fan, is you still a fan?” Are you a fan of me, in spite of my flaws, or are you a “fan” of the music? If you knew everything about me and my background, would you dissociate me from my creations?

As I’m sure you’ve noticed by now, the metaphor of the caterpillar and the butterfly is a mold into which nearly every artist fits in varying forms, and while Kendrick’s case is plagued by the issue of systemic racism, the question itself is one that consumers have encountered countless times since the genesis of art. If a respected artist were to taint our perception of them through controversial or outright problematic actions, would we still consider ourselves fans? Should we?

The answer I have heard most isn’t a straightforward “no” or “yes,” but both, under a redefinition of what it means to be a “fan.” It advocates for the separation of the art and the artist, claiming one can love the art while denouncing its creator. Clean, isn’t it? Not really. It’s a crude solution, to poach the wings of the butterfly; the jagged and uneven seams along which they are torn from the body illustrate the problem with the approach, which is that the artist is an indelible part of the art. To consider art in isolation from its creator is fallacious, for to neglect the artist is to neglect the idiosyncrasies and characteristic traits that make it worth considering art. Even separating those artistic touches from the rest of the artist’s personhood is, more often than not, impossible, as they either stem from or directly express part of it; the butterfly can’t exist without the caterpillar.

But neither embracing both the art and its maker nor rejecting it all are satisfactory resolutions, and so we arrive at a scenario I am all too familiar with, the reason this question resonated so deeply with me. I have a tricky relationship with problematic music; my perspectives on art and the human experience have been upended and remolded by the creations of musicians such as Kanye West and Roger Waters, whose actions I condemn yet whose works I can’t deny have changed my life and the lives of many around the world who have found solace in them. In my attempts to resolve this dilemma, I’ve come to the conclusion that there is nothing better, that accepting the separation of the caterpillar and the butterfly as a sustained act of cognitive dissonance is indeed the best I can do. It’s an anticlimactic answer, but what else are you supposed to do when sh*t hits the fan?