Kendrick Lamar took a life-changing trip to South Africa during the downtime after the dust settled on his smashing 2012 debut, Good KId, M.A.A.D. City, and the experience left a sufficiently deep mark on him that he decided to follow up that enormously ambitious "concept album" with ... another enormously ambitious concept album. 

"I felt like I belonged in Africa," he told an interviewer at the time. "I saw all the things that I wasn't taught. Probably one of the hardest things to do is put [together] a concept on how beautiful a place can be, and tell a person this while they're still in the ghettos of Compton. I wanted to put that experience in the music." 

To Pimp A Butterfly, released in March of 2015, thus seeks to understand the Black experience -- male and female -- in America through Lamar's newly enlightened eyes, while simultaneously paying homage to the history of Black music in America that led us to hip-hop: everything from free jazz, classic soul, gospel and '70s funk to Miles Davis and Art Blakey and P-Funk and Sly and the Family Stone. It's an exhilarating record and, rightly enough, wound up at the top of myriad year-end "best of" lists, with Spin magazine dubbing it the "Great American Hip-Hop Album" and numerous critics labeling it an "instant classic." Again. Kendrick Lamar had gone two-for-two.