There’s almost no such thing as a “do-over” in the world of professional criticism. Most reviews of a particular work are written when it is brand new, and the vast majority of those reviews are never revised or revisited. Critics have deadlines to meet, and often, they’re still sorting out their thoughts about a film or a book when their reviews are due. These problems are intensified when a work, such as a highly anticipated hip-hop album, is released a week early. On the one-year anniversary of Kendrick Lamar’s controversial but widely praised and complicated To Pimp A Butterfly album, the lyric-annotation site Genius did something original and interesting to mark the occasion: it asked several critics to annotate their own To Pimp A Butterfly reviews. The aim of this project, according to writer Christine Werthman, is to let reviewers answer some basic questions, like “Do they agree with their words from a year ago, or do they feel differently now that more time has passed?”
Craig Jenkins of Pitchfork admits in his marginal comments that he was still struggling with the album at the time of his original, highly positive review:
After just under a week with the album it was hard to make a conclusive call on what all the plot points were adding up to, like the opening cautionary Wesley Snipes tale and ducking visits from the mysterious Lucy (hits blunt “That’s Satan, right?”) and God masquerading as a homeless person.