Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp A Butterfly to be archived at Harvard Library

Nas’ Illmatic also honoured by the prestigious US college.

Kendrick Lamar’s 2015 LP To Pimp A Butterfly is one of the first four hip-hop albums to be archived at Harvard Library.

Read next: An interview with hip-hop archivist Johan Kugelberg

Former Little Brother producer and Harvard fellow 9th Wonder, who has also produced for Destiny’s Child and Mary J. Blige, has been tasked with curating the university’s Classic Crates project in collaboration with the Hiphop Archive and Research Institute (HARI).

Beginning in 2017, 10 albums will be archived into the collection each year and the project will feature 200 albums in total. Nas’ Illmatic, A Tribe Called Quest’s The Low End Theory and Lauryn Hill’s The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill are also among the first four to enter the collection, as XXL reports.

Each chosen album has been described by 9th Wonder as “the standard of the culture” and will be archived with liner notes and the vinyl that was used in the original production, “to be forever placed in the canon.”

#Repost @9thwonder with @repostapp ・・・ In 2012, I was chosen to be a Harvard University Fellow at The Dubois Institute under the direction of @henrylouisgates and Dr. Marcy Morgan. I chose the research project "These Are The Breaks"….a collection of albums that are the standard of the culture…..200 in all in no particular order. These are the first four we chose to start with….to live for forever in the Harvard Library…and to be forever placed in the canon…complete with liner notes and the vinyl that was used in the production of the album…… To live forever…. 4 down.. 196 to go….

A photo posted by The Hiphop Archive (@thehiphoparchive) on Jan 26, 2017 at 6:44am PST