“I’ve been through something.”
These are the first words of Kendrick Lamar’s “Mr. Morale & the Big Steppers,” and if the nineteen songs that follow over the next 72 minutes are any indication, it’s an understatement. In the five years since he released his last proper album, 2017’s Best Rapper Announcement “Damn,” Lamar has become the first hip-hop artist to win a Pulitzer Prize, receive an Oscar nomination, launch a media company, perform at the Super Bowl, and announce his departure About TDE, the cohesive label that has been his home and a major part of his identity since the beginning.
But “Mr. Morale” – along with the new off-album single “The Heart Part 5” – takes care almost entirely of Lamar’s long periods out of the spotlight between them. He’s been through a few things since we last heard about him, and he’s never been more willing to share them all.
While there is a little bit about “Mr. Moral” matching head-turning jazz fusion experiences with “To Pimp a Butterfly” for listen-first shock value, this album is likely to be the most consciously challenging project of Lamar’s career. professional. It contains moments of sublime beauty and depressing boredom. Harsh excavations of constant racial trauma and creeping social rot coexist with acid defeats that can sometimes make Lamar look older than his 34-year-old. The music moves in close quarters, full of head fakes and sudden falls in gaps of silence, and there’s little here that screams for clear radio play. Its productions—from who’s who of Lamar’s former collaborators include the Digi + Phonics team, Pharrell Williams and DJ Dahey—often seem designed to discourage wandering head wobble.
In short, this album would likely frustrate anyone who called them up on Spotify in search of another “humble” or “Money Trees,” and that’s pretty much by design. Most interestingly, though, it’s also likely to frustrate anyone who wants cleanly-delivered messages or Instagram-ready quotes, and that’s also by design. Lamar has always been drawn to gray areas and mystery, always keen to tackle a contrasting entourage to his sharpest streaks of applause. This direction is dialed in until 11 here, as he finds himself constantly turning around to make holes in his own arguments, to lower himself off the base he just built, and to make sure anyone who walks with their head is OK, too. For a long time he finds something to give them pause.
Lamar is no stranger to confronting his own personal traumas through art, whether he uses them to place himself within the rich and turbulent heritage of his hometown of Compton in “Good Kid, MAAD City,” or to transform his doubts into a revolutionary self-belief in “To Pimp a Butterfly.” But even by his standards, “Mr. Morale” is often painfully personal. We hear Lamar discuss therapy, infidelity, daddy issues, depression, and the void of buying infinity pools he never bothered to swim in. His longtime partner, Whitney Alford, serves as the album’s narrator, as well as a backup component of his conscience when Lamar imagined how she would respond to his shortcomings. If the specific images of Butterfly had seen him break into the White House, and the main line of “fuck it” had him gleefully declaring “This is how God feels,” Mr. Morale’s thesis phrase would probably be the chorus of the song “Crown,” As he wearily repeats “I can’t please everyone” over and over again across a piano loop without drums.Here, Kendrick Lamar did everything in his power to remind listeners that he was just a man, full of fear, regret, flaws, and a thousand contradictions as intense as any.
The album is not all provocative and bloodthirsty, and when it finds a low groove – airy and cocky “rich soul”; Boi-1da production of the hard hit “Silent Hill”; ‘Count Me Out’ Farewell – Reminds you of how easy it is for Kendrick Lamar to summon the indomitable ‘Good Kid’s’ vibe when he wants to. But the album’s spirit is more present in tracks like “Mother I Sober,” a stark and disturbing track as it unabashedly reviews the legacy of sexual abuse in black America, all the way from slavery to a long-forgotten incident. Childhood.
Lamar’s primary style of expressing that song and elsewhere is stream of consciousness–not in the chaotic sense of “first idea best idea” that has since begun the term, but stream of consciousness as practiced by Virginia Woolf: an attempt to dramatize curlicues The chaos and sudden shadows of human perception within a tightly controlled and carefully considered framework. Take, for example, “Worldwide Steppers,” in which a seemingly perturbed Lamar goes from playing “Baby Shark” with his daughter to worrying about preventing the writer from stressing his veracity, only to take a very abrupt left turn: “The bacteria are heavy, pinching the sciatica nerve/ I don’t know how to feel, like the first time I fucked a white whore.” He leaves the line hanging in the air for a second – as if surprised that he just said it too – and then repeats it. Reading the second line leads directly to a detailed account of a high school trip to the Pacific Palisades, which reminds him of his imprisoned uncle, whose memory gives way to a behind-the-scenes snapshot from his first international tour, all of which builds on an explosive acceptance of generational guilt. This is not how the mind works. It’s how the talented poet finds the slanting angles to get into difficult topics.
As much as this kind of lyrical anxiety can lead to unexpected rewards, there are many instances where Lamar can’t resist the urge to act his own way. In “The Aunt’s Diary,” he makes perhaps the most outspoken pro-rights statement we’ve heard from a rapper of his stature. The song tells the stories of a passing uncle and a second cousin with a great deal of sympathy, and the song culminates in an encounter with a dismissive preacher, which prompts Lamar to “choose humanity over religion” and celebrate his relatives for being who they are. In order to tell these stories, however, he frequently inverts to the perspective of his younger, less enlightened self, which necessitates the use of homosexual slander no less than ten times.
It’s important to mention that Lamar’s use of this slander is clearly purposeful, and he realizes it’s a problem – by the end of the song he wonders if he should say it at all, even if he remembers how he used to use it without thinking. (Here he is referring to a viral concert moment from 2018, when he blamed a white fan for failing to delete the N-word from his lyrics singing them on stage, and asked himself if he had more right to the former word than the latter.) But does this determination justify its use? Does Lamar’s desire to complicate his defense make the Path a richer text than a more elaborate, standards-and-practice ally’s declaration? Or is it just one last, needless blow in the eyes of LGBT+ hip-hop fans who have already struggled by hearing that word countless times in the music they love?
There are no easy answers to any of these questions. But taking a broad perspective on the mystery of “Auntie Diaries” seems to be key to calculating the album as a whole. As rightly regarded as a libertarian, Lamar was also prone to occasional retrograde impulses – revisit “Section 80” if you need a reminder – and “Mr. Morale” leaves them in open, jagged nerve endings he’s not trying to purge or shroud in metaphor . He’s never looked as evil as he does at a few points here, and the constant swipes of “cancellation of culture” and social media are starting to veer into his grumpy uncle’s territory. Of course, it is not fair to demand that he have a coherent and perfectly acceptable ideology, since Kendrick Lamar is not a politician. And on an album deeply averse to self-censorship, it seems unwise to take everything he says seriously. The line between explicit statements of beliefs and polemical thought experiences that Lamar interrogates and pushes them to their furthest conclusions always remains somewhat vague. One can respect that, while still finding some of these impulses tiring.
The album’s guests are choppy but cleverly spread out, even when — as with Kodak Black’s controversial inclusion on “Silent Hill” — their contributions seem to contradict Lamar’s verse that preceded them. Sometimes that’s for the better: After opening with a rather lousy Lamar verse, “Purple Hearts” sees Summer Walker land the most giggles on a record with a few of them, only to concede the stage to Ghostface Killah, whose home is one for the books. The veteran looks as old and shamanic as Bubba Wu did in the heyday of Ghost’s Cuban Links, offers pearls of runic spirituality, reckons with sadness, and reminds everyone why his face belongs to Lamar’s side on any hip-hop Mount Rushmore.
On a more surprising note, “We Cry Together” brings together Lamar and “Zola” star Taylor Page, and the two depict a toxic couple screaming at each other in rhyme throughout the song. Eminem’s Kim might be the closest comparison, but it’s something completely new, more sound stage than music, and the intensity level of Paige’s performance somehow makes it more chilling than the infamous Marshall Mathers murder fantasy. It’s an amazing feat – a five-minute hailstorm of pure rage that leaves you staring into the speakers in disbelief. It’s also hard to imagine why anyone would willingly listen to it twice.
And honestly, the same can be said about several tracks on this album. It is possible to walk away from “Mr. Spirits” admire — even stunned — her boldness, honesty, and far-flung lyrical prowess without necessarily knowing whether you like it or not, though soulful songs do exist (“Rich Spirit” and “Count Me Out”). ” and “Purple Hearts”, “Mr. Moral”). It is the voice of one of America’s foremost poets offering a comprehensive visit to the dark corners of his mind, unconcerned whether anyone would choose to take this journey again. “Mr. Morale and Big Steps” may not be a masterpiece, and it may not always be fun, but it is clearly a work of genius, answerable to no one but himself, bent on showing all the scars he had on his way to becoming the featured rapper for his generation, and many more have come after that, too. He’s going through something, okay. Let’s hope the interval between this album and the next one is kinder to him.
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