REVIEW- Mr. Morale & The Big Steppers (2022)

     Kendrick Lamar released his last studio album, DAMN., when I was in seventh grade. In the 1855 days since then, I have grown up. I went to high school. I learned that I loved to speak. I started dating a girl. I am going to college. And the world has changed too. Economies collapsed and a pandemic raged. Cities burned and were invaded. The influence of social media is more pervasive than ever, and polarization is worse than ever. The world has gotten more complicated, which places a heavy burden on Kendrick, as someone who must now juggle being a 34-year-old with a fiancee and two kids with discussing a range of societal issues in his work.

    But luckily, Kendrick delivers, remaining just as introspective and forward-thinking as he always is. His albums have always raised the stakes by complicating the topics they bring up and introducing additional perspectives—you never finish a Kendrick Lamar album feeling a sense of clarity, only more uncertainty. Mr. Morale & The Big Steppers is no different: in fact, as his first double album, it becomes even broader in scope than his previous ones. The album sprawls over themes of generational family trauma, anti-Blackness, hedonism, religion, misogyny, and unfaithfulness. And more importantly, it blurs the lines between personal and political even more. Kendrick psychoanalyzes himself to express generational cycles of trauma in Black communities, and his willingness to acknowledge and overcome these structural struggles in his own life is presented, as his partner Whitney Alford announces on the poignant "Mother I Sober," as "breaking the generational curse."

    The sound of Mr. Morale marks a logical next step in Kendrick's musical progression from the already expansive nature of 2015's To Pimp a Butterfly and 2017's DAMN. While the album is mostly produced by Sounwave and DJ Dahi, with assistance from DAMN. collaborator Bekon, Kendrick recruits experimental jazz musician Duval Timothy for a selection of lush piano instrumentals that weave their way through the album and give it a unique genre-bending sound overall. Swelling orchestral melodies like the cello at the end of "United In Grief" or the moving violin line in "Savior - Interlude"—as well as the choir in "Count Me Out" or the piano sequence at the end of "Silent Hill," are subtle layers that make Mr. Morale sound organic and smooth even as it is maximalist and layered. And Kendrick uses an impressive variety of flows and voices on those instrumentals—from the voice cracks reminiscent of "u" in "N95," to the autotuned, nasal vocals on "Rich Spirit" that could belong on DAMN., to a new, softer delivery on "Mother I'm Sober." 

    Despite its complexity, Mr. Morale threads an intersectional narrative through its eighteen tracks, containing discourse that is new even for Lamar. The first disc, with samples from self-help author Eckhart Tolle, begins the idea of the album as a therapy session. Lamar grapples largely with his relationship with his fiance and his "lust addiction" that he uses, much like materialism, to avoid deep-rooted psychological shortcomings. While Future has rapped about this sort of tortured hedonism as a Black man since Monster, Kendrick takes time to highlight the voices of women that help him change, using powerful features from Alford, Zola actress Taylour Paige, and Summer Walker to add refreshing depth and perspective. The clear highlight of this half is "We Cry Together," where Lamar and Paige have a relationship argument over a classic, weighty Alchemist piano loop. While I would not play this song in the car with the homies, Paige's bars and Kendrick's prickly arguments and interjections skillfully expose how women can be gaslighted and disregarded emotionally, because of toxic masculinity and mens' personal trauma. "You the reason R. Kelly can't recognize he's abusive," Paige accuses incisively. But the first half also lags a bit around tracks such as "Die Hard" and "Rich Spirit," which go for radio-friendly sounds that feel empty compared to the density of surrounding tracks like "Worldwide Steppers" or "We Cry Together."

    The second disc performs the Kendrick-esque zooming out, where personal growth turns into a prophetic call to action for communities to discuss pervasive, generational issues such as sexual violence, queerness, and misogyny. Eckhart Tolle appears, multiple times, to explain the Freudian notion of tortured self-development causing subjects to recreate their personal issues as an adult—for example, those who were abused as children (like R. Kelly) are more likely to abuse others as adults. On "Mother I Sober," Kendrick carefully unpacks multiple themes at once. His guilt about failing the most important women in his life—his mother, whose abuse he witnessed as a child, and Alford, whom he cheated on—is connected to the history of sexual violence in Black communities since the beginning of slavery. And Mr. Morale is the solution. Kendrick's musical expression represents healing and transformation, for not only himself but for others. He lays bare the issues of his past to regain control over his self, but also to spark discourse on subjects that are overlooked. 

    The doctrine of personal accountability that Kendrick doubles down on can become dubious when it borders respectability politics. However, he does a pretty convincing job of avoiding that trap in Mr. Morale. The track "Savior," which follows a blistering Baby Keem verse about rap success being merely a temporary respite from a history of violence and poverty, problematizes respectability politics itself. In what seems to be Kendrick's musings on the large-scale Black Lives Matter protests of 2020, he blasts the "capitalists posing as compassionates" for supporting his music's messaging but protesting only when it is easy and trendy for them to appear altruistic. It recalls the irony of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s words on peaceful protest being used as pacifying tools of the white moderates he criticized—but this time, Kendrick comes back and punches back with powerful bars: "Like it when they pro-Black, but I'm more Kodak Black." 

   And Kendrick does lack sensitivity in parts of the album—occasionally veering into the problematic side of the discussion he hopes to spark. On "Auntie Diaries," he attempts to reckon with the proximity of gender dysphoria to his own life, speaking from a problematic perspective to clumsily depict growth. The end of the song points to the conclusion that using the f-slur as a non-queer person is just as harmful as using the n-word is for a non-Black person—but Kendrick's use of the actual word in the song, uttered after he ostensibly "chose humanity over religion," contradicts that obvious conclusion, making the song seem like a thoughtless attempt at provocation instead of a spark of discourse. Kendrick also introduces a problematic muse in the form of Kodak Black, who was found guilty of sexual assault of a high school student last year. Kodak narrates many parts of the album, and while he is ostensibly included to representation the products of an environment of structural poverty and racism, the album seems to give Kodak an unnecessary platform. If "We Cry Together" was so powerful because it included the voice of a woman being treated unfairly, why is Kendrick uplifting Kodak's voice and silencing the voice of the woman he assaulted?

   Kendrick Lamar has billions of streams, multiple critically acclaimed albums, and a Pulitzer under his belt. But Mr. Morale & The Big Steppers is an indication that his drive to uncover the veneer of society and highlight cultural issues has only increased, regardless of whether it is difficult or even successful. He continues to undergo personal metamorphoses. "Vladimir making nightmares/But that's how we all think/The collective conscious," he raps in "Savior." In 2022, the collective consciousness is used to the calamity of "major" world events—pandemics, inflation, war. But another heavyweight LP from Kendrick is a vivid reminder that for many people in the world, pain has loomed over every waking moment for generations. 

8.2/10

Favorite tracks: United In Grief, We Cry Together, Count Me Out,  Savior - Interlude, Savior, Mr. Morale, Mother I Sober

Least Favorite tracks: Rich Spirit, Auntie Diaries