Kendrick Lamar has been one of the greatest artists in music over the past decade. Albums such as the concept album of Good Kid, M.A.A.D City and the jazz-fusion epic To Pimp a Butterfly are considered some of the best of the 2010s. His 2017 album DAMN, was easily his biggest album and cemented him as an artist that could make music in any vein of hip hop that he wanted. It even won a Pulitzer prize in music, making him the youngest and first-ever artist to win that wasn’t a classical or jazz project. But after this album, his musical output slowed to a halt. He headed the 2018 Black Panther Soundtrack, but besides that, he only had a handful of features over these years. There were rumors of new Kendrick music for years, but he finally announced his official follow up project through a post on his website about a month ago.
The rollout for this album was practically nonexistent, but it didn’t need anything more than that. There was no official single released before the album, only another installment in his “The Heart” series that shows Kendrick storytelling over a Marvin Gaye sample. Even the cover art wasn’t released until only a day and a half before the album came out, and the tracklist never released until the album came out. While other fans might have had a problem with this, I personally loved having no idea what to expect before listening to the album. Even now, instead of doing a bunch of interviews and public appearances to promote the album just releasing, Kendrick’s in Ghana celebrating the release with family and interacting with the locals as well. He’s letting the album speak for itself and letting listeners take what they want away from it. Even commercially, the hype for this album was so high that it will likely have the biggest first-week sales of any album so far in 2022 without almost any rollout!
Mr. Morale & The Big Steppers is easily his most introspective and unique album so far. The album is split up into two different discs, starting with Big Steppers and ending with Mr. Morale. Thematically, it seems to revolve around Kendrick’s therapy sessions, almost like each song is its own therapy session. This is shown with the many references to therapy throughout the entire runtime of the album, one of the biggest being that the 10th song starts out explicitly saying how this is session number 10. That song, “Count Me Out”, also starts off the second disc of the album and seems to signify a slightly different thematic look to the album. The first half of the album seems to have him more often literally tap dancing around his internal trauma and focusing on his relationships with other people, while the second half is him addressing his internal trauma and how it’s affected him throughout his lifetime. It’s a very difficult album to truly digest and there are hours worth of information to talk about, but I will do my best to explain some of the themes I’ve found so far.
One big theme throughout the album seems to be Kendrick admitting to his infidelity and using sex to ignore his deeper trauma. This theme really comes to fruition later on the album, but he even mentions it on the opener, “United in Grief”, where he talks about him and someone he calls Green Eyes are using each other to forget about their past trauma, Kendrick specifically, about the pain about losing loved ones throughout his entire life. He mentions being “lust addicted” on the mind-bending “Worldwide Steppers”, where he was also confronted for the first time about his infidelity by his partner, Whitney. But where this theme really hits home is on “Mother I Sober”.
“Mother I Sober” is not only the emotional centerpiece for this theme, but also the entire album. It’s the penultimate track, and also the longest track on the album at almost 7 minutes long. It even features famed Portishead singer Beth Gibbons on the heartwrenching chorus. On this song, Kendrick looks at his past trauma dead in the face and traces some of its roots back to the origin. In this case, he remembers being constantly asked as a kid if he was touched by his cousin, even when he would repeatedly reply that it was false. But it’s revealed in the final verse that the reason his mom constantly asked about it was that she was sexually assaulted when she was younger and never wanted that to happen to her son. Because Kendrick never used drugs or alcohol to cope with his trauma, he ended up turning to sex to numb the pain and it became an addiction. Whitney questioned him yet again and told him that he needed to go to therapy to fix this problem. This track ends with a voice note from his wife and daughter thanking him for breaking the generational curse and addressing the trauma that is passed down from generation to generation in many families.
This theme of generational trauma is also in the track “Father Time”, which features a beautiful chorus from Sampha. In this song, he talks about how the theme of toxic masculinity was passed down from his father onto him, and was likely passed onto his father back in the day as well. It’s the same theme that society stereotypes about men and fathers alike, which is that showing any emotion is bad and everything emotional should be buried deep. The same theme of telling kids to “man up” is what Kendrick is affected by here. He even tells a story where his father’s mom passed away, and he refused to take time off to grieve because “that’s life”. By addressing this problem head on, it shows that Kendrick is going to attempt to break this curse of toxic masculinity that is being passed down. This theme is something that has been in many pieces of media recently, including a new personal favorite movie, Everything Everywhere All At Once. In that movie, a mother faces up to the generational trauma she endured from her father and has been unknowingly transferring onto her daughter, while she tries to fix it through the metaphor of the multiverse. It’s a wild movie that I think everyone should watch, but that same theme of generational trauma is present in this album and song in particular.
Personal trauma isn’t the only aspect of his life that he shares on this project. “Auntie Diaries” is easily the most controversial song on the project, and it shows Kendrick tackling the fact that two members of his family came out as transgender when he was young. His family was always the most accepting of them, and he even talks about how his uncle was the first person he ever saw write a rap, inspiring him that he could also write his own. By the end of the song, he’s looking at how the church treated his trans cousin and comes to the conclusion that he should choose humanity over religion. The controversial part of the song is that when talking about being in elementary and middle school and having these transgender people in his life, he would constantly hear the f-slur flung around as something that wasn’t serious. So he uses the slur in the song in order to show how harmful it is. While the song is still clearly on the right side of LGBTQ+ issues, some people are still angry at his use of the slur and misgendering his relatives at points in the song. Personally, I don’t have a problem with him doing it in the context of this song, but I also can’t tell anyone else that they shouldn’t be offended, especially as someone who’s not a member of the LGBTQ+ community. If people are offended by it, I can’t tell them not to be because they have a very good reason to be offended. Only time will tell how people truly feel about him using that type of language.
There’s definitely a lot more themes in this project, but let's talk about the actual music for a little bit. Sonically, this album is all over the place. The opening song is equal parts free jazz drumming and beautiful piano chords, while the next song is full of synths and trap drums. There’s another point on Mr. Morale where Kendrick goes from a track of him singing over a bare piano about the troubles of wearing the metaphorical crown and trying to please everyone, to one that is a full-out trap banger with Kodak Black and Kendrick doing vocal inflections that sound almost like Playboi Carti or Baby Keem. There are moments of experimental hip hop that are unique from most of what’s out there, like on the songs “Worldwide Steppers”, “Savior”, and “Mr. Morale”, the last one being produced by Pharrell. But then, there are songs like “Rich Spirit”, “Die Hard”, "Purple Hearts", and even “Silent Hill” that are fairly plain and don’t add much to the overall album thematically either. While all of these songs are at least passable and somewhat enjoyable in the right mood, they don’t feel necessary to this tracklist. In fact, this album can feel so sonically incohesive at points that it becomes a detriment to the record. It sometimes feels like just a bunch of songs that all have similar themes that are slightly ordered in a way to make it feel as thematically cohesive as possible. He’s arguably attempting too many things at once instead of just focusing on perfecting one specific sound. This statement feels a bit preemptive because it's only been out for a week, but I think this album will have the lowest replay value of anything he's put out so far.
Writing this has definitely made me appreciate the album more. Unpacking these themes and how they connect with each other has given me a better appreciation for the album. I’m sure the themes will only continue to become more obvious with time. There is also a good likelihood that the sound of the album will grow on me over time as well, but there’s no telling for sure. Even though Mr. Morale & The Big Steppers is Kendrick’s most polarizing album so far, it shows that he’s human. He was successfully able to shed the crown and burden of being considered the savior people held him up to be. As Kendrick says in the final track, he is choosing himself, and he trusts that we should do the same and focus on making our own lives better ourselves. In his own words, “Sorry I didn’t save the world, my friend. I was too busy buildin’ mine again.”
Comments