REVIEW: After Half A Decade Removed From The Public Eye, Kendrick Lamar Returns With His Most Private LP Release ‘Mr. Morale & The Big Steppers’

On “DUCKWORTH.”, the final track from Kendrick Lamar’s Pulitzer prize-winning album DAMN., the Compton native revealed a story from his family past that sounds too consequential to be true. In this closing remark to the impeccable and historic 2017 LP, the massively accomplished orator details the crossing of paths between his father and the owner of his (now former) label/musical mentor Anthony “Top Dawg” Tiffith. Tiffith decides against a plot he had to rob the restaurant Kendrick’s father worked at, a plot that could have turned gruesome for Lamar’s father. This interaction occurs as Kendrick is just a young child, and the tale is summarized without mincing words: “If Anthony killed Duckie, Top Dawg could be serving life/while I grew up without a father, and die in a gunfight” the rapper spits out immediately followed by a resounding gunshot that spirals into the final moments of the record.

It was a truly bewildering conclusion to the artist’s fourth studio album and a shocking divulgence for someone already so deep into a career of weaving impeccable stories. Though I never expected I would be left to wonder for 5 years and 1 month, I spent much of the subsequent days wondering: how much deeper could Kendrick Lamar go? How much more personal could the MC’s work possibly get?

Kendrick’s answer to this question comes to us in the form of a double album, Mr. Morale & The Big Steppers.

If it isn’t clear in the literal words of the opening track (“United In Grief”) on this final album under Top Dawg Entertainment, Kendrick has been going through something. And though Kendrick Lamar claims “1,855 days, [he’s] been going through something”, it becomes quickly apparent that he has been going through things for much of his life.

Kendrick Lamar (Photo by Renell Medrano)

One thing it appears Kendrick Lamar has been grappling with in the time it took him to assemble this 73-minute barrage of personal inventory is his own status as a public figure. In many ways, fans of Kendrick Lamar have looked to him as a moral compass among a popular culture with few “pure” heroes left. As it only becomes easier to dig up the demons of our celebrity favorites, Kendrick has continued to uphold a distinctly admirable reputation and this is all before his artistic statements on larger societal failings often rooted in racism, classism, and spirituality that have positioned him as a generational thought leader. But with Mr. Morale, Kendrick seems to question if not outright reject this notion most notably on tracks like “Savior” over gorgeously sung backing vocals from Sam Dew and a constantly shifting instrumental.

On track two of disc two, Kendrick channels the words of playwright William Shakespeare over a piano ballad: “heavy is the head that chose to wear the crown”. It is a bleak and morose descent from the uptempo bounce of the latter disc’s opening track “Count Me Out”, a sharp correction of energy and vibe that occurs in multiple instances on this album. With these 18 songs presented through the lens of therapy both as an idea and as a personal practice for Kendrick, it makes sense that the narrative and the approach to his problems are non-linear.

One unsuspected common trope of Mr. Morale is the focus of sex. While it’s far from unheard of for Lamar to explore sexuality in fine detail (see: “These Walls”, the miraculously soulful fifth track from 2015’s To Pimp A Butterfly), he approaches this universal topic from an extremely nuanced angle that he and few artists in general ever touch. From the deeply confessional reflections on Kendrick’s uncle transitioning on “Auntie Diaries”, a song that has generated widespread controversy over its inclusion of homophobic slurs that Lamar condemns in the final verse; to the eerily haunting and conflicted recollections of Kendrick’s infidelity to his wife via his first sexual encounters with white women on “Worldwide Steppers”; to the absolutely gut-wrenching revelations of sexual abuse and molestation in Kendrick’s own family on “Mother I Sober”, sexual traumas and offenses play a vital role in Kendrick spilling his soul for the world to see.

In the magnificent “Father Time”, my favorite cut from the 18-track work, I believe Kendrick Lamar utters the most imperative line when it comes to understanding Mr. Morale & The Big Steppers: “my life is a plot, twisted from directions that I can’t see”. For much of Kendrick’s discography up to this point, it seemed the well-traveled chronicler was obsessed with understanding why the world around him was the way it was. However, on Mr. Morale, he is grappling with the epiphany that we as flawed beings may have far less agency than we would hope or at least expect. With possibly his clearest opportunity yet to look externally (see: a once in a century global pandemic), Lamar has chosen to give us his most internally focused effort. It is uncomfortable yet therapeutic, offensive yet sincere, aggressive yet indescribably beautiful. As with most of Kendrick Lamar’s artistic statements, I find there is much intention in these contradictory feelings.

Kendrick Lamar is complicated, and so are we. And so is my ever-growing love for, in my opinion, yet another masterpiece added to this remarkable solo discography.