The warning is served from the first bars of United in Grievanceat the opening of the album: 1855 days since the publication of DAMN“ I’ve been goin’ through somethin’/ Be afraid “Warns Kendrick Lamar. A lot has happened in five years, the rapper took note: over the next 75 minutes or so that lasts Mr. Morale & the Big Steppershe will touch on several sensitive subjects, racism of course, the transgenerational trauma resulting from slavery, domestic and sexual violence, the “cancel culture”, linking everything to his own experience and his own wounds to deliver this disc inconvenient, but monumental.
Presented as a double album, Mr. Morale & the Big Steppers is nevertheless a little shorter than its previous classic To Pimp a Butterfly (2015). It feels like he has twice as much to say, though: lyrically, this album is breathless, the 2018 Pulitzer Prize winner silencing his critics with his pen and superior intelligence. However, taken separately, these songs could give the impression that the artist scatters like a jack-of-all-trades columnist who does not delve into anything (the pandemic and even the war that the Kremlin is waging against Ukraine are mentioned on the album), but together they form a rich and coherent vision of a complex and chaotic world.
Thoughts and Confessions
Musically, Lamar surrounds himself with collaborators he met in the studio during the recording of his previous albums, such as Pharrell Williams (on the scabby and futuristic Mr Morale), Soundwave, Boi-1da or DJ Khalil; only the pianist, composer and arranger Terrace Martin is absent, and you can hear it in the sound sometimes closer to contemporary music (the avant-garde production of Worldwide Steppers !) than jazz, of which there are still beautiful traces, for example in the piano of the disconcerting United in Grief in opening.
If the first of the two discs will be perceived as the most abrupt, each of the eighteen songs of the double album contains pearls of rhyme which command attention and force us to reflect. We will talk a lot about the text of Worldwide Steppersduring which Lamar recounts to us the first, then the second time, where he slept with a white woman: Was out in Copenhagen / good kid, mAAd city tour / I flourished on them stages / Whitney asked did I have a problem / I said, “I might be racist” / Ancestors watchin’ me fuck was like retaliation “.
But beyond the shock formulas, let us retain above all the confessional dimension of his texts, Lamar using his own journey to understand the world around him. ” I come from a generation of home invasions and I got daddy issues, that’s on me / Everything them four walls had taught me, made habits bury deep “, he confides on Father Time, in the middle of the first disc. The most disturbing part of the album comes shortly after: We Cry Togetherin duet with actress Taylour Paige (Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom), makes us experience, through violent words, a marital dispute; suddenly, we are no longer listening to a song, but witnessing a theater scene.
The song has its importance at the very end of the first disc, but does not embody its spirit, which softens on the second disc, generous in good welcoming grooves. It is also on the second part of the album that we discover the most touching passages. Like Aunty Diariesa song that will become one of the best in his repertoire.
Learn and correct
The rhythm is soft but constant, like an amorphous house. Lamar takes a conciliatory tone, he talks more than he raps; behind him, vague sonorities of violins pass surreptitiously so as not to distract us from what the rapper tells us: the story of his aunt who has become a man and of a Demetrius (character quoted on his first album) who has become Mary-Ann, and the influence these people had on him. ” My auntie is a man now / I think I’m old enough to understand now “, he says on this sublime text which deals as much with tolerance towards members of the LGBTQ community as with the power of words used to hurt, sometimes gays, sometimes also blacks. When Lamar raises the tone and the violins unite in the last third, it’s guaranteed chills, interrupted by one of the most blistering punchlines in the history of rap.
It’s not Lamar’s only brilliant gesture. Mr. Morale & The Big Steppers is crowded with collaborators. British singer Sampha on Father Time, stunning. Summer Walker and Ghostface Killah on Purple Hearts. Its cousin Baby Keem everywhere, but more specifically on the striking Savior. Beth Gibbons, soul of Portishead, on the poignant Mother I Soberone of the peaks of the album, on which the rapper seems to hint at the controversial presence, on the song silent Hill, by rapper Kodak Black, convicted (among other things) of sexual assault. Towards the end of Mother I SoberLamar raps: “ I know the secrets / Every other rapper sexually abused / I see them daily burying their pain in chains and tattoos / So listen close before you start to pass judgment on how we move. Phew.
Where Kanye West made easy provocation by inviting Marilyn Manson and DaBaby to collaborate on his projects, Kendrick Lamar instead invites Kodak Black to seek, like him, to understand the source of problematic behavior, his own and those of his fellows. Name, understand, learn, correct: the common thread of the eighteen songs of Mr. Morale & The Big Steppers. And after listening, hope; at the very end of Mother I Sobera mother speaks to her child thus: You did it, I’m proud of you. You broke a generational curse. Say “Thank you, dad” “. The child responds: Thank you, daddy, thank you, mommy, thank you, brother Mr. Morale “.