WWAW #1 - Kendrick Lamar's Mr Morale & the Big Steppers

In the first of the Where We At With? reevaluation series, a look at Kendrick Lamar's double album one year after its release.

The title Mr Morale & the Big Steppers means your mind and your feet. Success is dependent on collaboration, between your dreams and your abilities to actualize. Of course it’s never that easy, nor is this album convinced of any given parameters of “success.” It’s not intended as a self-help sermon. Nor is Kendrick Lamar struggling to achieve his dreams - he’s all the way out there, a king on a throne sitting on the edge of a cliff.

“I’ve been going through something,” he announces at the start. We can take him at his word. Recall the old rock star hustle, straight from rehab to magazine cover, selling a mediocre new album on the back of some demons. This is not that. Bret Easton Ellis identifies the difference between Empire and post-Empire art, delineated roughly around the year 2000. The former is exemplified by the classy working class optimism of Bruce Springsteen, the latter by the scattershot rage of Eminem. Kendrick takes much influence from Eminem, with next level flows so shaking and reshaking the formula that they’re nearly impenetrable. But he’s also working against post-Empire nihilism, searching for deeper meanings. He ends up making a bit of a mess.

To spoil the conclusion - I don’t think Mr Morale holds up to his best or most listenable stuff. His other albums balanced emotional friction with insightful signposts, in musical forms that go far beyond Dr Dre with their P-Funk emulations and post-gangsta content. DAMN was a set of living galaxies, each imbued with hooks and themes. Mr Morale is far more unsettled, either set to explode or perhaps just the wreckage of such.

Kendrick has taken to burying his good messages, sublimating them to the album’s anti-message theme. Another theme is this idea of playing roles, represented by wooden feet sounds at certain moments. The Big Steppers dance through real world compromises, inevitably debasing us. Our feet just move, independent of the emotional guilt or pain that haunts the head. No amount of dancing can salve those wounds.

He’s sick of playing a role, even if his was the soundtrack of social uprisings in the ‘10s. What more can he say? That we’re addicted to screens and have lost our identities to social media feeds? Not exactly breaking news. He expresses post-COVID doubts on “N95” and “Savior,” and trans support on “Auntie Diaries.” Though given how both prejudice and progressivism have been codified and commodified, nothing really takes. These songs just become fodder for the fray, dissolving the singular urgency of his music.

So it makes sense that this is a personal album. “Mother I Sober” is like an extension of Jay-Z’s “Song Cry,” examining dramas haunted by generations of abuse. Among the many things that Kendrick has been working through is how to be of genuine use to Black Americans. Surely he sees the emptiness in just having his songs played at protests after another killing by police. And yes his music means so much more than that. But Mr Morale isn’t intended to offer us a coherent solution. We’re not just spectators, we’re culpable too. This is still activist music, but on a deeper level, transcending all the coopting on the surface.

Musically Mr Morale has some real highs, in among some mystifying mids. “Purple Hearts” is a highlight. The message is sort of a sequel to 2017’s “Humble” - don’t get in the universe’s way. Like that note someone pinned up in Tony Soprano’s hospital room: “Sometimes I go about in pity for myself, and all the while, a great wind carries me across the sky.” Ghostface Killah invokes spiritual themes while Summer Walker equates love with anilingus - it’s a great all time Kendrick song. So is “Rich Spirit,” which focuses the album’s complicated defiance. “Count Me Out” creates an anthem out of disparate musical elements, and only after a few listens does it sink in that the one counting him out is himself.

On the other hand - Baby Keem’s hook on “Savior” (“are you happy for me?”) sits uneasily atop an already confused song. Further muddling is the condescending intro (“Kendrick is not your savior”), which is so beneath all of us by this point. It brings up a question - all of this emotional abstraction, is it constructive or just a crutch? Kendrick travels with so much baggage, assuming so many burdens. His music seems to play a codependent role with his inner fires. That assessment could be totally wrong, but I’d say it speaks to a certain failure of Mr Morale as an album that we even consider it.

The accompanying tour was a success in every sense. I’d still rank Mr Morale a good notch below his perfect trilogy - good kid, Butterfly, and DAMN. My initial impression of this album was that it was the wrong one for the moment, that the audience needed something to rally behind rather than be subjected to. I still find it a challenging, sometimes frustrating listen that doesn’t offer enough easy pleasures to sustain its disparate emotions. Returning to it, I liked it better, but it remains for me something to admire more than consistently listen to. Still Kendrick Lamar has remained at the vanguard without losing a step.