It’s been 48 hours and 42 minutes since Kendrick Lamar released his fifth studio album, Mr. Morale & The Big Steppers. With a runtime of 1 hour and 13 minutes, it was possible to play all 18 songs four full times before my first listen.
Four times may seem excessive, but I get it. When Kendrick released DAMN in 2017, the music was like an alarm clock that rattled me awake. I couldn’t sleep, and neither could my friend John, so we dissected and pieced together an article published on DJBooth that same day.
'DAMN.' Decoded: Kendrick Lamar's Album Is About Breaking the Curse of Disobedience was the third most-read essay on the site that year.
John DM’d me on Twitter at 1:48 a.m. It felt like 2017 again. These are four messages he sent about the album:
“I think this is the first time we, as a generation, are seeing rappers process fatherhood in real-time. The OGs in the 90s were already fathers (most of them) by the time their debuts came around, but this new generation (Kendrick, Cole, Drake, Gambino, etc.) are becoming fathers later on in life, and the whiplash in changing from a selfish to a selfless perspective is what causes the messiness of their albums (Morale, 4YEO, Scorpion and 3.15.20 respectively)...”
“The delight, the horror, and reflexive self-evaluation that comes with that process are particularly interesting especially when you compare it to albums that tackle motherhood who, culturally, may be of another generation but are technically around the same age (Beyonce, Adele, Solange, etc) and are much more embracing of the process as a whole…”
“Also, to go super deep with it, I think it's tied to the 'quarter-life crisis'. You spend so much time thinking of who you want to be in the world from a professional perspective that once you achieve it and want to settle down you then have to unpack who you really are…”
“And parenthood is the ultimate trigger for that analysis because that's when you move from quarter-life to mid-life and questions about mortality and legacy start to become more real and nuanced.”
It’s been 50 hours and 4 minutes since Kendrick Lamar released his fifth studio album, Mr. Morale & The Big Steppers. By now you may have read reviews, held discussions, witnessed arguments, strangled a stranger, or found kinship with others that share your views. All very possible outcomes when a renowned artist drops polarizing art. In one of my text threads, a message reads, “This a classic my brother.” What makes it a classic? “Uhhh, let me get back to you, but I know what I heard.” We both laughed.
My cousin called it a project of paintings. Likening the experience to walking through a museum, observing what Kendrick placed on the gallery walls, and having to absorb the colors, the characters, and the content how you would a Jean-Michel, a Romare Bearden, a Janiva Ellis.
If this music was a painting it would be the one Henry Taylor painted in 1990 called Screaming Head. The inspiration came from working with schizophrenia patients as a psychiatric technician at Camarillo State Mental Hospital.
“A patient would clasp his hands together behind his head,” Taylor detailed in an interview, “And if you look at that long enough, you start to see something. It’s like, 'Wait a minute, his head just became his mouth.'
It’s been 52 hours and 28 minutes since Kendrick Lamar released his fifth studio album, Mr. Morale & The Big Steppers. The music video for track two, “N95,” was shared in a group chat with three other journalists.
We went from mourning Lil Keed (R.I.P.) to watching Kendrick. That’s how the journalism business works. Leapfrogging from subject to subject, artist to artist, moment to moment, a constant examination of what is said, what is done, who said it, and who did it.
Perhaps it is I, not Kendrick, that relates to Henry Taylor’s Screaming Head. This age of information overflow will have your mind in a labyrinth of ideas and feelings, searching for some way to express all that sticks to your psyche.
Kendrick, on this album, sounds like he relieves himself of holding back. Finding, what sounds like solace, in a brain dump of memories told with the transparency of a therapeutic breakthrough.
After my second listen, it felt safe to say Mr. Morale & The Big Steppers doesn’t hide the harsher, thornier edges of Kendrick’s psyche and the history of thoughts and decisions that brought him to this place.
If his life has been a journey to this destination, he arrives heavy, weighed down by a lifetime of trauma, but by the end, he sounds much lighter, a levitating feather free of the gravity that kept him buried beneath his grief.
It’s been 60 hours and 56 minutes since Kendrick Lamar released his fifth studio album, Mr. Morale & The Big Steppers. By now I was hoping to have some idea on how to write my views and express some critical analysis that perfectly depicts what the music says to me.
But I think John said it best when describing the quarter-life crisis that comes after you achieve what you sought, reaching the top of your profession, but still having to unpack who is at the bottom of your person.
“Crown,” the third track, has been on repeat since arriving in New Orleans. The humid weather doesn’t mirror how rainy and barren the song sounds. His words, like the keys, are dipped in melancholy, but there’s something soothing about hearing him say:
And I can't please everybody
No, I can't please everybody
Wait, you can't please everybody
No, I can't please everybody
And I can't please everybody
No, I can't please everybody
Wait, you can't please everybody
No, I can't please everybody
And in that stanza is where I found the album’s softest sentiment: Letting go of pleasing others to find yourself. Accepting that you aren’t in control and absolving any concept that you do. Pursuing self-discovery instead of self-indulgence. All in the name of freedom. Freedom from curses, freedom from judgment, freedom from pretending to be an artist of answers when you only know yourself and all the ugliness that is hidden from their praise.
A self that is fragile and fraudulent. A self that is sensitive and insecure. A self riddled with guilt and glory. A self that committed adulteries and suffers from writer’s block. A self that can’t escape unlearning to be better. No one gets better without revealing what they must heal from. I think Kendrick wants to heal. I think we all do. I also think no one knows how to do it. So we keep searching for a song, a saying, a solution for a transformative new beginning.
I still think, all these years later, “His Pain” by BJ The Chicago Kid has one of the best Kendrick verses. It’s the crux of understanding Kendrick’s music. A man, flawed and fighting, coming to grips with experiences as they unfold. Documenting, in song, a purpose that must be sung. Mr. Morale & The Big Steppers took the concept of “His Pain” to a place Kendrick could never reach as an adolescent. Growing into someone that may seem unfamiliar, but this was always who Kendrick wanted to become, a man who told stories to unlock the brain from its burdens.
To hear an artist still relieving burdens after millions of records sold, millions of dollars made, and a Pulitzer Prize speaks to the part of me that hopes art can be liberating for loud minds needing quiet ways to express themselves. After two years in a pandemic, there’s nothing that would make me feel better than to make something that takes the stress away.
It’s been 61 hours and 28 minutes since Kendrick Lamar released his fifth studio album, Mr. Morale & The Big Steppers…. I hit send.
– Yoh aka YOHKLAMA aka @Yoh31.