Kendrick Lamar Mr. Morale & the Big Steppers Review: Risky, Messy, and Honest

The album is a gripping treatise on the relationship between Lamar's inner turmoil and the cultural landscape.

Kendrick Lamar, Mr. Morale and the Big Steppers
Photo: Aftermath

Kendrick Lamar has long established a reputation for fearlessly confronting his inner demons, wielding his music as a tool to purge his doubts and insecurities. But the rapper has never been quite as bracingly self-interrogating as he is on his fifth studio album, Mr. Morale & the Big Steppers. Dotted with the alternately nurturing and combative feedback of his partner, Whitney Alford—who begins the album urging him to “tell ‘em the truth”—as well as snippets of advice from spiritual guide and self-help author Eckhart Tolle, the album is an at times uncomfortable balance of self-evaluation and social critique.

A reckoning with the cultural developments of the last five years (or “1,855 days,” as Lamar notes), the thorny Mr. Morale & the Big Steppers by and large doesn’t settle for easy answers. “Auntie Diaries,” for one, paints a complex portrait of a young Lamar coming to terms with his trans uncle and cousin’s gender identities. The song, which hinges on time’s capacity to reveal shifting truths, is mired in conflicting proclamations and slippages in pronoun usage.

“Auntie Diaries” also features Lamar repeatedly invoking a gay slur in order to demonstrate the gulf between his perception of the word as a heterosexual cis man and his newly informed grasp of its implications. He ends the track with a discussion of how much weight words carry—laughably, for a wordsmith of his caliber, excusing his own use of the epithet by saying that he “was taught words were nothing more than a sound.” Then, the situation is thrown back in his face by his cousin, who likens the use of a gay slur with the utterance of a racial one, prompting Lamar to tacitly admit he wouldn’t be okay with the latter.

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Lamar’s vehemence and dissatisfaction with public life at large runs throughout Mr. Morale & the Big Steppers. Songs like “N95” and “Savior” catalog with great detail the toxicity of a culture that worships celebrity and expects salvation or transcendence from the rich and famous: “Kendrick made you think about it, but he is not your savior/Cole made you feel empowered, but he is not your savior,” Lamar warns on the latter.

Yet the rapper also turns his skepticism toward his peers, admonishing them for not speaking their mind due to what he perceives as the constraints of political correctness. Indeed, on “N95,” he quips, “What the fuck is ‘cancel culture’?…Oh, you worried ‘bout a critic, that ain’t protocol.” These aren’t necessarily the most flattering or agreeable perspectives to take, but he gives our newfound cultural norms an urgent, thorough examination.

And while Lamar reifies his status as hip-hop’s foremost sociologist here, he avoids merely pointing fingers; his depiction of his own mental state and decisions are equally dire and suffused with harsh judgments. “Can’t you see I’m a wreck?” he cries out powerfully on “Count Me Out,” following it up with the determined repetition of “This is me and I’m blessed.”

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“The world that I’m in is a cul-de-sac,” Lamar bemoans on “United in Grief,” pairing his reflections on cyclical unrest with beats that sound as if they’re idling in place, emulating a self-perpetuating stasis. In this vein, “Crown,” which perhaps leans on cliché a little too hard to get at the burden of the responsibilities that come with being a fixture of the public imagination, features a circular piano riff whose repetitiveness evokes a stalling out.

Elsewhere, the bracing “We Cry Together” is soundtracked by another minor-key, reiterative piano scale (complemented by hair-raising electric guitar) that never changes throughout the track’s nearly six-minute runtime. The song depicts a couple, voiced by Lamar and Zola star Taylour Paige, going around and around in a fraught argument that animates age-old gender divides, even as it mostly serves to characterize the male figure as cruel and unfair. It’s a stirring bit of dramaturgy that’s far from the album’s most insightful discourse but is nonetheless reminiscent of Eminem’s “Kim” for its narrativized—verging on hysterical—portrayal of the album’s protagonist at his most unlikable and petty.

Another quality that Marshall Mathers and Lamar share is a propensity for embodying different personas and vocal tones. Near the end of “N95,” Lamar proves his adeptness at switching up intonations in quick succession while nodding to the frantic, forceful stylings of his cousin, Baby Keem, on the chorus. Breaking up the sometimes strident tone of Mr. Morale & the Big Steppers, Lamar offers a more laidback, playful approach on the menacing but grooving “Rich Spirit,” dipping into a yokel-like comic demeanor in the third verse.

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The rapper’s delivery is at its most nuanced on “Mother I Sober,” during which he’s soft-spoken and contemplative, sounding half lost in the memories of torment and generational trauma that he’s relaying. This is until Lamar startles himself into a fiery eruption as the track comes to a close, becoming increasingly more distressed, connecting his clan’s experience to that of Black families everywhere, and then emerging liberated from the shackles of victimhood through the processing of his guilt. The way that his voice gradually and affectingly balloons with purpose and invigoration may be the album’s masterstroke.

Mr. Morale & the Big Steppers can be emotionally ugly, even unpleasant, but it never feels less than completely authentic. It’s thankfully levied with glimpses of joy and melodic hooks, as in the blissful duetting of “Purple Hearts” and the brief guitar interlude on “Worldwide Steppers.” Though the album isn’t Lamar’s most incisive work, it’s a gripping treatise on the codependent relationship between his inner turmoil and an ever-evolving cultural landscape, its bluntness a risky externalization of deep-rooted confusion spurned by political upheaval.

Score: 
 Label: Top Dawg  Release Date: May 13, 2022  Buy: Amazon

Charles Lyons-Burt

Charles Lyons-Burt covers the government contracting industry by day and culture by night. His writing has also appeared in Spectrum Culture, In Review Online, and Battleship Pretension.

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