Nobody deconstructs Kendrick Lamar like Kendrick Lamar

It used to be that if you are everything to everyone, you are nothing to no one. Then Kanye West showed up. 

His arrival sounded the death knell on that truism – at least in the vast, ever-growing blast radius of hip-hop, no one has made more of the ‘Do You’ platform than him. There is no territory in his eyeline that Kanye West isn’t the king of. Not Kendrick, though. Kendrick is not that kind of king.

Like Kanye, Kendrick’s (earned) ascension into the pantheon of hip-hop is due to the fact that he is everything to everyone. He can set off club-friendly detonations like “DNA.”, whose seismic force also reverberates at arenas and festivals; he can unspool lusciously funked-out head-nodders like “Rigamortus” which sync up symbiotically with for/from-the-streets hustle-rap manifestos like “Backseat Freestyle” – which also serve as a majestically gritty foil for his reach into jazz esoterica. In every veneer he presents himself, virtuosity and a justice-seeking conscience are inextricable. Many times over, he’s assume the role of judge, jury and executioner over himself, his community and the prevailing fancies of the moment. But nowhere before his fifth and latest album Mr. Morale & The Big Steppers was the scalpel-plunge into the heart, psyche and soul of the culture his work exists in, been this utterly revealing and deep.

Mr. Morale is terrifyingly fantastic. Its wisdom is infinitely prismatic – it’s so real that it’s too real. It’s a spirit-affirming victory for hip-hop, that’s also an obituary for a lot of what its contemporary manifestation has come to be a shorthand for. It’s the most honest testimony from an artist who’s only ever been honest with the world. 

It’s the self-defining man-in-the-mirror reckoning from a chosen saviour reeling from the toll of being a chosen saviour – and though its medium is musical, its building block is pain. The sounds, many, florid and expertly realised in standard-setting fashion, are but servants of pain.

Mr. Morale is in pain. Every inch of sonic space and in all its 73 minutes and 18 songs. They're saturated with various symptoms of trauma. Pain – the gravity of its mark, the richness of its stain – is so great that it makes ‘reviewing’ this ‘album’ both compellingly necessary and vehemently idiotic. According to DSP regulations, this is the kind of work that artists aren’t so supposed to make. This is playlist-spurning, TikTok-torching work whose glare reaches so far inward, its only concern is in authentically extracting from the brutality of the human condition the wisdom that allows us to do and be better – all the while knowing that better is a very painful thing to be.

Hidden in plain sight throughout this record is the thesis that pain and pleasure are twinned hearts whose pulses animate the world. Song after song, the intimations of this duality are gorgeously, gruellingly teased out. Kendrick’s pen, already superlatively eloquent, is at its flourishing best on this album, and, particularly on this score. One personal best is: 

“The aloof Buddha, I'm Christ with a shooter.”

The ferocity of that is complicated in a two-way direction by another clincher: 

“You should know that I'm slightly off / Fightin' off demons that been outside / 

Better known as myself, I'm a demigod.”

Two tableaus from two standout moments on the album. The first from “Rich Spirit” and the second from “Mr. Morale”. What do an aloof Buddha and a self-battling demigod have in common? A penetrating sense of self-awareness that will bring you to your knees. 

But isn’t rap a tournament of muscularity and dominance, you ask? Aren’t rappers supposed to stand tall? On Mr. Morale, Kendrick spends most of his time on his knees, crushed, surveying his wreckage, subverting every rap norm in torturously confessional ways – underscoring that the things we do to stand tall are amongst the cardinal ingredients in the stew of inauthenticity we collectively and individually feed on.

A double-edged sword cuts both ways. But Kendrick wields it in a manner that gives his thrust an extra dimension: He strips bare the layers, the ossified stack of false certainties that attend to Kendrick the man, ‘Kendrick’ the hip-hop construct and the culture that simultaneously nourishes and obliterates both and is nourished and obliterated by both. The best songs here are unflinching in their depiction of the pain-saddled complexities that suffuse all three tropes. All songs are preoccupied with them but the best, the most unnervingly and interrogatively visceral, affirm the heat signature of that reality in ways that  are emotionally and psychically searing.

Which is why we can’t talk about Mr. Morale without talking about “We Cry Together”. From this moment on, we can’t talk about Kendrick Lamar and/or ‘Kendrick Lamar’ without talking about that song. 

Divided into two nine-song halves as it is, with each half featuring a soul-ravaging emotional climax, Mr. Morale’s approach to duality is literal and emphatic. “We Cry Together” hails from the first half but its boom echoes throughout the album. It haunts the other songs obtrusively and unfairly. It’s the site of a battle between Kendrick and the very-excellent Taylour Paige, both of whom embody the male and female poles of an embattled relationship whose toxicity is so overpoweringly noxious, you despise and sympathise with both and simultaneously – because the fiction they unravel holds a mirror exposing some unshakable real world truths.

“Eff” is lobbed by Kendrick and Taylour a total of 76 times. They outdo themselves and each other continually. The back-and-forth is 5:41, the second-longest runtime on the album, and ends in a disastrous stalemate:

Her: “Eff me,”

Him: “I'mma eff you.”

They collapse into the familiarity of the Band-Aid that is sex, as Kendrick’s actual wife, Whitney Alford, breaks the fourth wall with a sobering mic-drop: “Stop tap-dancing around the conversation”.

You can’t do a jig to that. There’s not a trace of virality here. Depending on how you choose music to function for you, you may never listen to this song after the first time. But you’ll never forget it.

Something else that can’t be ignored or forgotten, something that will define Kendrick’s trajectory henceforth, is his obvious insistence on not wanting the crown. Where much of hip-hop operates as a claim for top dawg status, Mr. Morale is a masterful feat of abject relinquishment. In 2015, on his time-stopping “Control” verse, Kendrick crowned himself: “King of the Coast; one hand, I juggle 'em both”. Now, he consummately rejects that honour, most notably on “Crown” (“I can’t please everybody”) and “Saviour” (“The cat is out the bag, I am not your saviour / I find it just as difficult to love thy neighbours”).

Those two particularly christened songs are emblematic of Kendrick’s world-weary outlook on the album. The eyes that peer out into Greatest of All Time accolades, critical and commercial esteem across the board, riches and pleasures beyond compare, have also been guilty of infidelity, addiction, inauthenticity and bad faith. Those eyes have also taken in a panorama of failure accentuated by being used and abused by the machinery of fame, of being known for a thing, prospering materially from it and subsequently being ruthlessly milked for it. So much so that, when he asks, “are you happy for me? / Really, are you happy for me?”, it’s gravely obvious that he’s not speaking rhetorically.

On Mr. Morale, the tension between fact and metaphor is as vivid as the lines between art and life are blurred. When Kendrick says, “This my undisputed truth / My life is like forbidden fruit”, he wants you to feel – really feel – the full weight of what his disclosure dredges up: “I come from a generation of home invasions and I got daddy issues”, for instance. And, “I'm sensitive, I feel everything, I feel everybody”. And “Mother cried, put they hands on her, it was family ties”. And “Family ties, they accused my cousin, ‘Did he touch you, Kendrick?’ /  Never lied, but no one believed me when I said ‘He didn’t’”.

All that, all that, is the reason the album isn’t so much ‘music’ as it uses music as a vehicle not so much for cathartic release but for emotional bloodletting. This is an album Kendrick had to make – because, if he didn’t, one wonders what he’d do with the burden he’s been carrying all this time, one that is infinitely heavier than the crown he sheds here.

This is the album where he says more than he ever has, where he can finally and definitively say, “I choose me, I’m sorry”. This is the album where he disowns himself to reclaim himself: We are left with a naked, quivering man. Not our star, not our king, not our saviour.

After that, it ends.