How’s this for a big step? Kendrick Lamar released his first album in over five years, Mr. Morale & the Big Steppers.
As Lamar previously teased on his website, oklama.com, Mr. Morale is a double album with 18 tracks. While Rihanna is unfortunately not featured on the album, Lamar collaborated with several artists for the first time like Blxst, Amanda Reifer, Sampha, Taylour Paige, Summer Walker, Ghostface Killah, Kodak Black, Sam Dew, Tanna Leone, and Beth Gibbons. Baby Keem is the only person on the double album that has worked with him as a feature previously on “family ties” and “range brothers.”
Mr. Morale & The Big Steppers ALBUM COVER
Lamar also samples Florence Welch in “We Cry Together,” giving her a writing credit on the track and mixing her vocals with Paige’s. One song not on the album is “The Heart Pt. 5,” which K.Dot released earlier this week as the first taste of his Mr. Morale era, with one big step for man: a deep-fake-filled video. The rapper first announced the album in April, after writing last August that it would be his final for longtime label Top Dawg Entertainment. (As for where he’s stepping to, that’d be his own company, pgLang.)
The Big Steppers are heading out on tour along with Baby Keem and Tanna Leone, Lamar announced on May 13. “Come help Mr. Morale get out of the box,” a poster reads. It’s his first headlining tour since DAMN., not including TDE’s “Championship Tour” in 2018. Lamar hasn’t been much of a big talker himself over the last five years, staying relatively quiet since the April 2017 release of DAMN., which won him a historic Pulitzer Prize. He helmed the Black Panther soundtrack in 2018, before stepping out of the spotlight for the next few years, save for a few features (most recently, on his cousin Baby Keem’s debut album The Melodic Blue). He made a soft return earlier this year, headlining the Super Bowl sans new music, and is set to headline multiple festivals including Glastonbury later this year. For now, the new Kendrick album you’ve waited over five years for is here. Time to step away from the takes and theories on Twitter, and boost that morale by pressing play.
In “The Heart Part 5” Kendrick Lamar highlights complicated famous Black men whose harmful actions speak to larger systemic issues beyond a right-wrong binary.
Lamar’s lyrics speak to this inescapable conundrum, one that we’re grappling with every day as we learn how human powerful Black men really are.
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- In doing so, Lamar asks a simple question: Are they still a part of the culture? If so, what shall we do with them? Powerful Black men engage in morally questionable behavior all the time. Of course, there’s Bill Cosby and R. Kelly, who used their cultural cache to craft a shield of impenetrability, but that’s the extreme end of the spectrum. What about those living in harder-to-define grays that speak to larger systemic issues rather than a right-wrong binary?
- Lamar’s lyrics speak to this inescapable conundrum, one that we’re grappling with every day as we learn how human powerful Black men really are. “Our foundation was trained to accept whatever follows/ Dehumanized, insensitive/ Scrutinize the way we live for you and I/ Enemies shook my hand, I can promise I’ll meet you/ In the land where no equal is your equal/ Never say I ain’t told ya, nah/ In the land where hurt people hurt more people/ F— callin’ it culture.” But if we don’t call it culture, what shall we call it?
- Lamar could’ve chosen to transform into anyone, or even simply remain as himself, but he knows as well as any other artist the value in generating conversation that extends his art and gives it renewed, deeper meaning. He doesn’t operate as a shock jock who considers both negative and positive press to be rewarding. Instead, his work values the beauty of delving into complexity without a surefire pathway forward but a mandate to figure it out.
“The Heart Part 5” is a call to consider the reasons people harm rather than just focusing on the harm itself. It’s not a bid for absolute forgiveness, per se, but for a politics that considers the systemic reasons people step outside their character to do things that seem unimaginable. No one embodies that idea more than Hussle, a rapper, philanthropist, and entrepreneur who was gunned down by someone he knew in front of the store he created in his neighborhood as a pillar of hope for many who are hopeless. He was there that day, March 31, 2019, to give clothing to a friend who’d been recently released from prison — a prime example of his commitment to his community.
Lamar, who featured on Hussle’s first and only official studio album, “Victory Lap,” has been pretty silent publicly about his slain peer, but in this video, he not only embodies his face, but his movements, and uses this position to offer an olive branch of sorts to his accused killer, who will face trial soon. “And to the killer that sped up my demise/ I forgive you, just know your soul’s in question,” Lamar, as Hussle, raps. “I seen the pain in your pupil when that trigger had squeezed/ And though you did me gruesome, I was surely relieved/ I completed my mission, wasn’t ready to leave/ But fulfilled my days, my Creator was pleased.”
Who would take the life of a person so embedded in community uplift? Someone in pain without an outlet. Someone failed by every system designed to catch us, but that so often lets impoverished Black people fall. Someone in need of love, in need of stability, in need of solid mental health care, in need of resources. Lamar recognizes that those who are hurt feel compelled to hurt others, even if they’re unable to articulate their reasoning or if the only person they’re able to hurt is themselves. Why else would Will Smith jeopardize one of the pinnacles of his career — winning the Academy Award he’d been chasing for a decade — to slap his peer for making an untoward joke? Why else would Kanye West, who has openly said he has bipolar disorder though it’s unclear if he’s currently receiving treatment, spend months tracking his ex-wife’s every move and chronicling it on Instagram? Why else would Jussie Smollett fabricate an attack at the expense of his burgeoning career?
In our cultural imagination, these people are brutal. They’re irredeemable. They see violence as a way out of whatever conundrum they’re facing. Or, maybe, as Lamar seems to poke at, it isn’t that simple. We exist in a time that asks us as humans to prescribe to a culture of moral absolutism. Some of that has spawned from the emergence of a radical fascist movement masquerading as conservatism that has declared war on reproductive rights, trans rights and voting rights among others — which side are you on? — but some of it doesn’t serve us well.
If we can’t make space for the possibility that there’s more complexity than what’s on the surface, then what’s the use? As always, Lamar is showcasing his genius by asking those questions to us, holding up a mirror to our behavior, and asking us to dig deep into our brains and our hearts for answers, even when they’re impossible.
