Mr. Morale & the Big Steppers ★★★★★
Kendrick Lamar
“Stop tap-dancing around the conversation,” Kendrick Lamar’s fiancee Whitney tells him on the rapper’s long-awaited fifth album, Mr. Morale & the Big Steppers. “Tap tap. Tappity-tap,” the shoes go, for the third or fourth time, as Lamar circles around the heart of the matter. It’s a running gag and, over 73 completely riveting minutes, it’s sometimes a pretty dark one.
Pulitzer Prize-winning rapper Kendrick Lamar is back with his fifth album.Credit: Universal Music Group
Hip hop royalty is a job that rewards fancy footwork, so good luck plucking sonic and poetic innovation from the pratfalls of violence, narcissism, materialism, misogyny, homophobia and hyper-macho posturing that dog the crown. Especially if you’re emotionally exhausted from hiding that thing that happened when you were five.
“Tell them,” Whitney urges her partner. “Tell them the truth.”
It’s an album that demands patience. It’s complicated. But whether you’ve been following Kendrick Lamar Duckworth’s story from the streets of Compton circa Good Kid, M.A.A.D City or you just pricked up your ears when he won that Pulitzer for DAMN in 2018, this is the top-tier contender’s essential, potentially final act of revelation; an album that upends the throne.
The cover of Mr. Morale & the Big Steppers.Credit:
It starts by torching the estate: “I was 28 years young, twenty mill’ in tax/Bought a couple of mansions just for practice,” he boasts. Women, jewellery, watches, cars and guns get ticked off by name but guess what, they didn’t fix what was broke. “I grieve different,” goes the refrain, strings quietly menacing like a dam that will finally break somewhere deep on the album’s second disc.
The first mention of therapy sets up a slow-dawning theme but first, Lamar ratchets up the pressures and delusions of heroism in the age of the “fake woke”. N95 nails his spitfire rap credentials to the mast while he punches holes in the ship: “You entertain the mediocre, need to stop it/You entertainin’ old friends when they toxic/What’s your life like? Bullshit and gossip.”
Tracks that follow sharpen the focus to personal confessions: sex addiction in Worldwide Steppers; the hereditary curse of toxic masculinity in Father Time. “Daddy issues, f--- everybody, go get your money, son/ Protect yourself, trust nobody”. Whitney, meanwhile, is in his ear to “reach out to Eckhart”. That’s Eckhart Tolle, Oprah’s self-help guru of choice, who makes a few surreal appearances later.
First comes the poisonous peak of Disc 1, destined to be the album’s most notorious track. We Cry Together is an expletive-loaded screaming match with Taylour Paige that slams though accusations of infidelity, arrested development, gaslighting, power trippin’, guilt trippin’, egotism, narcissism, Trumpism, “fake” feminism and much more. The family home picks through smashed glass on an escalating bum-note piano arpeggio towards a truce born of weakness, not resolution. “This is what the world sounds like,” Whitney says.
Mr. Morale & the Big Steppers is not about sonic innovation. Lamar sounds supremely comfortable in his own distinctive jazz-tinged world where elegant piano maintains a harmonically transporting thread and songs can ambush your heart in a way that’s more Marvin Gaye than Dr Dre. The climactic numbers on each disc, Purple Hearts and Mirror, are irresistible inroads for hip hop agnostics.
Lamar onstage at Lollapalooza Buenos Aires in 2019.Credit: Getty Images
But it’s his emotional terrain, especially on the revealing second disc, that’s likely to perpetuate a reputation that already transcends the genre. It’s telling that he mostly refrains here from the cross-promotional allegiances that have become increasingly common across hip-hop. Kodak Black, Ghostface Killah and Lamar’s cousin Baby Keem are among the exceptions, all notable for different reasons, but when he mentions king-hitters Kanye and Drake in passing, it’s only to say that he finds them confusing.
In the home stretch it’s clear that he’s come not to defend rap’s crown of thorns, but to abdicate in favour of the sometimes fraught family pictured on the album’s cover. “I can’t please everybody,” goes the affecting piano-vocal refrain of Crown, a final, downcast meditation before he lets loose the floodgates of inter-generational shame and abuse that have led him here.
Twin epics Auntie Diaries and Mother I Sober, the latter with its crushing refrain sung by Beth Gibbons of Portishead, are sublime, poetic purges that manage to transcend the trauma of childhood repression and self-recrimination to soar on exhilarating swells of orchestration. Lamar raps about God a lot, but here you can practically feel the Almighty enter the room.
Much has been made of Lamar’s declaration that this will be his last album – that is, for his current rap label Top Dawg Entertainment. What that means for future recordings is deliberately vague, but he’s clearly drawing a line at the end of this one.
“Personal gain off my pain, it’s nonsense/Darlin’ my demons is off the leash for a moshpit,” he raps. It’s a disco mosh pit, baby, complete with Barry White strings. “I choose me, I’m sorry,” goes the elated refrain. Who can blame him?
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