Kendrick Lamar albums are notably dense: good kid, M.A.A.D. City is one of the great modern coming-of-age works of art, To Pimp a Butterfly is a lush and didactic examination of Black culture, and DAMN. sees him wrestling nervously with his stratospheric fame and tremendous influence. Mr. Morale & The Big Steppers, Lamar’s eagerly awaited fifth LP, is no exception. It’s been five years since DAMN, the 34-year-old vocalist has a lot on his mind, and it feels like he airs it all over the record’s two discs (it’s being called a double album even though it’s shorter than To Pimp a Butterfly). He delves into celebrity hero worship on “Savior,” reflects candidly about watching a family member transition on “Auntie Diaries,” and shares his reaction to Kanye and Drake burying the hatchet on “Father Time.”
Musically, the album arguably covers more ground than Kendrick ever has, with features ranging from Portishead’s Beth Gibbons to Kodak Black to actor Taylour Paige. “Die Hard” is a gleaming Los Angeles joy ride, “We Cry Together” offers menacing boom bap courtesy of The Alchemist, “Crown” feels like a bleary-eyed Lamar writing on a cocktail napkin at a piano lounge.
Given the time he takes between releases, each time Kendrick releases an album he’s reckoning with a vastly different world than he did on his previous project. Mr. Morale is wide-ranging, ambitious, thoughtful, and occasionally messy, and it’s certainly full of food for thought. Here are some of GQ’s biggest takeaways from our initial listen.
Kendrick weighs in on the vaccine debate (and Kyrie Irving) on “Savior.” There’s a complicated relationship between some hip-hop artists and vaccines in general. But Kendrick is the rare artist who actually stays out of the spotlight when he’s out of the spotlight, so we really had no sense of how he felt about the COVID-19 vaccines. He opens Mr. Morale’s “Savior” with a Charles Barkley-ian critique of people who look to celebrities as societal bellwethers, and on the second verse really zeros in on the issue of inoculation. In classic Kendrick fashion, he doesn’t just come right out and share his opinion, but paints a picture of a devout Christian who was a vaccine skeptic…until they got sick.
“Seen a Christian say the vaccine mark of the beast/Then he caught COVID and prayed to Pfizer for relief/Then I caught COVID and started to question Kyrie/Will I stay organic or hurt in this bed for two weeks?” he raps, referring to Kyrie Irving’s refusal to get vaccinated for nebulous reason, which made him ineligible to play for much of the NBA season. .
It’s easy to be anti-vaccine until you’re ill, in other words. Irving has already responded to “Savior” in classic cryptic fashion, telling his Twitch audience, “That’s definitely gonna go over people’s heads but that’s part of art. It sparks conversation. I love it. I’m not mad, I’m not indifferent, I’m just grateful.”
“We Cry Together” is an early contender for the album’s biggest lightning rod. As early reactions started pouring in, fans and critics seemed particularly split on disc one’s “We Cry Together,” a venomous back-and-forth that many have likened to Eminem’s “Kim.” Kendrick and Zola star Taylour Paige play a toxic couple who shout at each other over a grimy Alchemist beat. “I swear, I’m tired of these emotional-ass, ungrateful-ass bitches,” Kendrick seethes as the first verse opens, while Paige fires back “Always act like your shit don’t stink, motherfucker, grow up.” Both performers put their all into the track emotionally–Kendrick’s voice even breaks the way it did when he was rapping in similarly distraught fashion on Lil Wayne’s “Mona Lisa”–but the clunky hook and awkward (though perhaps realistic) transition from fighting to sex scans a little weird in an audio-only format.
It’s a messy song, which is obviously kind of the point, so while it’s probably not going to get a lot of spins outside the context of the album, it’s at least interesting to hear Kendrick still trying new things at this phase of his career.
Kendrick uses his family to offer his perspective on trans rights in “Auntie Diaries.” While hip-hop is slowly becoming more accepting of the LGBTQ+ community, it’s still uncommon for an A-list rapper to really weigh in on a topic like gender identity. Kendrick does so on “Auntie Diaries,” a track about two people transitioning and the subsequent ripple effects.
The first two verses focus on Lamar’s trans uncle, and how he was treated by other members of the family. The final few verses deal with Mary-Ann, a trans woman who we were first introduced to as Demetrius on Good Kid m.A.A.d City. Over the course of the song, Kendrick seems to grow up, from peppering the second verse with homophobic insults the way grade schoolers would, to reckoning with the relationship between different kinds of slurs. He even harkens back to a moment in 2018 when he brought a white fan on stage at a festival to perform “M.A.A.D. City,” who used the n-word in her performance to the dismay of the crowd.
But Kendrick’s decision to use anti-queer language in the song has been met with some criticism, with many making the point that he could’ve touched on the same themes without using a word that has such venomous connotations when said by heterosexual cis people. “Just listened to Kendrick’s ‘Auntie Diaries.’ I want to reflect. I’m thankful he spoke in favor of love [and] acceptance of trans sibs — even after admitting what society did to them first. The ‘f**got’ threw me off because it isn’t his word to use. But that’s his point at the end,” The Trevor Project’s Preston Mitchum wrote on Twitter.
Kendrick can’t understand why Kanye made up with Drake. Kendrick is often willing to acknowledge his own shortcomings. He rarely takes a holier than thou approach, and that’s something that has kept his music relatable and vulnerable even as he’s become one of the biggest stars in the entire music industry. We get a glimpse of this on “Father Time,” where Lamar shares his reaction to the seeming resolution of the venomous feud between Drake and Kanye West: “When Kanye got back with Drake, I was slightly confused/Guess I’m not mature as I think, got some healin’ to do,” he admits.
The lyrics are endearingly candid–we don’t all forgive and forget in the same way and on the same timeline. But they also tie into the larger theme of the song, which is around the beliefs we inherit from our fathers and how they continue to shape us. Kendrick has rapped about his dad before, chiefly on DAMN.’s cinematic closer “Duckworth,” and here he talks openly about how his father taught him to present a tough exterior and repress his emotions (“Daddy issues, hid my emotions, never expressed myself/Men should never show feelings, being sensitive never helped”).
The line also raises eyebrows because Kendrick’s relationship with Drake hasn’t always seemed smooth. In fact, despite Drake’s early embrace of Kendrick in 2011 and a pair of collaborations, things have seemed icy between the two ever since Kendrick’s infamously confrontational “Control” verse. (The “ghostwriter” line on To Pimp a Butterfly single “King Kunta” is interpreted by many as a jab at Drake for the whole Quentin Miller controversy.) Most of this could arguably of course just be media and fans trying to strum up conflict where there is none. But insiders have noted there was a real point where tensions almost reached a fever pitch. Since Kendrick frequently bigs up Kanye and has worked with him often, some people are taking the line as him saying he wouldn’t be so quick to bury his own issues with Drake.
Kendrick gets real about his relationship with Whitney Alford. We’ve never heard Kendrick talk about his romantic life with this level of candor before. Lamar got engaged to Whitney Alford, his childhood sweetheart, in 2015 and they now have two children together. But clearly, there have been some fraught moments in their relationship, and Kendrick gets into them here. On “Worldwide Steppers,” he says he had a “lust addiction,” and talks about how his involvement with other women put a strain on his relationship with Whitney. On “Mother I Sober,” Kendrick seems to cop to infidelity. He raps, “Insecurities that I project, sleepin’ with other women/Whitney’s hurt, the pure soul I know, I found her in the kitchen/Askin’ God, ‘Where did I lose myself? And can it be forgiven?’”
The story ends on a note of reconciliation, as Alford can be heard talking to Kendrick at the end of “Mother I Sober.” “You did it, I’m proud of you. You broke a generational curse,” she says, before an adorable interjection from their daughter. Whitney and Lamar’s children come up again on “Rich Spirit,” in which a fiery Kendrick bucks back against critics, chiefly those whose lives revolve around being online while he has real-world obligations as a partner and father. “Takin’ my baby to school, then I pray for her/’Cause you bitches ain’t never been cool, writin’ testament,” he says.