Mr. Morale & the Big Steppers.
Back in college, I was deep in my culty religious phase, visiting my sister, when she told me there was this artist that she thought I would really like. She proceeded to choose a Kendrick Lamar song at random, and it ended up being from untitled unmastered., was just this spooky ethereal beat with no lyrics (at least up top). We stared at each other, wide-eyed—we laughed. She said, “Hold on, let me play another one,” but I was deep in my culty religious phase, and this was enough seemingly secular music for one day, so I told her I was good—we moved on.
Later, at the start of the Black Lives Matter movement, I was hanging out with a Black student org on campus. Somebody played “Alright,” and everybody started jumping up and down together, in this pack, undefeatable. I jumped with them, even though I didn’t know the song. I asked, “Who is this?” and they told me. I proceeded to listen to the rest of To Pimp a Butterfly and then to write a few essays on it for undergrad, later for grad school.
Last week, I read an essay I wrote on To Pimp a Butterfly for a crowd that I knew would ask good questions, would want to know what other Lamar albums I’d listened to and what other hip hop artists and what did I think of the Super Bowl and is Kendrick Lamar as political as he used to be? Prepping for this, I realized that my strongest connection to his work—To Pimp a Butterfly, with bops like “u,” “How Much a Dollar Cost,” “These Walls,” and of course, “Alright”—was now ten years old. I was going to talk about an album that came out in 2015. The problem with my music taste is that a lot of it is older and older stuff that I listened to when I was younger, when I really needed music to help shuffle me along. I needed music to help get me to where I needed to be, which was usually somewhere different than where I was—when I was younger, I was constantly bumping into yet another emotionally precarious situation. I knew what it meant to question who you are and to be enamored and to wonder if you’re doing enough, stuff the music I like from back then reflects on, interrogates. I came up in the era of hip hop where you were straightforward, whatever your intentions, and the era of R&B where you were the same, where you didn’t love somebody with your fingers crossed, with your eyes narrowed, but belted that shit, your heart ever on the line.
I am maybe a chronic nostalgic for earlier renditions of Black culture—even as I love so much of what’s happening these days. I knew I had to update my references if I was going to stand a chance during this Q&A. I relistened to the other albums and found Mr. Morale & the Big Steppers was one I had maybe overlooked as a project (among others—especially good kid, m.a.a.d. city). I was caught up in the hubbub of grad school when Mr. Morale came out, but listening to it back to prep for this talk, what I especially loved about it was the reflection here, the vulnerability, the specificity of going through what you yourself are going through, stuff others can relate to, even if the specifics are yours alone.
I had heard “We Cry Together” when the album came out, and listening to it back, this track was still one of my favorites. It’s just Kendrick and Taylour Paige (who is amazing in Zola) playing characters who are yelling at each other and roasting each other and loving each other in this sort of burned way that happens when you don’t get a break from the stress of being together. The characters in this skit have the kind of love that comes out more resentful than anything but love that is not at all detached. They are yelling at each other á la Baby Boy, which is what my boyfriend said the track is inspired by. Maybe that’s why I love it so much. It doesn’t have its guard up, even though both characters are defensive. It has something to say, and it’s said not as a message packaged with a bow, but in a fight, with both sides saying the most in what they imply, in what they leave unsaid.
“Auntie Diaries” is similar. It’s about transphobia and homophobia in the Black community and how your own perspective changes when it’s your loved ones going through it. How instead of some big idea, queerness and transness becomes personal. You understand—the way you understand anything when it’s happening in real time—the stakes of not loving the people you are here, in part, to love. When it happens to you, you begin to lose all of the pretense and ignorance of a more removed position. I love “Auntie Diaries” for how it isn’t preachy but it is direct. It’s messy in the sense that we watch the speaker transform in real time, learn from his ignorance. He is forgiven by family members he’s hurt because he is able to change. To be a more supportive loved one, to not get swept up in whatever the status quo deems possible, deems good. This song, like “We Cry Together,” seems to be a call to think for yourself (the album is all about this, it seems, “Savior” and “Father Time” send similar messages).
Without going on too long, I guess I loved this album because it shows how—seven years after To Pimp a Butterfly, the album I’m always finding my way back to—Kendrick Lamar is still changing. Look at him in the three years since Mr. Morale, beefing his way to the Super Bowl arena, putting out an album that’s different from all the previous stuff and daring us to say something when this new stuff is all he performs. He is taking his own advice from Mr. Morale, it seems, thinking for himself, allowing himself to be one thing, than another, not trapped in any previous rendition: a spooky, ethereal beat one day, a hit everybody can’t stop singing the next.
Image: Top Dawg Entertainment
