Messiah has been revealed to be valid: Kendrick Lamar invites us to hate him

What happens when a leader is forced to confront himself and admit that he carries his wreath of thorns with far less tormented grace than he would like to think?

The answer is "Mr. Morale & the Big Steppers", an album that deals with intergenerational trauma, betrayal, insecurity, masculinity, fame, and the thin line between victim and victim

Maya Kolsky

23/05/2022

Monday, 23 May 2022, 14:14

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There comes a point where your scratches stop being just yours.

Cover of "Mr. Morale & the Big Steppers" by Kendrick Lamar (Photo: PR)

The correct reference point.

Rona Keinan (Photo: Assaf Eini)

A little over a week ago I started listening to "Mr. Morale & the Big Steppers", Kendrick Lamar's fifth studio album, and I haven't stopped since.

An emotional roller coaster of sadness, helplessness, transcendence and shock, which like all of Kendrick Lamar's work - invites repeated listening to shed more layers of meaning, cracking knots, knots, skits, transitions and half-sentences that resonate with each other throughout Kendrick's album and discography. The whole.

Yes, musically it's a wonderful album - a masterpiece of jazzy and emotional piano, chopped and inverted beats, symbols from Florence and the Machine and Nigerian punk bands, angel bands and supporting actors who almost steal the show - but why, for God's sake, I can not put it aside?

And how is it - in light of the lukewarm reviews - that no one else sees this greatness?

Maybe because the point of reference for this album - a compressed and coated hip-hop album with guest appearances by nineties legends like Ghostface Kila and teenage legends like Sampa - is not hip-hop at all.

This album does not try to match Dr. Dre's "The Chronic", Tupac's "2 Pacalypse Now", or even Tribe Cold Quest's "The Low End Theory", and certainly does not try to match or continue Lamar's masterpiece, "To Pimp a Butterfly".

From a lost child to a leader, to a prophet, and finally - to a father.

Kendrick Lamar (Photo: PR)

"Songs for Joel" is an album that is all about complex post-trauma that has been passed down from generation to generation, narrated from the parent's perspective, as experienced by the child.

I first heard it when I was 30, a mother of two little girls.

I whimpered for a week - I cried at work and cried in the shower and cried in bed - and then at the age of 30, a mother of two little girls, I started psychotherapy.

At age 34, a father of two young children, Kendrick Lamar went for treatment.

Our biography is very different, but the motivation was the same motivation: there comes a point where your scratches stop being just yours.

You share them with your children, your spouse, your community.

The stage comes where coming from a dark place and tormenting ceases to be interesting and admirable and noble, and begins to be harmful.

But what happens when that pain fuels a groundbreaking, sophisticated, clever and inspiring creative body?

What happens when your pain gives voice and hope to millions of people?

What happens when a leader, prophet, savior, is forced to confront himself and admit that he carries his wreath of thorns with far less tormented and dull grace than he would like to think?

What Happens is "Mr. Morale & the Big Steppers" - an album that deals with intergenerational trauma, betrayal, insecurity, masculinity, fame, and the thin line between victim and victim.

It took 1855 days for Kendrick to formulate this message, to understand himself and to choose to share with us what he went through.

"I've been going through something," he opens and warns, "Be afraid."

This sentence can be interpreted in two ways - I went through something, or I went through something.

process.

His warning corresponds directly with the song ".FEAR" from his previous album, "DAMN".

In the last verse Kendrick enumerates his current fears - the fear of losing his humility, the fear that his partner (Whitney Alford, if his two children and his girlfriend since high school) will not love him anymore, the fear of losing the creative drive and the love of the audience.

In the five years since that album, all of those fears - except the last one - have threatened to come true.

He suffered from a writing block for two years, adopted the image of a leader, prophet and savior, made his partner miserable with betrayals and gossiping until she threatened to leave him, and now he faces the last fear and turns it back on us - be afraid,

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Since his breakthrough album, "Good Kid, MAAD City," Kendrick warns us that he is not who we think he is, asking himself and us if he deserves our love, how far we will go with him.

In "Mortal Man," the closing song of "To Pimp a Butterfly," he asks us, "When shit hits the fan, are you still a fan?" The ongoing, Michael Jackson (and emphasizes that he gave us "Billy Jean" - do you really think he touched those kids?).

In this context, the collaboration with rapper Kodak Black, who was convicted and ran a prison sentence for sexually assaulting a minor, is a little less surprising.

Kendrick has always played this double game, while at the same time telling stories about women in prostitution and battered women ("Keisha's Song") and continuing to sleep with fans and exploit his power ("These Walls").

Tupac, Kendrick's outspoken idol, himself was convicted of rape and sat on it in jail, while at the same time being considered one who also represents the pains of black women thanks to songs like "Brenda's Got a Baby".

No wonder the album annoyed a lot of people in the first days after its release.

Aside from collaborating with Kodak Black, Kendrick conjures up singer Er Kelly and chats about the culture of cancellation as if women who have been harmed have no meaning at all, and all sorts of irrational purist moves.

Considering his own behavior that he condemns throughout the album, the fear of the culture of cancellation seems much less like some point of principle in favor of freedom of expression, and more like the behavior of someone who has something to hide.

But Kendrick does not hide.

More than that, Kendrick himself expects his partner, who is reminiscent of R. Kelly (and Trump, and Harvey Weinstein) during their bitter quarrel in "We Cry Together," to stop listening to his music, and throws it in her face when she compares it to him.

So where does he really stand?

Nowhere.

This whole issue of cancellation or non-cancellation ultimately obscures the real point of the album - the therapeutic process itself.

Like every Kendrick album, "Mr. Morale" is not just a collection of songs but a story, an epic, consisting of two parts - the crisis and the treatment, the result and the cause.

The story takes us through the emptiness of glory, the pressures of one who has crowned himself a prophet and savior, his crumbling relationships and addiction to sex and money, to the inner dig that ends in identifying the complex trauma that sits on him (and the black community) and dismantling it.

From the opening point of the album it is made clear that this is not just a private trauma but a collective one, injuries that an entire community carries and continues to pry into scabs, because psychological treatment, as some reviews I read, is a white matter and not a worthy subject for a black rapper.

Beyond being a racist stance, it misses the depths - those who are in a state of survival cannot look inward.

It's expensive, it's exhausting, it's far too painful.

"In the gray house at 5 Dov Hoz Street" also did not speak psychologically, but it was clear that there are things hes hesitant to mention, and every second and third generation of the Holocaust knows exactly what is the walking zombie trying to calm the crisis, fill the pain with something else.

At the peak of the album, Kendrick is weaned off his evasion and compensation mechanisms - extravagance, sex, the savior complex that spares him an inward look, and reaches the heart of the matter.

He is finally free to look at the personal and social trauma of the black community - sexual violence against children, women, men, trauma passed down from generation to generation through victims and victims, toxic masculinity designed to compensate for the helplessness felt as children unable to protect relatives or hurt themselves.

Kendrick scatters hints for the main and bland throughout the album through tap shoes that once stamped with artistic precision and once with wild hysteria, like someone who talks himself into knowing his feelings instead of feeling them, trying to win a fight with his partner through intellectual arguments about women's hypocrisy.

For those unfamiliar with Kendrick and his tendency to play characters, this sounds appalling.

The truth is that it sounds horrible even to those who do.

Kendrick, a big fan of 'show, do not tell', gives a live demonstration of his horrific treatment of his partner in an orchestrated, filmed and superbly played quarrel, losing about half of his listeners along the way.

I promised you I'm human shit, here's the proof.

But whoever stays with him to the end is rewarded with causality and depth, even if it can sometimes sound like the great excuse book for rapists.

When and why does a victim become a victim, and what does it take to stop it?

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"You wake up, the pillow next to you is still hot / We all know it's a lie / She went years ago"

("You wake up", Rona Keinan)

(Kendrick Lamar," Count Me Out ")

We throw our scratches violently at everyone around us.

For our children who experience moments of alienation and guilt that they do not know how they have earned, for our spouses who are supposed to contain us emotionally while we actively hurt them, for the friends who collapse under a mountain of expectations and debauchery.

And they leave, or continue to suffer and then leave, until we finally fold ourselves into treatment.

Trauma, and specifically sexual trauma, is at the heart of this album - sexual trauma as an idea, and not as something that Kendrick himself experiences, and it is felt.

Because even in "Mother I Sober," Kendrick put himself on the side of the offenders, not the victims.

We know the issue is important, we know women suffer terribly, but as we see time and time again ‘mercy is not equal to appreciation or regulation.

We all know Brenda is poor, but we also know she has no brain.

The sexual trauma is at the heart of the album, but Kendrick in general is on the other side, rhyme about how much he hurt his partner, how much he took advantage of authority, how much he did it in a frenzy that deprived these women of their humanity.

And that brings us to Kodak Black.

Why is he there?

Because Kendrick says there is no difference.

He put himself and Kodak in the same basket, on the same spectrum, and along with himself he also put millions of other men who did not sit in jail for sexual assault, but used women as their trash can for emotional violence and insecurity.

Because it's the same shit, comes from the same place, and requires healing equally.

He gives here an almost Misandrian thesis which holds that yes, all men, because all men carry with them a certain education and certain experiences.

Violence against women is constant, the question is what the volume is at which it is expressed.

So why does he hate the culture of cancellation?

For he is a Christian - he who has not sinned from his days will throw the first stone.

Public condemnation does not serve the moral duty to forgive, to turn the other cheek, to help the lost sinner, but it also itself serves the hubris of the condemner - separating the good from the bad, producing a dichotomy in what is actually a scale.

Sex, money, murder.

Kendrick has referred to all of these in the past as sins whose solution is religious redemption.

In this album he realizes that even though he is a religious person who is actively seeking redemption - not at all Kung Fu Kenny who ignores God's call - he still suffers from exactly the same failures.

It is not a sin in the face of being redeemed, it is a toxic masculinity in the face of treatment, it is a reconstruction of traumas to gain control and defense mechanisms that push more precious status symbols into a hole that cannot be filled.

It is not before God - it is before himself.

In "Auntie Diaries" (which in itself deserves 1000 words) he sobers up in front of religious institutions and protects his trans cousin from the preacher who condemns her.

The moment he comes to terms with it and comes to a deeper understanding of the things that have happened to it, is also the moment when he comes to a deeper understanding of the pressures that are exerted on him to prove masculinity in a society that punishes for any deviation.

Sinners and redeemed stand in the same place as long as they do not deal with the urge to crush others to lift themselves up.

It is the momentum of the trauma that continues to unfold.

But he does not call it an intergenerational transmission of trauma.

He calls it an intergenerational curse.

Brewing curses become blessings - a central theme in "Damn".

The transformation in the album - Kendrick's treatment, the transition of his trans relatives, Whitney's disgust - also touches on the curse itself.

And this is what he does at the end of "Mother I Sober" - he does not condemn the perpetrators, he releases them.

How do you become an intergenerational curse?

What is the opposite of commemorating a trauma?

According to Kendrick - her release by creating a different, different story.

Here comes Baby Kim, Kendrick's younger cousin, who recently won a Grammy for the two's collaboration, "Family Ties," and is featured on the new album.

Kendrick sees his cousin - and this has been hinted at several times as part of the album - as the younger version of himself.

Like any new parent (and in fact, like any person in care), Kendrick deals a lot with fatherhood.

He has always been full of gratitude for his father's presence in his life, in a community where many fathers die or in prison, but in "Father Time" he admits for the first time that it is not enough to just be a father - no matter what kind of father you are.

If you are emotionally restrained, not showing vulnerability, defending yourself even in front of your son and explaining it as a “Tuff Love”, you have not done much other than roll on your trauma and scratches.

This duality is reflected in his relationship with Baby Kim - a rapper without a real dad, but with a living, emotionally restrained and damaged musical dad.

Kim is opposed to Black.

Is the fix, so Kendrick feels a commitment to being a better character,

"Mirror", the last song on the album, which channels the musicality of Stevie Wonder, is supposed to be a song of completion and mental health, of a completed treatment, but it is not really there, just on the way.

He tells us "I choose me, I'm sorry".

He has not finished mixing, he has work to do and he can not be there for us.

But it's a song where "I choose me" is equal in intensity to "I'm sorry", an incomplete decision and eaten up with guilt.

To some extent choosing for myself, sorry, is a statement that stands not only in front of the world and all those who are waiting for it as inspiration, prophet, savior - but also in the face of the trauma itself and its demand for more and more energies.

Energies of revenge, of correction and of commemoration, when a victim becomes a victim.

I'm afraid we will not get another Kendrick album in the near future, a combination of the circumstances of his mental state and the end of his contract with TDE (this album is the fifth and final in the contract against them).

"I choose me, I'm sorry" is a healthy choice, and anyone who loves Kendrick not as a savior, but as the person he introduced us to throughout his discography, should support it.

"The album cover hints at this parting story and what's behind it. If in" To Pimp a Butterfly "Kendrick held an anonymous baby and stood with his face forward, as the community leader, here he holds his baby and stands with his back to the camera. Pimp "was the future of the black community and the burden that Kendrick took on when he turned outside." Mr. Morel's baby is literally a baby - not on the grass of the White House but in a small, dilapidated room. Perspective, changed priorities, and we - the fans, the community,

"Mother I Sober" ends when Whitney says "You did it, you broke the generational curse. Say thank you, Dad."

His daughter, Uzi, repeats after her, "Thank you Dad, thank you Mom, thank you brother."

In doing so, she plays the role played by Kendrick's parents in the penultimate song in "Good Kid, MAAD City," Kendrick the leader in "To Pimp a Butterfly," and Cousin Carl the Preacher in "DAMN."

Kendrick underwent a transformation, as he promised, and became from a lost child a leader, a prophet, and finally - a father.

(Kendrick Lamar, "Mirror")

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