“Father Time,” “Crown,” “Mother I Sober,” “Rich (Interlude),” and “Savior (Interlude)” luxuriate in orchestral flourishes and cascading piano notes.
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“We Cry Together,” opener “United in Grief,” and “Worldwide Steppers” lean into storytelling and wordplay over productions that reward the tricks Lamar pulls, like the elaborate set pieces in Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater games. But really, there are three distinct threads braided into its 18-song track list. (People think Kodak is here as provocation and counterpoint, a voice from the streets to play off the mansions and Jeeps, but what if he and Kendrick are just on similar faith journeys?)Īs it pivots from bubbly love songs to prickly tracks about relationship woes, the album almost feels as if someone has tried to fit the honest unhappiness of Speakerboxx and the giddy romanticism of The Love Below into the same frame.
Multiple guest spots from Kodak Black - the talented South Florida rapper and aspiring Hebrew Israelite convert whose legal woes include pleading guilty to a lesser charge after a 2016 sexual assault allegation and a 2019 gun charge pardoned in 2021 by Donald Trump - don’t square with songs for women or calls for men to end cycles of abuse. The Tolle stuff and the faint moral skepticism sit weirdly with the Christianity, but that’s nothing new for fans of Lamar, whose last album, DAMN., floated Black Hebrew Israelite ideas the church does not approve of. Like good kid, m.A.A.d city’s “Swimming Pools (Drank),” Morale’s “Father Time” - home to a soul-crushing chorus from Sampha about numbing pain with hard liquor - is a song that talks about the perils of drinking that will also make a killer drinking anthem. He thinks woke scolds are hurting discourse, but he has a single denouncing materialism, and in other songs, he catalogues jewelry he has never worn and pools he never swam in. He also wants to map out the hundred ways we’re fucking up. He wants us to know he’s human and fallible just like us. Kendrick doesn’t want to be seen as a leader, but he is aware that there are people who take it to heart when he speaks. These songs come with a light sprinkling of teachings from Oprah-approved German self-help guru Eckhart Tolle and heavy helpings of spirituality and psychoanalysis. “The cat is out the bag,” Lamar raps in “Savior,” “I am not your savior.” He’s leading by example, though, staging a loud vanishing act and inviting listeners to spend less time pocket watching and gossiping and more time getting in tune with their greater purpose. The album’s cross-purposes are intriguing.
Morale is a perfectionist’s swan dive into his imperfections. It is ditching narrative cohesion for messy sprawl, gesturing to pop but insisting on lethargic tempos, and calling out commercialism from the comfort of wealth. It is forcing uncomfortable conversations. Morale is an album of provocations and denunciations and affirmations and realizations, a clump of ideas that don’t necessarily complement one another, a dramatization of the expurgation and upheaval that come before reconciliation and healing. He knows it’s not the message people want he feels it’s the one they need.
Morale & the Big Steppers, delivers this news with an air of apology. Dot peaced on us, got himself a therapist, and came back to share what he learned, to redraw some boundaries, and to refuse the titles of Voice of a Generation and Best Rapper Alive. The Book of Matthew says no man can serve two masters K. He wants to unpack generational trauma and unlearn toxic thought patterns.
But he wants to be a better partner and son and nephew and cousin - a more present person in the relationships that matter the most to him. People want the guy who wrote “ Alright” and “Sing About Me, I’m Dying of Thirst” and “The Blacker the Berry” to come back and tell us we have what it takes to survive the compounding conflicts of our time, to save the soul of a divided nation.