The five-year wait for a new album from Kendrick Lamar – the Pulitzer-anointed voice of a generation rapper – is finally over.
“Mr. Morale & the Big Steppers,” Lamar’s fifth studio LP and one of the most highly anticipated new albums in years, was released overnight on digital services, with huge fan expectations and big questions about his next one. career steps.
Lamar, 34, is one of the few major figures in today’s music scene – where a regular stream of new content is seen as a necessity – who can keep fans waiting that long without sacrificing fan loyalty or critical prestige. Even after Lamar’s extended absence, “Mr. Morale & the Big Steppers” is expected to make a big splash in its opening week on the Billboard album chart.
Lamar established himself as one of the most ambitious rappers of the millennial generation with his major-label debut, “good boy, crazy city” (2012). For his sequel, “To Pimp a Butterfly” (2015), he brought in a host of players from Los Angeles’ prolific jazz scene, including Kamasi Washington and Thundercat. That album, “a work about living under constant racialized surveillance and how that can lead to many kinds of internal monologues, some powerful, some self-loathing,” such as the Times pop music critic Jon Caramanica wrote:including ‘Alright’, which became an unofficial Black Lives Matter protest national anthem†
His 2017 album, “DAMN.” won five Grammy Awards, though it lost album of the year to Bruno Mars’s “24K Magic”. (The rapper has won a total of 14 Grammy wins.) Growing up in Compton, California, Lamar, who has made the culture and struggles of that area a central part of his music, also became the first rapper to receive the Pulitzer Prize for received music. “DAMNED.” used to be quoted in 2018 as “a virtuoso song collection united by its local authenticity and rhythmic dynamism that offers poignant vignettes capturing the complexities of modern African American life.” Lamar embraced the award and appeared in concert with a banner “Pulitzer Kenny” behind him.
Also in 2018, Lamar and the head of his record company, Anthony Tiffith (known as Top Dawg), were the executive producers of a accompanying album to the movie ‘Black Panther’. A song from the LP, “All the Stars,” by Lamar and SZA, was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Original Song. The visual artist Lina Iris Viktor lamented, say her work has been used without permission in the video of the track; the lawsuit was settled end of 2018.
Since that eventful year, Lamar has maintained a low public profile, with a handful of guest appearances on songs by other artists and, last year, teamed up with Las Vegas rapper (and his cousin) Baby Keem for two songs on Keem’s album “The Melodic Blue.” ‘, including the Grammy-winning ‘Family Ties.’ In February, Lamar took the stage at the Super Bowl LVI halftime show next to dr. Dre, Snoop Dogg, 50 Cent, Eminem and Mary J. Blige, which put him in the odd position of either being the only relative youngster on a hip-hop oldies show or – playing songs that are as old as ten years – maybe a bit of a throwback myself.
Last Sunday, Lamar released a new music video, “The heart part 5”, as a teaser for “Mr. Moral.” It has a spoken prologue stating “life is perspective” then shows Lamar’s face merging with that of a series of black men of varying levels of cultural heroism or controversy: OJ Simpson, Kanye West, Jussie Smollett, Will Smith, Kobe Bryant, Nipsey hustle.The deepfake effects were created by deep voodooa studio of “South Park” creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone, which is planning further projects with pgLang, a new company founded by Lamar and Dave Free, a longtime collaborator.
The lyrics in “The Heart Part 5” have already been published combed out for meaning, just like the image Lamar shared of the albums on Wednesday cover, photographed by Renell Medrano. It shows Lamar, in a crown of thorns, holding a child while a woman on a bed nurses a baby, like an allegorical religious painting.
To a certain extent, these can also serve as starting points for the next phase of Lamar’s career. “Mr. Morale” will be his last album for Top Dawg Entertainment, or TDE, Lamar’s home since the beginning of his career, who released his music in collaboration with Interscope. He has not announced a new label deal, but instead is new projects started with pgLang, what was announced two years ago as a “multilingual service company” that will work on a range of creative and commercial projects, from the video for “The Heart Part 5” to a series of new Converse sneakers†
