The five-year wait for a new album by Kendrick Lamar – the Pulitzer Prize-winning rapper with the voice of a generation – is finally over.
Mr. Morale & the Big Steppers, Lamar’s fifth studio LP and one of the most anticipated new albums of years, was released overnight in digital services, with high hopes from fans and big questions about his next steps. in his career.
Lamar, 34, is one of the few big figures on the modern music scene – where the regular flow of new content is seen as a necessity – that can make fans wait so long without sacrificing fan loyalty or critical prestige. Even after Lamar’s long absence, “Mr. Morale & the Big Steppers is expected to cause a significant sensation in the first week of Billboard’s album chart.
Lamar has established himself as one of the most ambitious rappers of the millennium generation with his debut on the big label “Good kid, mAAd city” (2012). For his subsequent effort, “To Pimp a Butterfly” (2015), he attracted many players from the prolific jazz scene of Los Angeles, including Kamasi Washington and Thundercat. This album, “Working for Life under Constant Racial Surveillance and How It Can Lead to Many Kinds of Inner Monologues, Some Authorized, Others Self-Disgusted,” as Times pop music critic John Karamanica writes, includes “Alright,” which became unofficial protest anthem Black Lives Matter.
His 2017 album, DAMN, won five Grammy Awards, although it lost the album of the year from Bruno Mars’ 24K Magic. (The rapper has won a total of 14 Grammys.) Lamar, who grew up in Compton, California, and has made the culture and struggles of this area a central part of his music, also became the first rapper to receive a Pulitzer Prize for music. “PO MAKATA” was quoted in 2018 as a “virtuoso collection of songs, united by its folk authenticity and rhythmic dynamism, which offers impactful vignettes that capture the complexity of modern life of African Americans.” Lamar embraced the confession by appearing at a concert with a Pulitzer Kenny banner behind him.
Also in 2018, Lamar and the head of his record company Anthony Tifit (known as Top Dawg) were executive producers of an accompanying album to the movie “Black Panther”. A track from LP, “All the Stars”, by Lamar and SZA, was nominated for an Oscar for Best Original Song. Visual artist Lina Iris Victor has filed a lawsuit alleging that her work was used without permission in the song’s video; the case was settled at the end of 2018.
Since that eventful year, Lamar has maintained a low public profile, making several guest appearances on other artists’ songs, and last year joined Las Vegas rapper (and his cousin) Baby Keem for two songs from Keem’s “The Melodic Blue” album. , including the Grammy-winning Family Ties. In February, Lamar took the stage at the halftime show of the Super Bowl LVI with Dr. Dre, Snoop Dogg, 50 Cent, Eminem and Mary J. Blige, which put him in the strange position of being either the only relative young man on a hip-hop oldies show or – performing songs under the age of ten – maybe he himself is a little going back.
Last Sunday, Lamar released a new music video for “The Heart Part 5” as a teaser for “Mr. Morality. ” There is an eloquent prologue that says “life is a perspective” and then shows Lamar’s face merging with that of a series of black men with varying levels of cultural heroism or controversy: Oh Jay Simpson, Kanye West, Jesse Smolet , Will Smith, Kobe Bryant, Nipsy Huss. The effects of deep fakes were created by Deep Voodoo, a studio of South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone, which is planning additional projects with pgLang, a new company founded by Lamar and Dave Free, longtime collaborators.
The lyrics in “The Heart Part 5” have already been searched for meaning, as well as the image that Lamar shared on Wednesday on the cover of the album, shot by Renel Medrano. He shows Lamar, in a crown of thorns, holding a child while a woman in bed breastfeeds a baby, as an allegorical religious painting.
To some extent, they can also serve as clues to the next stage of Lamar’s career. “Mr. Morale” will be his latest album for Top Dawg Entertainment, or TDE, Lamar’s home since the beginning of his career, releasing his music in partnership with Interscope. He has not announced a new deal with the label, but instead has launched new projects with pgLang, which was announced two years ago as a “multilingual, service company” that will work on a number of creative and commercial projects, from the video for “The Heart Part 5” to a series of new Converse sneakers.
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