Lamar, Kendrick

The Pulitzer Prize-winning social commentator rapper returns after five years with “Mr. Morale & the Big Steppers,” an album about what’s broken on the inside.Kendrick Lamar has long extracted maximum power from his blend of the interior and the global, making him a particular kind of generational superstar — one who shoulders the weight of others. In a few places on “Mr. Morale & the Big Steppers,” the rapper’s fifth studio album, he laments from the top of the mountain he’s spent the last decade climbing. These are depleted, lonely incantations: “I can’t please everybody,” “I choose me, I’m sorry.”Lamar, 34, is an astonishing technician, a keen observer of Black life, a proletarian superhero, an artist who reckons with moral weight in his work. But judging by “Mr. Morale,” which was released on Friday, he is also anguished, ravaged by his past and grappling with how to make tomorrow better, besieged by a collision of self-doubt and obstinacy. And fallible, too.Five years have passed since Lamar’s last album, the Pulitzer Prize-winning “DAMN.,” and even that gap has the air of the moral to it — Lamar as pop culture refusenik, a thinker who discourses at no one’s pace but his own.But maybe five years is just how long it takes to shake free of the long echoes of other people’s perceptions and expectations. The Lamar of “Mr. Morale” sounds lonely and tense, increasingly aware of the burdens placed upon him by his upbringing and potentially unsure about his capacities for overcoming them. He does these calculations over some of the most desolate production of his career. He is withdrawing in more ways than one.If “To Pimp a Butterfly” from 2015 was Lamar’s social polemical peak, and “DAMN.” from 2017 was his anxiety album — the product of realizing how his very private thoughts were becoming very public and scrutinized — then “Mr. Morale” is about retreating within and pondering your accountability to the person in the mirror, and to the handful of people you keep closest. (A recurrent voice on the album is that of Whitney Alford, Lamar’s longtime romantic partner, though perhaps no longer, depending how you read “Mother I Sober.”)The Return of Kendrick LamarThe five-year wait for a new album by the Pulitzer Prize-winning rapper is finally over.New Album: Kendrick Lamar’s fifth studio LP, “Mr. Morale & the Big Steppers,” is one of the most ardently anticipated albums in years.Review: “Mr. Morale & the Big Steppers” is an album about what’s broken on the inside, our music critic writes.Pulitzer Prize: In 2017, Lamar became the first rapper to receive the Pulitzer Prize for music, winning the award for his album “DAMN.”2014 Profile: Eight years ago, a young M.C. from Los Angeles was on a quest to become the best rapper in the world.This begins with family, and two of the most moving songs on the album deal with Lamar’s parents. On “Father Time” he details how his father raised him to be unforgiving of himself, and to bury his uncertainties: “Men should never show feelings, being sensitive never helped/His mama died, I asked him why he goin’ back to work so soon?/His first reply was, ‘Son, that’s life, the bills got no silver spoon.’”“Mother I Sober” — which features sagging vocals from Beth Gibbons of Portishead, a missed opportunity — traverses domestic abuse and Lamar’s frustration at his own childhood inaction, but then telescopes out to his own failings, in the form of infidelity. Hearing Lamar apparently confess to this kind of intimate disloyalty is part of an immolation of the ethical persona he’s cultivated for years (or perhaps had thrust upon him — “Like it when they pro-Black, but I’m more Kodak Black,” he raps on “Savior”).He goes even further on “We Cry Together,” an outlandish tit-for-tat about a profoundly broken relationship, with the role of his partner vividly speak-rapped by the actress Taylour Paige. The song pulses with a startlingly raw toxicity, even if construed as character work. It is also, perhaps perversely, one of the most musically successful songs on the album, a shuddering alignment of rhythm and sentiment.The opposite is true of “Auntie Diaries,” in which Lamar raps about two people close to him who came out as transgender. He does this in an earnest but clunky way — there is misgendering, and there is deadnaming. And in his retelling of his childhood ignorance, he invokes, and repeats, a homophobic slur several times. These are faux pas, and so is the airless, joyless production — it is as sonically uncommitted as it is apathetic.Lamar is the rare popular musician who receives almost universal acclaim, not only artistically, but often as a kind of paragon of virtue. But there are all sorts of complexities and heterodoxies that are suffocated by uncomplicated embrace. “Mr. Morale” appears to be a corrective for that — it is an album that aims to repel, or if not quite that, then at least is at peace with alienating some of its audience.It is also a reminder of how rare it is these days to encounter popular music with unstable politics, and a gut punch to the presumption that progressive art and ideas always go hand in hand.On two different songs, Lamar expresses a kind of sympathy for R. Kelly, who has been convicted of sex trafficking and racketeering. And one of the voices that appears throughout the album is that of the Florida rapper Kodak Black, who has in the past faced sexual assault charges. (He later pleaded guilty to lesser assault charges.) Opting to work with Kodak is both creative and political provocation — it suggests Lamar believes in redemption (or perhaps that everyone is flawed, some more publicly than others), but also feels like an implicit rebuke to those who don’t see poetry, pain or progress in the work of Kodak or his peers. (Indeed, it has plenty of all of that.)These are dares of a kind — in a way, they are the most public-minded decisions on this album, which often feels insular, lyrically and musically. “Mr. Morale” is probably Lamar’s least tonally consistent work. Unlike on “DAMN.,” where Lamar tried to smooth the edges of his songs and arrived at his most commercially appealing album, “Mr. Morale” — on which Lamar works with his frequent collaborators Sounwave and DJ Dahi, Beach Noise, Duval Timothy, and others — is rangy and structurally erratic, full of mid-song beat switches, sorrowful piano and a few moments of dead air.At his best, Lamar embodies the deep creative promise of the art form of rapping — he provides hope that there are ways of agglomerating syllables that haven’t yet been thought of, that word and cadence and meaning can still collide in unanticipated ways. His voice is squeaky and malleable, and it’s often most riveting when untethered from simple rhythms. But there is a difference between effort and achievement. And when Lamar is under-delivering — say, on “Crown” — the air fills with expectancy: Surely more is just around the corner?That said, one gift of the Lamar aura is the way he frees those around him to reach for transcendence. Ghostface Killah, a veteran so accepted as a lyrical hulk as to be taken for granted, appears on “Purple Hearts” with an astonishing, floating verse. Lamar’s cousin Baby Keem also shines on “Savior (Interlude),” as does Kodak Black on “Silent Hill.”Such is the enviable house Lamar has built over the last decade, one that demands more of everyone who visits. But “Mr. Morale” reveals him to be a titan who is a victim of idolatry. Lamar knows that in truth, no one is a hero, and maybe no one should be. He is just a man. Allow him that.Kendrick Lamar“Mr. Morale & the Big Steppers”(pgLang/Top Dawg Entertainment/Aftermath/Interscope) More

Since his 2017 album, “DAMN.,” the California rapper has won seven Grammys and the Pulitzer Prize for music. “Mr. Morale,” his fifth LP, is expected to make a big splash on the charts.The five-year wait for a new album by 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 ardently anticipated new albums in years, was released overnight on digital services, with big hopes from fans and big questions looming about his next career steps.Lamar, 34, is one of the few major figures in the contemporary music scene — where a regular flow of new content is seen as a necessity — who can keep fans waiting for such a long stretch without sacrificing fan loyalty or critical prestige. Even after Lamar’s extended absence, “Mr. Morale & the Big Steppers” is expected to make a sizable opening-week splash on the Billboard albums chart.Lamar cemented himself as one of the most ambitious rappers of the millennial generation with his major-label debut, “good kid, m.A.A.d. city” (2012). For his follow-up effort, “To Pimp a Butterfly” (2015), he brought in a host of players from Los Angeles’s fertile jazz scene, including Kamasi Washington and Thundercat. That album, “a work about living under constant racialized surveillance and how that can lead to many types of internal monologues, some empowered, some self-loathing,” as the Times pop music critic Jon Caramanica wrote, includes “Alright,” which became an unofficial Black Lives Matter protest 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 14 total Grammy wins.) Lamar, who grew up in Compton, Calif., and has made that area’s culture and struggles a central part of his music, also became the first rapper to receive the Pulitzer Prize for music. “DAMN.” was cited in 2018 as “a virtuosic song collection unified by its vernacular authenticity and rhythmic dynamism that offers affecting vignettes capturing the complexity of modern African-American life.” Lamar embraced the accolade, appearing in concert with a “Pulitzer Kenny” banner 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 companion album to the film “Black Panther.” A track 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 sued, saying her work was used without permission in the track’s video; the lawsuit was settled in late 2018.Since that eventful year, Lamar has kept a low public profile, making a handful of guest appearances on other artists’ songs and, last year, joining the 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 alongside Dr. Dre, Snoop Dogg, 50 Cent, Eminem and Mary J. Blige, which put him in the odd position of being either the only relative youngster in a hip-hop oldies show or — performing songs up to a decade old — perhaps already being a bit of a throwback himself.Last Sunday, Lamar released a new music video, “The Heart Part 5,” as a teaser for “Mr. Morale.” It has a spoken prologue stating “life is perspective” and then shows Lamar’s face melding with those of a series of Black men of varying levels of cultural heroism or controversy: O.J. Simpson, Kanye West, Jussie Smollett, Will Smith, Kobe Bryant, Nipsey Hussle. The deepfake effects were created by Deep Voodoo, a studio from the “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 scoured for meaning, as has the image that Lamar shared on Wednesday of the album’s 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 some extent, those may also serve as clues for the next stage 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, which has released his music in partnership with Interscope. He has not announced a new label deal, but has instead begun new projects with pgLang, which was announced two years ago as a “multilingual, at 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. More