The Comfortability of Being Great (Mr. Morale & the Big Steppers 2023 Review)

I told y’all, give me around a year & I’ll tell you what I thought about his newest album. Well…here we go. 

Kendrick Lamar, one of the greatest rappers of all time won another Grammy, again. This dude grinds on his albums. They’re always complex, have something new to say, & touch on relevant & important issues. But did it deserve a Grammy & was it even great in the first place?

I would be remiss to not mention the sales. 35,000 in the US. For some artists this would be big but for one of the biggest rap artists on the planet this doesn’t look too good. It’s not an indicator that ‘Mr. Morale & the Big Steppers’ was bad, it’s just saying that people weren’t rocking with it too much besides the die hard Kung Fu Kenny fans of course. When you compare this to his last 3 studio albums for instance, all three went platinum including DAMN & Good Kid, Madd City which both went 3 times platinum. So what was it about this album that people weren’t as receptive to? 

N95, Silent Hill, & Die Hard were all in the top 10 billboard charts close to their release but none of them ever found a large audience as seen through the already mentioned sales. Compare this to 2018’s Pray For Me & King’s Dead which are both singles that went 2 to 3 times platinum, each were actually lower on the top 100 billboard charts when released, but the difference was, people rocked with them. 

All of that to say album sales aren’t everything. I heard the most recent national tour was FUEGO. One thing Kendrick has always been talented at is bringing interesting & provoking visuals to his music which makes him a must see artist to see live (check out his MTV medley of Humble & DNA where he literally sets the stage on fire, his performance at the 2017-2018 Grammy’s featuring the greatest comedian of all time, AND pretty much any music video he has ever made EVER). 

DAMN was what we wanted with some of what we needed as well. After the release of To Pimp a Butterfly I believe Kendrick fans were really craving some more hyped music. TPAB was slower, more complex, & perhaps Lamar’s greatest album of all time (also I believe is one of the greatest albums ever made) as it shares the unique perspective of what it means to be black in America as seen through the BLM anthem Alright to the more introspective look at the black community in the song Blacker the Berry, that actually calls out the hypocrisy when black people kill and/or bring each other down. 

But there were no songs you could really bump. Which is probably why despite its accolades it sold less than Good Kidd Madd City, but still went platinum tho. 

On DAMN we could bump Humble & we could bump DNA. On the Black Panther album we could turn up to King’s Dead. With all that in mind Kendrick might’ve known our expectations of wanting to get amped going into MM&TBS by first giving us the fan favorite ‘Family Ties’ with his cousin Baby Keem. 

Watch any clip of Lamar’s recent concerts doing this song & the crowd goes CRAZY. We want more turnt Kendrick songs but MM&TBS wasn’t that. Should we have seen it coming since DAMN gave us the bass we oh so craved, to know that Kenny would eventually be reverting back to his roots of being more calm & complex? But even something complicated can appear unfocused. 

If I asked you what’s the main theme of MM&TBS I don’t know if you could tell me what it is without googling it first. If you have to do research on music then I don’t think the music itself conveyed the message that well. 

Kendrick is like fine wine with his skills getting better & better with age but that also seems to be making the message more murky each time. Complex is good until there is little comprehension of what is trying to be said through the medium. 

Listening to the album it seems to be about Lamar looking more inward this time around as opposed to outwards at the current culture & the black community. 

We hear more about his family as seen through sharing the experiences of his uncle & cousin’s transitions as transgender people, looking at his own personal experiences through his issues with his dad through the song Father Time, & him looking at relational issues through the battle of the sexes represented through the song We Cry Together. The songs are good, they’re well made, but the math doesn’t add up to create anything great in my opinion. The sum is incoherent in the sense that I still to this day couldn’t tell you what the album is actually about. 

Did it deserve a Grammy for best rap album of the year? I don’t know. Was there a better contender who should’ve won? Maybe. If you asked this Kendrick Lamar fan writing to you right now if you should definitely check out the album or not, my answers un-coincidentally would be: I don’t know, maybe. 

Hopefully with the transition of Lamar’s former label TDE to now working independently will ignite more focus on Lamar’s next efforts & he will find the happy medium of complex & hype that his fans want to rock to, IF that’s the kind of music he wants to make in the future. Either way as a Kenny Lamar fan I’m always expectant of whatever he decides to do next. 

Y’all have a good one. 

Peace ✌️