this poem is in dishonour of my transphobic controlling mother.
may she suffer forever. -cas, 8/6/22
i. the wondrous world of small scope
the city was but a leaf in a verdant world:
however, izalith was all-encompassing.
sage knew nothing but the veined streets,
quantised cells and laws, all created by
brudenell-on-high.
she hid her station and her intent,
met sage as if she had no designs,
even then never treating them as equal.
sage would move across izalith's libraries,
dusted books and studied nooks,
and crannies filled with tiny toys,
perfect for fiddling;
but they would only move with brude's word,
and they did not know enough to want else.
and even so, wonders were to be seen here;
the magnificent tree hyperion at its top
accompanied with a gentle golden hand
marked this dendritic city as safe for sage,
an infinite and infinitely small marble glass house
"where you will stay always, my sweet".
3) to build slight but fun-loving and ridiculous personae for killer mike and el-p to inhabit on this project.
kendrick lamar may not be one of my favorite rappers, but on his mainline albums i can argue that he has had an eye for specifically album craft. sometimes that has been in the deployment of singles, whether it's the differences between swimming pools (drank) single vs album edition, the release of i prior to tpab to allow for a live version to be used or the very funny day lamar chose to release the blacker the berry. the concern for this analysis, however, is in kendrick’s deployment of musical framing devices for his album.
on good kid, m.a.a.d city, it was a simple but effective gimmick for a simple but effective album: the usage of recorded dialogue that often sounds tinny or distorted, whether that’s reflecting listening to a phone call on sherane or audio recorded from a camera as on the art of peer pressure or sing about me, i’m dying of thirst. this format is most closely aligned to the classic idea of hip-hop skits as little dramas, but is modified both in its recording and writing to reflect that gkmc was framed as ‘a short film directed by kendrick lamar’. shit’s neat.
this idea gets expanded on to a very large extent on to pimp a butterfly, which is fitting considering how much larger in scope that album is as compared to lamar’s debut. here the framing device is present in a poem which kendrick recites. this poem, broadly speaking, recounts the events of the album, the things that kendrick does or that happen to kendrick as well as his internal thoughts. the poem is deployed about every 2-3 songs and will stop when its events tie in with the events of the song, i.e kendrick ending the poem on ‘found myself screaming in a hotel room’ right before the start of u. the musicality of poetry helps to more solidly integrate this framing device into the album proper, where it can often form a part of the musical landscape of certain songs, i.e it fitting alongside the clicks at the start of these walls before the saxes start playing or it functioning as the outro of hood politics while double bass and other instruments build a melodic motif that leads into how much a dollar cost. the repetition of this poem also helps consistently legitimise it as a musical idea and thus make it feel more natural to the album than the skits of gkmc or really any other hip-hop album. finally, this poem has a solid narrative payoff in its own right! halfway through mortal man, the instrumental fades away as kendrick reads the poem for the last time and ultimately finishes reading it. this then leads seamlessly into the now-well-known ‘interview’ with 2pac and one of the best endings for an album ever made. it’s jawdropping stuff.
damn dropped the ball slightly when it came to its framing devices but with time i have grown to like them, much as i have grown to like the album itself. here they’re a bit more disorganised to reflect an album and a kendrick lamar that is more disorganised but they still play well. there are 2 main framing devices across the album (one could theoretically include the album rewind at the end of duckworth to the start of the story on blood but it feels a bit too detached from the palette from the others to be in consideration):
1) choral vocals seemingly playing as a higher power singing as if to announce the individual tracks. these are very pretty and quite soulful (something i really underrated on damn back when it came out is the soul of that project in its vocals and less trap-leaning beats) and highlight the dualism present, such as the ‘wickedness’ or ‘weakness’ of blood and the contrasting of love and pride on… well, pride. these feel more used for their musicality than their framing potential, and honestly that’s okay!
2) the dj segments across the album, framing damn as a whole as a very strange radio mix of some kind, and indeed one where the mask of party-accessible trap-leaning hip-hop is torn off to reveal a bunch of suffering and trauma both individual and systemic (if this is ringing bells, it’s because this isn’t a particularly new framing method: queens of the stone age did similar previously on songs for the deaf with obviously no focus on specifically Black issues, and afterwards vince staples would outdo kendrick for sheer focus on this issue with the wonderful FM!). this dj says variations of ‘new kung fu kenny’, ‘ain’t nobody prayin for me’, ’what happens on earth stays on earth’ and so forth.
now these two do interplay off each other; in particular, the phrase ‘what happens on earth stays on earth’ implies a more powerful religious angle alongside the choral vocals that places a strong highlight on kendrick’s religious struggles across the album. but nevertheless, the cracks in kendrick’s album crafting were starting to show…
and nowhere have they in my eyes been more exposed than on mr morale and the big steppers. this album features about 3 or 4 different framing devices working through the 18 songs here, and with the notable division of this project into a double album, some framing devices are also deliberately used within one or both discs… but their usage feels more slipshod than any past kendrick project.
the first to appear on the album is… choral vocals! yes we’re doing this again, and the fact that this is a trick that with repetition from damn feels uninteresting is not its biggest problem. principally it is musically less compelling than the vocals on damn; sam dew just isn’t interesting and the overly heavy layering of harmonies feels like it’s trying to badger the listener with their point in a way that is unsubtle even for kendrick lamar (who, to be clear, has been meticulous but NEVER subtle). as opposed to multiple melodic ideas that show up on the chorals on damn, here they simply use one single melodic idea, which is a problem when the lyrics change and you’re left trying to parse the new lyrics each time. i understand this as an exercise in stripping away musical excess from an artist who normally indulges in it and wants to change themselves up (what is tpab if not a nyc hip-hop head’s heaviest indulgences for over a full cd of content), but the rest of the album is already so stripped down already. i am left starving for extra musical details that simply are not present here. another blow to their effectiveness is that their incredible usage on mother | sober doesn’t close the record out, with mirror functioning as a frankly rather annoying epilogue that undercuts the biggest dramatic stakes that this album has managed to build thus far.
the second is present mostly on disc 1, ‘the big steppers’, and it is something new: recordings of tapdancing. now i have seen a simple surface interpretation of this as kendrick highlighting the performativity of his own art and everything therein (whether that applies to his performative wack bars like those mentioning quote-unquote cancel culture or to his ostensible goal of dismantling his own savior complex depends on how charitable you are to him personally). but i would argue that this seems perhaps too simple, and if this is all it is intended to be it is unimpressive for its blandness as opposed to its incompetent usage. my personal interpretation is that the stepping highlights kendrick ‘stepping’ around his personal issues, given that the whole album represents two therapy sessions. and on we cry together, that is absolutely what it is, where whitney alford herself clearly states that kendrick should ‘stop tapdancing around the issue’ of his own repressed trauma. however, the other tracks it is used on (father time, savior, mother | sober) are the ones where kendrick is decidedly NOT stepping around trauma and is indeed engaging with his rough past in full force, leading to a contradictory framing device that is unhelpful in navigating the stories present here. you might also notice that 2 of the previously mentioned tracks are on the 2nd disc, ‘mr morale’. one might make the argument that therapy doesn’t solve everything and that kendrick is highlighting that even with therapy he will continue to step around his issues; however, it starts to remove the dramatic stakes of the album. if you want an album example where this idea of a concluding arc still leaves work to be done and a life to be left and lived, i could name a whole bunch that don’t sacrifice dramatic stakes to achieve this idea: spanish love songs’s brave faces, everyone, especially its final verse. chester bennington’s throat-rending delivery of a seeming love song on linkin park’s a thousand suns. hell, to specify with albums framed as therapy sessions: brand new’s (and before anything else, fuck jesse lacey pirate this band’s music) science fiction ends with batter up, where the core line on the chorus is ‘it’s never going to stop / batter up’.
the third is only present on disc 2, and comprises the ‘mr morale’ of the album’s namesake; one eckhart tolle, a self-help scholar that has been vital to kendrick lamar to the extent that tolle is involved with kendrick’s nebulous company pglang. here, tolle’s words alongside statements from lamar’s wife whitney alford contextualise mr morale even further as a therapy session. however, let me get one thing straight: a good chunk of the things tolle says. SUCK. like on the savior interlude, where on an album that is predominantly about trauma from growing up tolle states ‘If you derive your sense of identity from being a victim. Let's say, bad things were done to you when you were a child. And you develop a sense of self that is based on the bad things that happened to you’, which even though it can be right it feels genuinely insulting as if to say that one can fully remove oneself from the circumstances one grew up in. on top of this, however, the focus of this disc (and indeed this whole album) as a therapy session ultimately reveals what makes mr morale and the big steppers so lacking; it feels hemmed in, a (dare i say it) vampire castle (SIDE SIDENOTE: for anyone reading, 'exiting the vampire castle' as an essay fucking sucks as someone who likes mark fisher and is him at his most whiny-teacher and insufferable, but nevertheless the term has some use) where kendrick cannot and refuses to expand his view of the world, such as the fact that even with anti-Black discrimination the world over, his money not only puts him in a position to gain therapy but to be able to retreat from the problems of the world and allow himself the time to process his trauma in such a hyper-individualistic way as those ways advocated for by tolle. this even ties back to one of my problems with the heart part 5, where im not particularly sympathetic to kendrick’s calls to poorer Black folk to keep supporting him and wanting them to want him too alongside wanting respect from them: it’s like this dude hasn’t heard of class solidarity. tangent aside, however, the main weakness of tolle as a framing device is that the fucker just doesn’t show up all that much, appearing in three songs and only delivering 2 lines outside of the savior interlude. and it’s that lack of legitimising repetition that kills this framing device. it’s a problem with the tapdancing too and ultimately leaves the album unfocused in nature.
on top of this, brief snippets of kendrick’s family can be heard on some tracks such as united in grief, count me out and mother | sober. these aren’t worth much comment and aren’t very interesting aside from the one on mother | sober, where whitney’s lines feel somewhat self-aggrandising to kendrick and kendrick’s daughter speaking is quite sweet.
i said at the start of this analysis that one of the modes of mr morale and the big steppers is ‘chasing the ghost of kanye west’, and if my discussions here around the imperfections in the album product are ringing any bells, it’s likely because this is the discourse that kanye west has been generating around his releases since my beautiful dark twisted fantasy (and arguably even before with how radically he changed his performance style away from his then-strengths on 808s and heartbreak). and it’s a discussion that has to me largely become uninteresting. yes, we are all flawed human beings that are not designed for paparazzi press coverage and often when our art fails, it can be due to very personal reasons, as all art is a reflection of the person or people who made it. and indeed, part of releasing art is the idea of being perceived by others in a way that can be seen as incomplete. cool points the first time i heard them back when the life of pablo released. points that have gotten less interesting as it is clear that in the case of kanye, this discussion has been a veil to protect his stans and those caught in his cult of personality from the idea that maybe he’s not particularly great or interesting and that these ideas are like a century old and kanye’s only contribution is bringing them into the world of pop music (and he isn’t even the first to do stuff like this. metal machine music, anyone?). it’s just kind of sad to see kendrick lamar, the mr theatrical of hip-hop, go down a similar lane.