What The Return Of Kendrick Lamar Means For Hip-Hop Music
The wait is finally over.
The world has been gifted a new Kendrick Lamar album — Mr. Morale & the Big Steppers —that will without a doubt leave its mark, like the albums that came before it. And as Filipino and First Nations rapper Dobby put it: “there’s someone like him for each generation and for me and my generation, it’s him in terms of how stories are portrayed.”
Mr. Morale & The Big Steppers pic.twitter.com/tLcJDyNxVe
— Kendrick Lamar (@kendricklamar) May 11, 2022
Reactions To The Heartbeat Part 5
In true Kendrick fashion, it wouldn’t be an iconic album week without dropping a teaser single days before.
In “The Heartbeat Part 5”, the fifth “heart” track in a series of songs that started in the 2010s, Kendrick raps about “the land where hurt people hurt people — fuck calling it culture,” with Marvin Gaye sampled underneath.
But it’s his new video that’s really something else. The rapper’s face morphs into several deep fakes of OJ Simpson, Will Smith, Jussie Smollet, Kobe Bryant, Kanye West and Nipsey Hussle.
Complex staff writer Jordan Rose notes it’s as if Kendrick is speaking to how perspective “lies at the crux of all these portrayals…of influential (and polarising) Black figures.”
A Look Back On Kendrick’s Legacy
Born and raised in Compton, Kendrick has always proudly platformed his Californian west coast roots by rapping about gang violence, drugs, losing loved ones and his battle with depression. Eminem once said “we’ve seen Compton before…but the way Kendrick did it was so different.”
“He delivers his product in such a way that you cannot deny both the message, but also how hot of a track it is because he’s a musician. He thinks in those grooves, you know, like he’ll understand exactly the type of cadence he needs to put on a funk track, a G funk track or like one of those trap tracks,” Dobby said.
A moment that the rapper says sparked something in him was in 1995 when Dr. Dre and Tupac filmed California Love in Compton and stopped in the middle of the Compton Swap Meet — a historical meeting place for rappers— to speak to locals.
An eight-year-old Kendrick was there on his dad’s shoulders listening, watching and learning. Little did he know back then that his breakthrough album good kid m.A.A.d. City in 2012, would be released through Dr. Dre’s Aftermath Entertainment. And that Snoop Dogg, Dr Dre and Game would pass the torch for the best rapper over to Kendrick in at the HiiiPower Live Music Box Los Angeles, securing his seat at the table of the greats.
Dobby said that as an American artist, Kendrick has the ability to influence Australians, especially First Nations and artists of colour, is more than we can understand. You know, it means so much to us to see someone like him doing what he does.
The New Era Of Kendrick Lamar
Last year Kendrick posted that this record would be his last with label TDE after 17 years.
“He’s going to look for something very different because each album has a different sound palette each time. You know, good kid m.A.A.d. City was an incredible production in 2012 he worked closely with Dr. Dre on that one. And then you’ve got To Pimp a Butterfly, which was not jazzish or jazz-like it was jazz. It was a whole world of jazz with Terrace Martin, Robert Glasper. And it, you know, he really took it to the fullest extent for that sound palette. And then DAMN. was something else which was, you know, incredible in so many different ways. So I think this next album is going to be another radical step yet again,” said Dobby.
With his newly co-founded multi media company pgLang, a Pulitzer Prize under his belt, an entire Marvel album, 14 Grammy wins and 39 nominations, and a new protege in his younger cousin Baby Keem, what Kendrick does with this new album will be a moment in its own right.