Mr Morale & The Big Steppers - Kendrick Lamar (2022)

There’s nobody quite like Kendrick.

I have talked plenty about how deep the performative solipsism goes in a lot of hip hop artists. It was due to a toss of the dice ∆ that Kendrick landed the same week as Kanye, whose solipsism is much more in the “it’s so hard to be me” style than most rappers.

Kendrick digs deep into confessional territory, examining his own psyche as well as those around him. It’s not always relentlessly positive or pretty but it offers a glimpse into human nature that you don’t get often.

The music is built on the brash hip hop that made him famous, but mixes with an increasingly complex musicality of his more recent albums. There are a number of tracks that are very mature R&B that’s well beyond the reach of a lot of rappers.

It’s a broad collection of a lot of ideas that doesn’t really lend itself to a list of highlighted tracks. In Purple Hearts he says he’s not in the music business, he’s in the human business. That seems a pretty good summation.

∆ Actually a toss of =RANDBETWEEN(1, ROWS($A$12:$B$1826)) but still…