{"id":501036,"date":"2022-06-13T00:00:00","date_gmt":"1970-01-01T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/numero.com\/non-classifiee-2\/with-his-latest-album-kendrick-lamar-has-produced-a-masterpiece-worthy-of-a-greek-tragedy\/"},"modified":"2025-10-28T09:38:27","modified_gmt":"2025-10-28T08:38:27","slug":"with-his-latest-album-kendrick-lamar-has-produced-a-masterpiece-worthy-of-a-greek-tragedy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/numero.com\/en\/non-classifiee-2\/with-his-latest-album-kendrick-lamar-has-produced-a-masterpiece-worthy-of-a-greek-tragedy\/","title":{"rendered":"With his latest album, Kendrick Lamar has produced a masterpiece worthy of a Greek tragedy"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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The \u201cMr. Morale & The Big Steppers\u201d sleeve by Renell Medrano<\/figcaption>\n <\/figure>\n \n

Today we are all orphans<\/b>. Dazed, feeling like Father Christmas has just made a final appearance. Witnesses of a shift that marks the end of a happy era, as the great myth of childhood dissolves and we are dangerously close to the doors of all too serious adulthood. And yet we’re happy to find, under the Christmas tree, the gift we’ve been waiting for, fantasizing about, dreaming of for weeks: Mr. Morale & The Big Steppers<\/i>, Kendrick Lamar’s latest album, announced on his website on 18th<\/sup> April 2022, and his ultimate masterpiece released by Top Dawg Entertainment, his label for the past seventeen years.<\/p>\r\n\r\n

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The double LP containing eighteen tracks, released five years after the fiery Damn<\/b>, opens like a message to those he left behind, he says, precisely one thousand eight hundred and fifty five days ago. The rapper also felt like it had been ages, watching Trump elected and then driven out of the White House and witnessing the ultra-violent assault on the Capitol by the outgoing president’s supporters… From the very first lines, he hopes that we’ve found peace in our souls, whether we’ve been united in mourning (a supposedly more pacifist era) or whether, like him, we’ve found a single answer to all our questions.<\/p>\r\n\r\n

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Because in addition to being called the king of hip-hop<\/b>, since the release of Good Kid, M.A.A.D. City<\/i> (2012), Kendrick Lamar has crafted an image of wisdom. He has been in a relationship with the same woman since he was a kid, poses with a toddler in his arms on the cover of his latest album and won the very serious Pulitzer Prize in 2018 for his eminently committed lyrics, anti-racist denouncements and (all too) clear-sighted manifestos of an ultra-dark, fascist and reactionary era.<\/p>\r\n\r\n

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So we’ve come to wonder, at times, whether Kendrick Lamar was real<\/b>. Did he really grow up on the wide streets of Compton, record five albums in American studios, fiddling with all the buttons on the mixing deck and phoning his sound engineer late at night to rush in and arrange the track he’d just written, scribbled on a whiteboard? Did he really pose for hours in front of the American photographer Renell Medrano’s lens for a cover in which he appears, a crown of diamond thorns on his head, half-Jesus and half-head of the family? With Mr. Morale & The Big Steppers<\/i>, he goes against the grain of an era in which opulence is the only thing that matters, an era that has elevated the Bible into the sole school of thought, of a world where people only believe in one unique story and, like Kanye West when he made up with Drake, are not shy of changing sides. A tempered storyline, a sharp and uncensored testimony, the Californian’s album is the B-side of opulent Southern hip-hop \u2013 more specifically Pusha T’s blockbuster released at the end of April comes to mind. It’s a work that tells the truth, evokes the personal and the intimate, an honest album that speaks of cowardice and moves forward, full-bodied, lurking like a Komodo dragon.<\/p>\r\n\n

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