kendrick lamar - mr. morale & the big steppers (2022)

I found "We Cry Together" unbearable, actually, and I queued three times to ensure the fuck-you-bitch thing hit me every time.

the alchemist snapped, though

i dont mind auntie diaries but his epiphany about slurs at the end is very clunky & anticlimactic. like i'm glad he's thinking about that but i didnt exactly need him to hold my hand through the whole song if thats where we were going. but alfred otm, on first listen i'm digging this despite the occasional clumsiness or misstep.

i feel like i've been harping on the negative a bit, but i definitely think that the album as a whole is incredibly impressive on a technical and artistic level. i appreciate the raw nerve, therapeutic aspect of it all and the bulk of it *sounds* fantastic.

On first pass this feels like a good album by a great artist — which for Kendrick makes it probably his weakest since his first, but that’s only a relative measure. (I think it’s kind of a classic case of the dreaded 3 1/2-star Rolling Stone review.) To my ears so far, it doesn’t advance anything much, it’s mostly him doing things we already know he can do, and with more moodiness and less verve than last time out. I think that is mostly a function of the things that have been occupying him, which are mostly internal and personal, and he has every right to his own occupations. Just because I don’t necessarily want to listen to a lot of introspection about his infidelity doesn’t mean that it’s not important for him to do. I agree that “Auntie Diaries” is a misfire but it seems well intended and it might actually reach some people, so I’ll just put it on my skip list and leave it be. “We Cry Together” is a plausible lovers’ quarrel but not an illuminating one, also on the skip list.

I just got to the beginning of "Mr. Morale" and this entire album is glorious

"mr. morale" is very "black skinhead"

Wasn’t expecting Pharrell to deliver that kind of track.

Great guest spots all over this

even beyond all the lyrical issues this is relatively boring musically for the most part & would be firmly his worst for that alone

I don’t think we are listening to the same album. At a minimum I am not processing it the way you are.

I wish this thread would shut down for at least two days to let ILM absorb it.

Should we meet back here Sunday?

Cool.

I'm still processing it, but I think it's really good. As someone mentioned, he's not so arrogant that he thinks he's wiser or more infallible than anyone else and he puts himself at the audience's level, but he doesn't pander either - it's honest and self-interrogating.

Haven't heard it yet (will do so tonight) but the polarized opinions around it so far both here and elsewhere are fascinating, and only seem to make me more intrigued. Can't wait.

As ever.

love the use of duval timothy and his piano throughout, his playing is mesmerizing

First listen and am trying to get past all the two-dimensional “bitches.”

The stereogum review of this calls it a therapy album, which feels very accurate

Honorable entry in the “working through some shit” canon.

tbf he does open track 1 with "I've been goin' through somethin' / Be afraid"

On my third listen now and I'd probably rank it above DAMN or at least at the same level.

Breihan's review is really good. I think he likes it more than me, but I agree with his overall sense of it.

This record has me reminiscing about the first time I fucked a white bitch.

re: "auntie diaries"

the song details how he now understands saying faggot is bad but there's no similar revelation regarding the misgendering or anything. there's only a single line where he uses 'she' for his cousin near the end so it's much harder to get the sense that he actually really does 'get' trans people now, it's not very effective even as the corny didactic "look i've grown" thing that it wants to be.

that kendrick song kinda brings up complicated feelings for me cause it reminds me of the way i got certain family members who “accept” me yet still see me as my old self. like they “trying” and i appreciate that much but they still dont actually *see* me if that makes sense

— Sage 💕 (@_introspekt) May 13, 2022

^this is still how it comes across overall

& his usage of "faggot" is absolutely excessive to make his point about saying it being bad, on top of all the misgendering which again isn't addressed in the same way. i'd be hesistant to grant it to him even once - maybe he could have gotten away with it once if the song was much better executed - but he goes well beyond that anyway. macklemore certainly did not deserve the pass he got from straight liberals for saying it on "same love" and i don't anyone much would be defending him if he did the same thing with the n-word.

"clumsy, overly didactic, overlong, and generally lacks the sparkle of his best work" is all otm

i hope kendrick will take some of the criticism floating around to heart & not react badly, which is unfortunately often what happens when there's pushback to these sort of well-meaning but very clumsy & misguided gestures

My son, fwiw, thinks the album is great and is exhorting me to listen to it and pay more attention to the music and production, so I will.

so i listened to the record and since there is Discourse about "auntie diaries" - also hi, i'm doing really shitty right now but a new kendrick album dropped

i don't get it, he does a whole album calling out rape culture and Black trauma and people are like "oh wait he said faggot in a tremendously self-lacerating context, what a Bad Ally"

not saying anybody shouldn't be offended by this, maybe i'm just jaded, i've been at this three years, my friends keep getting called fucking "groomers" by their close family members and being told they should be in fucking death camps. maybe i'm just setting the bar too low, maybe i should be holding him to a higher standard

it's been three years, i get junkmail to my deadname every day and will every day for the rest of my life, my mom has never once called me "she", and cis people are here walking around eggshells around me like i'm this fragile little delicate flower and that anybody misgendering a trans person is setting a Bad Example

am i worried that people are going to start walking up to me on the street and calling me "faggot" because kendrick lamar used that word in a song? not really. i don't think this is gonna be like when dave chappelle put out that special and a couple weeks later i'm walking around with a couple of my gender non-conforming friends and some guys start "hitting on us" by talking about how they want to breed us and saying that they are "down with dave chappelle". that bothered me. kendrick lamar saying "boy it sure was dumb of me to go around saying 'faggot' all the time" hits me a little different.

the record didn't really click with me too much but 1) i'm very much a white girl and 2) kind of a lot has changed for me since lamar's last album came out.

it sounds like lamar has a really good therapist and is working through some of his trauma issues and i'm super happy for him! but therapy albums for me kinda hit me like those fantasy novels that are clearly just people writing up their d&d campaigns.

that said i literally wrote a 60,000 word transition memoir, which isn't exactly that different from a therapy album, so i guess i can't criticize too much!

no one's saying it's anywhere near as bad as chappelle's shit, this isn't "kendrick should be cancelled!", this is frustration and critique (i'm trans too!), and over more than just him saying faggot. if the bar for giving someone a free pass as an ally is just that they're not encouraging hate crimes you're setting it way too low.

he does a whole album calling out rape culture and Black trauma

and others have already raised the issues around this with kodak black being all over the album, the album's much more of a mess on that front

thought: he's a pretty smart guy. maybe he's done it on purpose. one more tour, cash tf out.

doesn't excuse him.

but i think his experience with the use of that word growing up as portrayed in the song is representative for a lot of boys. i wish i couldn't relate with it. but it was just so prevalent. i don't know. . . it's not supposed to have an easy answer and he knows it.

i like the intent and the beat.

i probably am setting the bar too low. i mean, "allyship" too, i set that bar really fucking low. i don't really view "ally" as a compliment. three years watching my straight friends try and find a man who doesn't treat them like shit, watching lesbians talking on their dating profiles about all of the people who "go to the front of the line", seeing how far that shit actually gets any of us. this old dude saying, what the fuck is he saying, that white girls like me should get n-word privileges because he did a song where he says "faggot faggot faggot" like he's michael richards or some shit? honestly that is classic Allyship with a capital fucking a. and that doesn't interest me, but the differences he shows off in how trans men and trans women get treated? to me that's way more interesting than most of the shit cis people say about us.

my read was he was saying that the comparison to the white fan n-word incident helped him understand that faggot is bad, not that everyone should be able to say whatever slurs they want

It's really funny to me that the big Kendrick discourse for this album cycle is basically the Louie poker episode discourse from 12 years ago

One of the more popular and respected left trans twitter people has a perspective that has some similarities with Kate’s

So I’m just gonna say Auntie Diaries goes

— Autogyniphiles_Anonymous (@autogyniphiles) May 13, 2022

musically this album is very convincing, and obv there's almost nothing kendrick can't do technically (but then he was almost fully formed from the get go, the incredible cadence in rigamortis is what immediately got me interested when he was coming up)

not sure what to make of the whiny voice he applies at times - do some people love it?

in the end too self-important for me, and the casual misogyny, however confessional, is off-putting ("first time I fucked a white bitch" could really have used some editing)

but a bold statement for sure

my read was he was saying that the comparison to the white fan n-word incident helped him understand that faggot is bad, not that everyone should be able to say whatever slurs they want

― ufo

you're probably right! and in some ways i think lamar kind of sells himself short by making that his conclusion. like, if that was all he was saying, i'd be pissed about the song too. "saying faggot is bad" is a pretty weaksauce conclusion - a swede once told me there's a Swedish word for it, "pekoral". like "war is bad" or the classic ilx punching bag "i just shot john lennon" by the cranberries.

so i got a brother, right, and ever since i came out to him he's been supportive of me, in the sense that it's been kate, she/her, no problems, no slip-ups, not like my mom. but like that's all it is to him. i'm the same person to him that i was at 21, like he just does a global search and replace on my name and pronouns in his brain and that's it. i start telling him about the house music i'm into and he says that just because i'm trans doesn't mean i have to start listening to that stuff. i start complaining about frank zappa's misogyny and he talks about how obsessed i was with zappa in my 20s. i love my brother, i care about him, but i told him a couple weeks ago that i just couldn't be talking to him right now. i don't think i could explain to him why in a way that he would understand.

shit _changed_ for me when i transitioned. when i say i've always been a woman, i'm not making some universal axiomatic statement - that's not what i _do_ as a queer person. i'm responding to a specific prevalent variety of cis bullshit, the way cis people will say that i "used to be a man". it doesn't mean that i'm the same person now.

to me, i hear that song, and i hear someone who _gets it_ in a way that the brother i can't bear to talk to doesn't. i hear someone who's aware of all the bullshit cis people say about us and doesn't buy it. the stuff about how mary-ann played with barbies as a child, for instance. you can see that as a superficial and hackneyed view of gender roles, you can see that in terms of "wait, i played with he-man as a child, does that mean i'm _not_ really a woman?"

if a trans person hears "auntie diaries" and that's their reaction, that's how they read the song, i think that's a valid read. if a trans person is pissed at lamar for saying that, i'm not going to police that, call them a "tenderqueer" or say they're secretly racist or any of that shit. that's just not my personal read.

my personal read is that, again, he's responding to a specific variety of cis bullshit, the "there were no signs" denial response so many of us get from cis relatives, this idea that we have this obligation to be visibly trans to them in certain culturally approved ways, that we have to _prove_ to them that we're _really trans_. which is a big part of why, as best i can tell, every single goddamn one of us has imposter syndrome, every single goddamn one of us struggles with the idea that we're somehow not _really_ trans. i read that as lamar saying "fuck you, 'there were no signs', you saw what you fucking wanted to see, that's all".

What's the whiny/weird vocals ratio on this album?

From my first listen and also from what I’ve been reading, Kate’s points also seems to relate to the way that Blackness itself is treated on the record— that is, not as an easily consumable and legible identity without contradictions and internal dissonances. Obviously I think Kendrick’s work has been doing this kind of thing to some degree since the beginning, but this record seems to bring that to the fore in a way.

i don't really get a strong sense that he does fully 'get it' from the song, especially with stuff like deadnaming caitlyn jenner which isn't even really relevant to the storytelling & the very inconsistent pronouns for his uncle - there's not the same past/present distinction that mary-ann gets, it just feels muddled to me. he's well-meaning and clearly trying to be supportive and i do appreciate that he is trying but that doesn't mean i have to be grateful for the end result or think it's good art, i'm not really a huge fan of someone cis weighing in in this muddled way. in terms of impact i think it's pretty mixed - sure i hope the message reaches people but you also see a bunch of cis/straight people totally baffled that anyone queer could not love it and getting extremely defensive, bc he's well-meaning you see.

& idk that's reading a lot into that one line about him seeing the signs with his cousin. if anything to me it's still reinforcing the 'signs'/'proof' narrative bc his cousin's transition made sense to him because he did see signs even if others didn't - i'd personally reject the whole idea of of there needing to be signs at all.

booming posts, all.

Just going to note that this album came out the day after Ethel Cain's (very ambitious and imo very good) album, which feels like it's from a world that "Auntie's Diaries" can only dimly perceive. There are more edifying voices than Kendrick's out there, certainly in this instance.

Ethel Cain album is great!

to me, i hear that song, and i hear someone who _gets it_ in a way that the brother i can't bear to talk to doesn't. i hear someone who's aware of all the bullshit cis people say about us and doesn't buy it.

otm.

strong example in "auntie diaries" of tolerate vs accept in action.

Yep, some really great posts above, thanks all and especially Kate and UFO.

I processed “Auntie Diaries” as ultimately being about the realisation of not having a monopoly on righteousness - the realisation that you’ve been protesting against others punching down while participating in a culture of punching down yourself. For me the closing lines are more powerful than just “the use of these terms is functionality equivalent” - they’re trying to capture the difficulty of seeing that, of realising that your own struggle and someone else’s struggle are intertwined, at the level if loved experience - especially and in particular when you are not part of a community which prioritises the drawing of particular connections.

I’m reminded of the Upton Sinclair quote, “ It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.” That insight could be extended to culture - it’s difficult to get a person to understand something when their membership within a community depends on their not understanding it.” This terrain is what I think the song grapples with: the ethical demand “don’t punch down” will tend to founder on our cultural blindspots, which in turn we are reluctant to confront. IDK maybe I am overthinking it.

I’m still stuck on Rich Spirit. Bumps like a Too Short song

i don't really get a strong sense that he does fully 'get it' from the song, especially with stuff like deadnaming caitlyn jenner which isn't even really relevant to the storytelling & the very inconsistent pronouns for his uncle - there's not the same past/present distinction that mary-ann gets, it just feels muddled to me. he's well-meaning and clearly trying to be supportive and i do appreciate that he is trying but that doesn't mean i have to be grateful for the end result or think it's good art, i'm not really a huge fan of someone cis weighing in in this muddled way. in terms of impact i think it's pretty mixed - sure i hope the message reaches people but you also see a bunch of cis/straight people totally baffled that anyone queer could not love it and getting extremely defensive, bc he's well-meaning you see.

& idk that's reading a lot into that one line about him seeing the signs with his cousin. if anything to me it's still reinforcing the 'signs'/'proof' narrative bc his cousin's transition made sense to him because he did see signs even if others didn't - i'd personally reject the whole idea of of there needing to be signs at all.

― ufo

that's one of the things that's most interesting to me about "auntie diaries", yeah, i don't know for sure that he "gets it". it is messy, it is ambiguous, it is inconsistent, and it's all these things in a way that feels true to the way cis people experience my gender transition, the way in some senses i have experienced my own gender. he's inconsistent in a way that people are in _person_ with me, but he's not freestyling this, he _wrote_ these lyrics. the sense i get from _mr. morale_ is that it's a _meticulous_ album, a _deliberate_ album.

one of the things i struggle with is the question of how _much_ to show my own ass, talking about this stuff. because of the hyper-judgemental climate around these things. becuse it's normal and typical for popular and respected left trans twitter people to just blithely say that trans people who are offended by lamar saying "faggot faggot faggot" are "tenderqueers" and probably racist. because whenever the Discourse starts up around trans people somehow trans folks wind up being carrying the most hot allostatic load. something is really wrong here, something is really fucking wrong, and it's not any of _us_.

i think i will, in fact, show my ass here. this isn't the Dearborn Birdsite, it's a message board for a smattering of middle-aged trauma-informed mostly queer music nerds, and this week i'm really leaning into the "poor life decisions" thing.

i was driving a few weeks ago down a busy suburban thoroughfare near my home and some jerk cut me off. I muttered "fucking faggot" under my breath - i think the car had all kinds of rainbow shit and furry trash on the back. it took a couple seconds and i remembered that i had a trans flag sticker on my own bumper, and i remember literally saying aloud "wait a second, _i'm_ a fucking faggot!" and laughing. the idea hadn't occurred to me before. like lamar says about his "auntie", he wasn't gay, he ate pussy. growing up i fucking wished i could be gay, i wished it could be that easy. we, not he, we didn't know any better.

this cis people want me to justify it, want me to say "oh i always knew", but i didn't, a lot of us didn't. i gotta pretend like i don't still wonder, sometimes, "yeah, but am i _really_ trans?", can't be vulnerable, can't be weak, can't be a fucking _tenderqueer_ even though, like a lot of us, i'm basically a big fucking wad of trauma, because if i do, the assholes who made me this way, the assholes who, like my friend just wrote to her (should i mention that i wrote "his" and backspaced over it?) mom, "wield a dagger and name it love", will fucking eat us alive.

one of the most important experiences of my coming out, of my coming to understand myself, was seeing my own experiences reflected in others. of hearing people talk about things i'd been too ashamed to tell anybody, hearing them talk about it openly and being amazed, because i thought it was just me. that's what i get from hearing lamar say "faggot faggot faggot". are you going to learn anything about being trans from kendrick lamar? hell no. lamar doesn't know shit about being trans. he grieves _different_ from us. that's fine, we all got our own voices. maybe you hear it from ethel cain, maybe you hear it from tami t, maybe you hear it from... you know. there's a lot of us.

maybe i'm hearing what i want to hear in "auntie diaries", just like the people who tell us "there were no signs" are seeing what they want to see. i just... i need to hear that so fucking much right now, you know? if i have to pretend lamar _gets it_, if i have to lie to myself to get through the rest of this week, you know, i'll fucking do that. i made my peace with that hears ago. whatever i need to do to survive. no guilt. no shame.

My new favorite thread. Thanks, Kate.

more i read kate's posts, more i like the song.

obviously identify with it from one of the other sides. i knew i wasn't gay but i definitely wasn't sure i liked girls either. i liked slow jams, not all that rah rah shit. but the word still got used growing up. a lot. an ongoing theme in kendrick's music: you did it to fit in, not because you wanted to. i'm not ashamed to admit that because of my mental health issues, i have voices that use extremely offensive language in my head, constantly. at some point, it stops becoming about attacking someone because of who they might be and starts to become a form of establishing dominance.

(reminded here of the outstanding byron hurt doc hiphop: beyond beats and rhymes from maybe late 2000s? he talks about how it became more of a casual thing by using it / other lgbtq+ slurs interchangeably with "bitch." that becomes "bitch n___" and "bitch ass n___" and yeah. breaks it tf down. busta rhymes walks out of his interview. talks to gay rappers. interviews trans woman at a hiphop festival. makes a lot of people uncomfortable. highly recommended.)

was outside last night, doing the most middle aged white man thing to do on a friday evening: smoking a bowl and watching the sunset while listening to the new album. a group of teenage boys drove past, blaring "united in grief" and they were into it; waving their arms around, bobbing their heads out the window, being kids. i laughed and waved peace to them and my mind immediately went to that moment when they would hear that song.

i wish i had someone like kendrick at that age. instead i had common talkin`bout "in a circle of f___s yo name is mentioned!" just repeating the cycle.