Kendrick Lamar's Art of Authenticity

Inner strength, trauma transcendence, and real language

Kendrick Lamar’s latest album Mr. Morale & The Big Steppers, exemplifies what it advocates: personal authenticity. The authenticity Kendrick defends is not feel-good “be inspired” pseudo-empowerment, but the far more difficult and rewarding kind that requires serious introspection and comes at a cost. The album depicts Kendrick painfully recognizing his imperfections “in the valley of silence.” He works to transcend the trauma of his past and grapples with the social exclusion that accompanies self-renewal. The album subverts commercial rap culture’s machismo by representing true strength as self-awareness, the courage to face life sober, and taking responsibility for oneself and one’s family.

The album opens with a confession of aimlessness, “Indulging myself and my life and my music, the world that I'm in is a cul-de-sac.” He admits how unhappy he is despite his fame and success. “I bought a Rolex watch, I only wore it once / I bought infinity pools I never swimmed in.” He translates this grief into a message on the album’s banger “N95,” which castigates the superficiality of consumerism. “Take all that designer bullshit off / And what do you have? / Bitch, you ugly as fuck.” Kendrick directs this to listeners, but he’s also reprimanding himself for attempting to shortcut authenticity through appearance. “Tell me what you would do for aesthetic / Would you sell your soul on credit?” He realizes that he doesn’t know the person he's become. As he explains in “Worldwide Steppers,” grief over the death of his self-awareness suppresses his creative instinct. Only when he lets go of the egotistical belief that he’s too good to be broken and weak and faces the demons within does it return. “Writer's block for two years, nothin' moved me / Asked God to speak through me, that's what you hear now.”  The confrontation transforms his perspective about what is important in life: “I don't think like I used to / No, I don't blink like I used to / Awkward stares at everybody, see the flesh of man.”

Kendrick develops a sophisticated two-part critique of superficial language throughout the album. He’s keenly aware that people choose to interpret and use language in ways that incentivize fakeness and obscure pain. His criticism of bad faith interpretation begins with a reference to Jay-Z’s defense of n-word use in his music. Jay-Z argued that using the term in a new way can change its meaning and that interpersonal meanings, not mouth sounds, are what matter. “I treat you crackers like I'm Jigga, watch / I own it all / Oh, you worried 'bout a critic? / That ain't protocol.” Like Jay-Z, Kendrick disconnects the manifest and latent content of speech. He recognizes that people use language purposefully; the intention behind the use of a word is independent of that word’s current dictionary definition.

Kendrick argues it is duplicitous to conflate the general social connotations of a word with the specific way an individual is using it and suggests people exploit this conflation out of base self-interest. “Auntie Diaries” addresses this most explicitly: “See, I was taught words was nothing more than a sound / If everything was pronounced without any intentions.” Kendrick humbly sings his regrets about the viral incident in which he invited a white girl up on stage to rap and then publicly humiliated her for using the n-word along with him. “To truly understand love, switch position / ‘Faggot, faggot, faggot,’ we can say it together / But only if you let a white girl say, 'Nigga.’” If slur-words are bad because they are used to disparage, and the conventional meanings of words are socially constructed, then using what are now slur-words in a way that isn’t disparaging can eliminate their derogatory social meanings over time.  Kendrick invokes his own opportunistic, self-righteous decontextualization of language use for the sake of taking offense as an example of a wider problem: By ignoring the ways in which others use language and pretending like mouth sounds have Absolute Meanings, people promote a culture of performativity that incentivizes the intentional misinterpretation of others’ language and the avoidance of inner life.

The second part of Kendrick’s critique of linguistic superficiality, which targets the use of language to obscure and displace pain, is fleshed out in the viscerally raw “We Cry Together.” The track is a progressively intensifying screaming match in which partners whose love has been wounded by lies and infidelity sadistically take their pain out on one another. They lash out with insults (“Lil' dick ass nigga that's tryna go big,” “Act like that pussy ain't loose”), weaponize psychoanalysis (“Womanizer, got no affection from yo' momma, I see”), and politically intellectualize (“See, you the reason for Trump / You the reason we overlooked, underpaid, underbooked, under shame,” “Fake innocent, fake feminist, stop pretendin' / Y'all sentiments ain't realer than what you defendin'”) – saying anything to avoid vulnerably facing the hurt within. The row culminates in passionate sex revealing that all the malice they flung at each other was really about relational tension, not small dicks or loose pussies, Trump, or gender politics. They hurt each other and wouldn't take responsibility, constantly invoking new vocabularies to redirect their pain, what Kendrick calls “tap-dancing around the conversation.” Authenticity requires clear language and language can only be clear when it is used to express what the speaker has vulnerably recognized in themselves.

The relationship between self-understanding and past trauma emerges as a clear theme, with tracks like “Father Time” and “Mother I Sober” addressing unresolved intra- and inter-personal conflict. The latter portrays intergenerational trauma with devastating specificity. Kendrick, in a strained tone, tells multiple stories about how historical abuse is psychologically promulgated. First, “Mother cried, put they hands on her, it was family ties / I heard it all, I should've grabbed a gun, but I was only five.” The cycle of violence continued in the name of retribution: “Mother's brother said he got revenge for my mother's face / Black and blue, the image of my queen that I can't erase / Til this day can't look her in the eyes, pain is takin' over.” The second story Kendrick shares concerns his family’s belief that his cousin molested him. “Family ties, they accused my cousin, ‘Did he touch you, Kendrick?’ / Never lied, but no one believed me when I said, ‘He didn't.’” Only later did he learn about his mother’s unresolved trauma from having been sexually abused herself earlier in her life, which accounted for her disbelief. “Now I'm affected, twenty years later, trauma has resurfaced.”

Kendrick advocates taking responsibility for the traumatic chaos of inner life to save oneself and, by extension, one’s family first before trying to save society. Such responsibility starts by becoming painfully aware of imperfection. “I'm a killer, he's a killer, she's a killer, bitch / We some killers, walkin' zombies, tryna scratch that itch” (“Worldwide Steppers”). Kendrick refuses to grant moral perfection to anyone or any group, portraying everyone as dangerous and self-interested. “The noble person that goes to work and pray like they 'posed to? / Slaughter people too, your murder's just a bit slower.” He pushes back against the perpetually outraged, suggesting that their “righteousness” is really a distraction from their internal disarray. “Do yourself a favor and get a mirror that mirror grievance / Then point it at me so the reflection can mirror freedom” (“Mirror”).

Kendrick repeatedly attacks the idea that it is even possible to save everyone, portraying it as a delusion whose pursuit is bound to result in disappointment. In “Crown,” he sings “I can't please everybody / I can't even please myself.” He emphasizes how doing anything impactful inevitably results in criticism: “Heavy is the head that chose to wear the crown / To whom it's given, much is required now.” Kendrick wants people to courageously become authentic, to figure out what they want to stand for, and then live convicted, but he acknowledges the cost. The authentic are excluded by weak people who are jealous of inner strength and other authentic people convicted of opposing beliefs. Universal inclusion of the authentic is impossible. Nonetheless, Kendrick praises the willpower necessary to express true beliefs and criticizes posers who pretend like it is admirable to say things that are controversial in distal contexts but financially and culturally incentivized within the social domains they actually traffic. “Scared to be crucified about a song but they won't admit it / Politically correct is how you keep an opinion / Niggas is tight lipped, fuck who dare to be different” (“Savior”). This is echoed in the chorus of “Count Me Out” when he sings “I love when you count me out / My name is in your mouth.” Kendrick interprets being explicitly singled out and excluded as a potential indication that he symbolizes something important that the excluders lack the strength or knowledge to accept. True nonconformity is always costly.

Mr. Morale & The Big Steppers relays a way to overcome the sins of the past for a better future. It says trauma is transcended through the strength of a responsibility that can stand alone, that isn’t drowned out by the noise of strangers’ complaints, obscured by language, or numbed by behaviors of avoidance. Avoidance often takes the form of alcohol or drug addiction, but Kendrick expands it to include sex addiction, the vice he confesses to struggling with personally, shopping addiction, outrage addiction, and anything else that distracts from inner turmoil. He ends the album with an apology to everyone who expects him to be able to save society before developing inner strength. In a culture whose obsession with superficial indignation incentivizes the intellectualization of character flaws as political activism for the sake of “saving society,” facing personal trauma and taking individual responsibility for life takes gall. “Sorry I didn't save the world, my friend / I was too busy buildin' mine again / I choose me, I'm sorry.”