...mr. morale
i choose me, i'm not sorry
as promised, here's part two of the new kendrick album’s breakdown.
this album isn't exactly a transformational experience for me but it was very validating and liberating in uniting the plight of healing that we are all undergoing right now. because of the subject matter of the album, there will be a trigger warning for s.a. and transphobia here.
disc 2: mr. morale
count me out
banger. goes nuts. this one and n95 are probably the only party tracks on the album and even so still contain a lot of shit to process. when i’m at a party, i like to be brain empty no thoughts mode so this might make it to the party on instrumentation alone. great start to disc 2 and to me it’s an excellent look at the parallel thoughts that occur when a person makes the choice to be on an intentional growth journey: bigging yourself up and also tripping, falling, and fucking it up. “i love when you count me out” juxtaposed with “fuck it up, fuck it up, fuck it up, fuck it up, fuckin' it up” was just *chef’s kiss* just the double entendre of “fuck it up, fuck it up, fuck it up, fuck it up, fuckin' it up” about being in the club and also stumbling through growing was enough to have ya boy tearing up. damn, maybe this shouldn’t have party rotation…
this half of the tape is incredibly introspective; the line “some put it on the devil when they fall short / i put it on my ego, lord of all lords” signifies that this side is gonna be about kendrick confronting kendrick. honestly, who else is achieving this level of clarity in the game right now? this album came right when i started getting sick of my own cycles of not feeling heard, seen, or felt so it’s resonant on a myriad of levels. i even started working on afronihilist which is about this exact topic; the battle to confront yourself and just be, so the collective consciousness i feel with an artist i respect was very validating.
i’ve been the strong friend and the strong friend’s strong friend but ultimately, keeping some truths about me and what i’ve been through in my life from friends, family, everyone has been killing me slowly. the smiles get less smiley, the laughs feel like echoes, and the silences when i should fill it with my truth feel deafening without me choosing to take that space. seems like a lot what can i say? when you feel seen, you feel seen.
stand out lyric: when you was at your lowest, tell me where the hoes was at? / when you was at your lowest, tell me where the bros was at?
crown
ok so this track was a drag of me particularly. as previously stated, i’ve been navigating the space between how people see me (strong friend) and how i see me (oh god, i’m falling apart). first line “you walk around like everything is in control / favor come favors and you can’t say no” is my main operating system on god. because i’m quiet about how i feel about things for fear of how my anger, frustration, pain, no matter how righteous, will be perceived, people see a put-together person. but truly, i have been in a state of long grief, punctuated with career highs that feel meaningless in the grief and more loss of people (alive and dead) and time. i find myself envious of all the people who can just take time and not care what people think; i find myself always able to kill myself to make a deadline or help someone through something because i can…at least i think i can…then i don’t…now they forget me…and another thing lost…siri, rerun that grieving cycle.
the other juxtaposition here that was resonant was the public performance of kendrick’s music and art, consumed at this all-you-can-eat buffet where as soon as the plate’s empty, his fans want more. but what happens if you’ve given all of yourself and there’s nothing left? if shit hits the fan and you need to take time to deal with it, will the fans still be fans? i’ll get into it as i get to savior. you can’t please everybody. love can change with the seasons. love gon get you killed. you can’t please everybody. all this gets repeated over and over as if this is a constant reminder kendrick needs for himself and lord knows, i need it for me too; i’ll touch on this later.
love the simple piano, reminds me of the insistence from worldwide steppers but somehow kinder and more of an internal acceptance where worldwide steppers felt like a series of confessions.
stand out lyric: but the time it'll come to not be there when somebody needs you / you say no and all you've done gives them amnesia / one thing i've learned, love can change with thе seasons
silent hill ft. kodak black
*sigh*...kodak black. still not my favorite selection for this album but the intention is still clear. where’s the line for redemption? how much can we blame on the circumstances that create a kodak black? nature or nurture? if it’s nature, why fight it? if it’s nurture, when can a truly healing world take a look at people from the circumstances that kendrick and kodak grew up in and nurture a better future for people who sit in this painful prison of black masculinity in the hood (especially with no male role models in a culture rife with misogyn(oir) and homophobia)? can we hold space for growth and center victims? i get it. still don’t love kodak off the strength of the music. this being said, kendrick dragged a fire verse out of kodak; very revelatory about kodak’s early life, some introspection, time and care could bring him to the level that clarity that kendrick weaves in and out of the album.
hook is great, probably another one i could hear at a party, wild vibey but still, personal preference, stick to n95 and count me out for the party. i think kendrick’s intention for kodak really comes out in mirror, more on that later.
stand out lyric: push these niggas off me like, "huh" / push these bitches off me like, "huh" / push these niggas off me like, "huh" / pushin' the snakes, i'm pushin' the fakes / i'm pushin' 'em all off me like, "huh" / pushin' 'em all off me like, "huh" (yeah)
savior (interlude)
baby keem is my favorite new rapper out now. no kendrick here but the tolle quote up top feels apropos of the moment we’re in. trauma is the game of social media, i’ve said this before. it feels harsh to say but if everyone’s traumatized, no one is. airing out our trauma on the tl brings attention to out individual struggles. being seen is validating but there’s something more powerful in collectivizing trauma to break through the reasons for it. if we stay in a victim or traumatized mentality, we begin to believe the lies of needing to find self-worth in the very structures that oppress us; money, status, power, looking at the people who are in the fight with us as threats rather than the real puppeteers of our pain.
the line where keem talks about becoming a millionaire, which was a fantasy to his uncle, only to come home and buy his casket felt resonant. i’ve lost both my grandmas in the last 3 years. all i wanted to show them is i was making money, i was successful, their kids raising me and my sister away from our people, from them, meant something.
for grandma fatou, i missed it. she never saw it but i know she loved me and i release myself from needing to be successful for love. grandma aiche i saw months before she passed with my mom there with her at the end. i got to hold her hand, tell her stories, laugh with her. she never wanted success from me, she just wanted me. i always send back what i could and if i could’ve sent myself back more, i would. but i can’t. so i find peace in knowing how much i love my family and friends and seek more relationships where the love isn’t seasonal.
stand out lyric: “my uncle would tell me the shit in the movies could only be magic / this year, i did forty-three shows and took it all home to buy him a casket”
savior ft. baby keem & sam dew
front to back, dope track. keem and kendrick goated on tracks. i love their influence on each other. he gets into the fake woke activism, the money polluting the movement, and most important, he is not your savior. i am not your savior.
i got off social media in 2020 because someone i wanted to collab with in 2016 didn’t believe in my short film dm’d me at the top of the protests.
i found myself in a toxic place on social media, simultaneously looked to for advice, povs, hot takes and also tweeting through shit i was dealing with emotionally. the gap between seeing the good in people and the ignorance in them was only compounded by the dms, comments, and trauma bombs where i felt everyone’s pain including my own. it was a tough time to see people come to conclusions that black people are born learning and on top of that, this dm felt very selfish. one protest for him, 365 for me and mine. with poor boundaries, a fear of true vulnerability being used against me in some way (as i’d learned from countless “allies”), and seeing the cycle of awareness, anger, and apathy, was too much. i had to go back to analog for a while, let niggas think for themselves to heal my mental.
–
bitch, are you happy for me? / really, are you happy for me? / smile in my face, but are you happy for me? / yeah, i'm out the way, are you happy for me?” in the last few years, i’ve been using the metric of “how does this person respond to good news about me?” to filter some of those toxic clingers out of my life. famously, a “friend” of mine asked another homie “how does mamoudou keep getting jobs?” short answer: because i’m talented, funny, and genuinely care about getting better you miserable motherfucker. but at the time i already had taken inventory of this “friend” and she was someone who did dope things for the community, hoping that good things would come her way in return. but that’s the issue: community care isn’t transactional. reciprocity, yes, but don’t do good things and want a favor in return. that’s some shallow miserable shit.
now that that’s off my chest: love this track. kendrick said “abolish celebrity” with his chest. he is not your savior, the only one who can save you is you. the only one who can save me is me. this track is less introspective and more of the social commentary we’re used to from kendrick but, in my opinion, someone needed to fucking say it. some of the allies out here got “allyship fatigue” from two weeks of seeing black people as humans meanwhile, being black is a full time, 24 hour a day protest against all the strings of capitalism, colonization, and seeing the strings that either our white allies see and pretend not to, don’t see at all, or don’t believe us when we say there’s a puppeteer to our pain.
and the people who capitalize off of this dysfunction…i felt myself becoming that spokesperson for the blacks, the immigrants, the “smart black dude…” and i rejected that. i’m a human. i just want to be that. a human being, imperfect, growing, changing, human, and not put on a pedestal just to be pushed off when i don’t play the game and accept disrespect with a smile, and a paper chasing plan. i didn’t want to be d*ray or z*we, i wanted to be me. or, even more simply, just be. and i’m ok with that.
stand out lyric(s):
“i tell the whole truth from a to z, ayy / show me you real, show me that you bleed, ayy”
“capitalists posing as compassionates be offending me”
“i've been protecting my soul in the valley of silence”
auntie diaries
this is going to be more of a commentary on the current culture of discourse. listening to this track was validating for me because we all had childhoods were we've had to unpack some of the more toxic ideas that get easily sponged into our collective conscious. to pretend that we all came into this world as blank slates and then grew up completely unaffected by the cisnormative, heteropatriarchal, colonial programming that is all around us seems disingenuous. for me, it is brave to admit that you were wrong and you grew from the experience. we are not going to have more people willing to grow unless we begin to forgive people for being products of their environment and commend them for trying to cross over.
i don't agree with the use of the f-word but it's not my song and i've never experienced the heat of that word. it's not my experience. going through this song, it is clear to me that kendrick gets it. but the streets are saying they wish it had gone differently, been said differently, or not at all. i want anyone critical of this song to point to any other rappers of the level of kendrick lamar doing the exact same work. please don't read this as being contrarian, i just know that growing up, there were so many people around me, alongside me who had no idea that there was anything outside of a gender binary and just now doing the queer duolingo to figure it out.
it's a weird time right now where we both accept that we didn't learn enough about the world, about queerness, about blackness in any of these colonial countries, about transness or anything outside of the gender binary but also want people to have been caught up on years of things that they have been misinformed about or never heard. oochie wally or one mic? is there a space for people to admit that they've been wrong and grow or are we just pretending? do we want perfection? because if we do, that's colonial, that's steeped in toxic puritanical religious doctrine. i've both seen people beg cis black men to respect trans identity and scene people reject cis black man for stumbling through words that they just learned either on the internet or from a loved one. what i haven't seen is the space for them to go from the former to the latter safely and in a public way.
do you want echo chambers of people who all agree (all queer/gnc/nb/trans people who live similar experiences or cis people who don’t come from that experience, pretending all the isms and phobias don’t exist) or do you want someone to be honest and take the brave step of going against the grain? you need a disruptor. in my opinion, man disrupted. it was relatable, raw, and gave the vibe of somebody trying to process something which i think there has not been enough time for in many regards, for many different issues. i think the concluding lines about the charged history of the f word and the n-word can come off as a little simplistic but that's the point; those words have histories and the double standard needs to be said in a more mainstream way. these thoughts are a work in progress.
stand out lyric: “heart plays in ways the mind can't figure out / this is how we conceptualize human beings”
mr. morale ft. tanna leone
i don't know how to say this but this is one of my favorite and least needed tracks on the album. i think that it really does have a good groove to it, something reminiscent of kid cudi “passion, pain, and demon slayin” it absolutely is a wonderful palate cleanser between auntie diaries and mother i sober but it isn't something that i'm going to return to over and over again the way that i would with many songs on this album. this being said, i think that kendrick talking directly to his kids is cute and the revelation that he is now detoxed, stepping out of the heaviness of all the pain, and ready to jump back into a creative flow is beautiful. really no need to name drop oprah twice on one album, right? and i think we all wonder what r. kelly's life would've been like without his trauma but not everything is tied to a single (or several) traumatic events. he was protected by the very things kendrick rejects on this album, capitalistic record labels and their interests, other men who didn’t care about black women, the church, etc. i'm just happy that we didn't see r. kelly's face on the heart part 5…
it bounces, it moves, it has a kinetic energy to it end it makes me feel good to hear this track but it isn't as necessary, especially as it shares the name of the disc title. i thought it would hit more. the baby keem connection is very apparent and strong on this album but i want to see more from tanna leone before i pass judgment on his talent.
stand out lyric: watchin' my cousin struggle with addiction / then watchin' her firstborn make a million / and both of them off the grid for forgiveness / i'm sacrificin' myself to start the healin' and...
mother i sober ft. beth gibbons of portishead
i cried multiple times during this song. i have not had a mother go through what kendrick has but has a lot of us black children have experienced, i think a lot about what my mother has been through to get me to the place where i am right now. especially as an immigrant.
both me and my sister have been sexually assaulted. it is very difficult to forgive your abuser. and, truth be told i have not forgiven hers, and i am yet to truly forgive mine. the year of questioning whether or not what happened to me really happened would have been shorter if what had happened to my sister had not happened just two months before me in 2016. i poured myself into making sure that my family felt secure, safe, and tried to be the fixer, but i failed and found a way to blame myself for that failure .
but wait, black men aren’t allowed to fail. you have to be successful all the time. your family is counting on you! you think that your parents came all the way here from mauritania to let you just fail and take time away from your family like this?
on top of that, the summer of 2016 my sister ran away from home, breaking off contact with our family. for months i went back and forth between whether my sister was alive or dead. all while keeping a happy smile on my face for the comedy audiences, these neoliberal news organizations, trying to keep on keepin’ on going through periods of grief followed by brief relief then back to grief again. the struggle to bridge the gap between a public person who seemingly had it together, career seemingly going well, and the reality of me falling apart and pulling myself back together multiple times a day for months on end in silence and in private took a toll on me. i see that toll every time i look in the mirror. the years of youthful energy and goofing off with friends were lost because 1) i didn't trust them to help me carry this burden and 2) the prison of masculinity kept me feeling as if my vulnerability would be used against me. truth be told, it was used against me. but never again.
i was trying to be both strong and sensitive, to feel nothing and everything, to be myself when i didn't want to be, to reject being what everybody else wanted me to be while continuing to be exactly what they wanted.
lord knows i was in therapy trying to figure it out for myself, scared to respond to text messages weeks later because the little bandwidth that i had i was spending it trying to keep going. what i needed to do is rest. heal. grow. grieve. love, myself and others. i do love myself. i do. but the guilt of that failure to protect my sister, to protect myself, protect my brothers and sisters were assaulted, harmed, violated with no repercussions or accountability weighed on me and still does.
to have kendrick make a song about something so visceral, relatable, and difficult to parse through made me feel seen. this album was right on time, his time, and somehow cosmically mine as well. it wasn't until literally this month but i began to open up about how i felt about these things to my mother and father, people who i never wanted to see me fail. i had been slowly connecting with my sister always just as scared as i was 6 years ago to lose her but the hardest part was to face my mother and father and tell them just how much i was hurting, how the coded “i need a breaks” really meant that there were times i did not want to be alive anymore. how i was cracking under the pressure, trying to learn and unlearn at the same time, trying to heal and losing faith in it, trying to be spiritually connected but feeling afloat and lost.
i don't say any of this for sympathy, i say it for transparency. and the transparent god’s honest truth is that letting go of that truly makes me feel more alive. letting go of that hurt, letting go of that need to control all the variables, letting go of what people think i am, letting go not to go the final resting place but to rest and wake up, excited for the next day, conversation, project, experience, hug, kiss, meal.
i was telling maria, that even though i knew what i needed to do, but i needed to allow myself to be, that even the art that i make is about community, unity, and ego death, i still had a lot of work to do to connect the work and my soul. so it continues. it continues.
stand out lyric: i'm sensitive, i feel everything, i feel everybody / one man standin' on two words, heal everybody / transformation, then reciprocation, karma must return / heal myself, secrets that i hide, buried in these words / death threats, ego must die, but i let it purge
mirror
mirror is a triumphant conclusion to an album that dug through a lot of grief in an attempt to break through generational trauma. it was a tough journey, often messy, always introspective, patient, reflective. kendrick telling the culture that he chose himself over coming back to just put out and mediocre album feels revolutionary because there is an entitlement to celebrity time and energy especially from people that we put on the pedestal of being “a thought leader.” walking down the street listening to this track felt immediately rejuvenating, it felt like he forgave himself, he forgave other people, he accepted forgiveness, and all he wants to do is continue to propagate this.
part of this track feels like it is directed at a specific person; not whitney, but someone. the streets are saying that it's noname when she called out male rappers for their silence during the 2020 protests and honestly, i agree with his response here. i love the work that noname has been able to do with her book club and opening up her own library ut as somebody who has been told by people, white and black, why am i not being louder with a voice that was already shaking and trembling under the weight of what was unsaid, this resonated with me deeply.
the summer i tore my acl, a white woman chewed me out for not being able to go to a protest, insinuating that i didn't really care because i wasn't out in the streets for black lives matter. bitch, i’m one of the black lives!!!! i'm over it but i think that we all have unrealistic expectations of the limited time that we have outside of trying to make ends meet under the oppressive done with capitalism. when kendrick said “disregardin' the way that i cope with my own vices / maybe it's time to break it off / run away from the culture to follow my heart” it hit because i felt mad guilt about not being vocal through the biden election all the way until the present but i had nothing left in my head, heart, voice, bones, nothing. nothing. and my trauma response is to isolate, is to hold everything in, and ultimately to help other people before i help myself. the very thing i love to do was also the thing i was using to not better understand myself.
i've said it before, i went through a gaslighting recovery program and learned a lot about the ways in which i have been manipulated and how the very culture of the art spaces i was navigating didn't make it any easier for me to heal. i was in therapy trying to reject the reality that i have been harmed, gaslit, led astray, run amok! i was constantly trying to grow in the wrong pot.
i went off to grow and i’m finally ready to show the world whatever i’ve found in that time, in that light, in that space, at my pace.
to the homies who felt left behind, i’m sorry, i had to figure some shit out. i hope you did your own growing.
to the people who kept my name in their mouths, i’m sad you don’t got other things going on and i pray you take the time to heal and put your own name back in your mouth.
to the homies who helped me learn to be me again, i love you. we back outside.
stand out lyric: sorry i didn't save the world, my friend / i was too busy buildin' mine again
summary:
whole album is a therapy session. therapy today is more normalized than ever but no two therapy experiences are the same, and not everyone respects it. you are either there to tweet say you went, to be told you’re always right, or validated in even your wildest opinions, or to dig into the dirt and heal the childhood and adulthood trauma to prevent continuing the cycle. this album got into the dirt, it got messy, it got raw, and painted a picture of the messiah of hip hop to many as a human being. i don’t know what else people wanted. perfection from anyone is impossible and this was the portrait of a work in progress. this isn’t about your reality, or mine, it’s about kendrick’s. we all reach our destination in the vehicle of our choice; some of us are in cars alone, some on horses, bikes, some of y’all niggas on a bus following other cars, some of y’all on a bus trying to find another way to the destination, but kendrick stopped driving. he stopped for 5 years. and that’s ok.
i feel like there’s a price point/popularity level where people cease to be humans when it comes to celebrity. so many curated images, projections as reflections of what we choose to hide or what we choose to put on other people. even the way we unpack our pain can be curated into an album, art, or a book. but what matters is that we’re doing it, hopefully for pure, non-exploitative reasons. yes, kendrick has the luxury of taking 5 years off to heal but let’s not pretend that he’s always had that; he’s more than the snapshot of fame we’ve had since 2010ish.
i think kodak black is just another kendrick in the sense that he comes from similar circumstances to kendrick despite being from florida; indicative that no matter what hood, the symptoms ara all around us. i think “mirror” opening with “i choose me” from kodak is supposed to be the propagation of the healing energy that kendrick has found to people outside his community and family, but from his circumstances; “i choose me, i’m sorry” is a powerful hook. if that’s his intention, i appreciate it and hope that whatever juice or game kendrick gave kodak stuck and he makes the most of this chance to be better. what’s all this transformational and rehabilitative talk for if it isn’t for the kodaks of the world? that being said…again, there was another way to do it but this was kendrick’s intention and he’s super intentional.
conversation is often intention vs. interpretation and social media is the interpretation machine; the me matrix, how do i insert me into this narrative, etc. it’s not lost on me that that’s what i’ve done with this and the last loosies but it was in the service of feeling seen and not feeling silenced, as i have by others and myself in my life. this was an intentional foray into healing as a man and a thing i’ve noticed as i’ve dipped my toe into the waters of social media again is just how queer and femme coded healing is. it’s not intentionally exclusionary but as a dude stepping into his queerness from the prison of masculinity, specifically black masculinity, i don’t see a lot of places where cis or straight black men get their infographics about healing, therapy, digging in the dirt, etc. abuse, trauma, and healing shouldn’t be gendered; nothing should be but if the propagation of pain is to stop, everyone needs to be allowed to heal. everyone. even that person who you just thought of who doesn’t deserve it.
kendrick’s use of repetition felt like a rejection of a lot of the things men are asked to hold inside by the culture and then blamed for following the patriarchal playbook. not all men want to grow and unpack that but for those who do, the ones who no longer want to tap dance around the issues and be the mr. morale to the people in their lives, i choose these lyrics as mantras and affirmations:
i choose me, i’m sorry.
i can’t please everybody.
i know you feel deep.
i am not (anyone’s) savior.
this is me and i’m blessed.
we’re not going to infographic our way to freedom and we’re not going to discourse our way to justice with open mouths and closed ears.
the gate to growth shouldn’t be kept, and the first step is to take the first step. the second is to keep going.
let’s keep going together 🌱
next time, ify nwadiwe and then bianca bafitis 🤝✨