Crown of Horns
Kendrick Lamar's angels and demons at play.
“In certain respects, art succeeds where religion fails. A great symphony or poem is an active reminder of the reality of meaning. It provides a stimulus like an electric shock, reanimating the will and the appetite for life. Its disadvantage is that we all assume art is subjective by nature, it tells us about the emotions of the artist, not about the objective world. So when life fails, the effectiveness of art diminishes.” From, The Essential Colin Wilson.
Listen to the sound of Kendrick Lamar’s voice on Mr. Morale & the Big Steppers. Like the music, it’s disjointed and skittering, jump cutting through madness, humiliation, shame, bravado, doubt, fear, and occasionally, thundering understanding. The double album’s reception has been mixed, in part due to the song “Auntie Diaries,” in which he reckons with his conceptions of queerness, dropping homophobic slurs and hopping back in time narratively via use of a dead name, before concluding in a moving, psychedelic melodic surge, “Here Come the Warm Jets” meets What’s Going On.
On this song, and all over the album, Lamar skewers others and skewers himself, employing theatrically arch and grandiose scenes and narration by his partner, Whitney Alford, noted abuser Kodak Black, and spiritual figure Eckhart Tolle with incredible acting by Taylour Paige and dozens of strange and beautiful vocal inflections and articulations from himself. Disruption of groove is employed as an ethos, lurching from trunk rattling G-Funk to Radiohead-style art rock, “Jesus Walks” gospel thumps, and orchestral swells. Often, things shift mid-song.
But it’s especially interesting when Kendrick strips it down, like on “Crown,” where he croons over a minimalist piano sketch that evokes Arthur Russell’s hymnal experimental folk. “One thing I've learned, love can change with the seasons,” he states, admonishing himself and acknowledging difficult truths in tandem. “Love will get you killed,” he adds, his Christianity meets New Age metaphysics suggesting the dark night of the soul and crucifixion. Like Christ at the end, Kendrick remains dissatisfied. He can’t please everybody, and worse, he can’t even please himself, he admits, his multi-tracked voice screaming in, cloaked in a Mayfield-like falsetto like he employed on “These Walls” from To Pimp A Butterfly.
I find Kendrick just as convincing when he talks about The Devil, as he is prone to do. In the past, he often wrote of a demonic spirit, Lucy or Lucifer, but on “Count Me Out,” he addresses his innermost demon:
“Some put it on the Devil when they fall short
I put it on my ego, lord of all lords
Sometimes I fall for her, dawg”
On Mr. Morale and the Big Steppers, Kendrick suggests the Satan’s visit with Christ in the wilderness, or the demon on one wing, an angel on the other. In the songs, these two irreconcilable sides do something like accord. Lamar knows he can’t please everybody, but you have to serve somebody. He offers a vision of something new that could grow out of the friction if viewed honestly.
Bonus: Like Judee Sill trying to musically induce God into giving us all a break, Ghostface Killah asks for one too: “This world's in The Twilight Zone, this is the fifth dimension/God, please blow the whistle, we need a intermission.”