Review: Kendrick Lamar, in a Tour Befitting a Legend

It's always a big year in music when Kendrick Lamar releases an album. After all, he's earned himself a reputation as one of the most influential rappers of all time – the poet laureate of hip-hop – and he's achieved that reputation after only four studio albums. His fifth album, "Mr. Morale & the Big Steppers," was released this spring and is poised to further cement his reputation as being the best of his generation.

A lot has happened since Lamar's last release five years ago. For starters, he won the Pulitzer Prize for music, making him the first non-jazz and non-classical musician to achieve that feat. We have endured political upheaval, a global pandemic, the murder of a shameful number of Black people at the hands of police, and that's on top of what Lamar has been dealing with personally. This album is, in part, Lamar's attempt to come to terms with or make heads or tails of some of what he's been wrestling with over the last five years. And while the album is fractured and doesn't necessarily result in any great personal exorcism or revelation about himself, it remains a masterpiece told in fragmented shards of truth that he sends flying at the listener with the suave, aggressive intensity that has become his hallmark. It's only fitting, then, that his "The Big Steppers Tour," which is touring the world through December, aims for cohesion more than its namesake album does, resulting in something of an exorcism after all, a fitting denouement for his entire "Big Steppers" era. He achieves this in part by weaving in a dozen songs from his other albums, resulting in a 25-song-long opus that looks as sleek as a Balenciaga fashion show yet packs the dramatic wallop of an opera.

Sleek, sexy, and theatrical, Lamar understands how to move around the stage in live performance, which can often be a pitfall for many solo rappers. He understands how vision is everything, and part of the marvel of the spectacle of "The Big Steppers Tour" is just how carefully curated each frame is, almost like a flip book. It also may have set a new standard in terms of combining intimacy with intensity during a hip-hop show, which can sometimes feel smaller than life in a big arena. But of course, with Kendrick Lamar, it's doubtful that he could ever come across as anything so mortal.

The tour starts the way the album does, with "United in Grief," a song that begins with the lyrics "I hope you find some peace of mind in this lifetime. I hope you find some paradise. I been goin' through somethin'. 1855 days, I been goin' through something'. Be afraid." Over the next two hours, Lamar wrestles with therapy, relationships, cancel culture, and the fucked-up state of the world. He goes through everything, from R. Kelly and anti-vaxxers to Putin. But really, both the tour and the album are about one person's problems and perceptions rather than commentary at large, and "The Big Steppers Tour" is a shining example of the kind of magic that can happen when an artist's vision is melded with his words in perfect multi-dimensional harmony.

Lamar is notoriously private, often receding out of the public eye in between projects, which can last for years at a time. "And they like to wonder where I've been," he raps in the last line of the concert, "protectin' my soul in the valley of silence." And as he waved goodbye and descended beneath the stage for the final time, he seemed to be acknowledging that it might be a while before we see him again. Even if he keeps us all waiting another five years, one thing is certain: whatever he emerges with next will be well worth the wait.