When it comes to live shows, Kendrick Lamar has always faced an uphill battle. He isn’t Drake, who breezes through each stadium gig as if it’s just another party on a seemingly endless Ibiza holiday, and he isn’t Kanye West, who is so brilliantly facetious that he based one of his tours on Jodorowsky’s The Holy Mountain. Lamar is far more human than any stars of a similar wattage, and his music – rap records that are ornate bordering on ornery, so poetic and literary that he won a Pulitzer for 2017’s Damn – doesn’t necessarily lend itself to the greatest hits format that pop stars are so often cowed into.
This is doubly true of his most recent album, Mr Morale and the Big Steppers, which is an elaborate and often uncomfortable trauma opera about, among other things, Lamar’s childhood, his unwanted status as a kind of pop messiah, and cancel culture. How do you bring an audience into We Cry Together, a dialogue that plays like a kind of rap Punch and Judy? Or Mirror, whose hook (“I choose me, I’m sorry”) is basically therapy-speak repeated over and over.
