Kendrick Lamar's new album: How good is Mr. Morales & The Big Steppers?

Sent by the god of rap, crowned by the cultural olympus with the Pulitzer Prize and anointed by his fan Barack Obama: The rapper Kendrick Lamar didn't even have to put on the crown of thorns for the cover of his new album, even without the Jesus symbol he had long been the chosen one , who shouldered the suffering on behalf of his own.

Because he could describe this suffering from transgenerational trauma and structural racism like no other without using these terms - and if he did, he even found a rhyme for it.

With every album/masterpiece, the expectation grew that Lamar could create the superhuman and conjure up some ingenious trick that would bring salvation out of the baseball cap.

He also has salvation on “Mr.

Morale & The Big Steppers”, his fifth album, certainly not a collective one;

just the very timely, but somewhat disappointing solution for himself: he's doing psychotherapy now.

During an almost eighty-minute wild

, Kendrick reports to his therapist “Eckhart” – meaning, no joke, the German self-help author Eckhart Tolle, who speaks several times – in an associative flashback of megalomania and self-hatred.

Along the way, he also voices some surprisingly avuncular views on cancel culture and political correctness.

Driven by the desire to show himself to be a fallible person, the patient confesses his moral failures (cheating, emotional unavailability), but tends to be self-righteous, as if confessing were an achievement in itself.

Out of responsibility to his loved ones, Lamar wants to work on his "pain body" — a great term for the sum of a person's accumulated suffering over a lifetime.

This leaves no resources to carry around the responsibility for an entire culture.

"I choose me, I'm sorry", Lamar says goodbye as the savior a.

D., and that is the saddest thing: that the psycho-industry has converted him, who can so magnificently connect the personal with the social, with the message that solutions to his problems should first and foremost be found within himself, as if they did not have a thousand external triggers .

But that disappointment aside, Lamar still tells weirder, more devious stories than any other rapper, and that's more than okay, too.