The Complete Fucking Thrill of Seeing Kendrick Lamar Live

I’m trying to bring gig reviews back. I miss them. I love them. And I’m trying to bring them back and deliver them to other people that love them too. We went to Kendrick Lamar in Auckland. Holy shit!

Kendrick Lamar

Spark Arena, Auckland

Friday, December 16

I loved Kendrick Lamar, then left him alone – he wasn’t for me. And people that looked a lot like me and not at all like Lamar seemed to “enjoy” his music rather than ever mention that they respected it. It’s not for us to say that we liked a song like King Kunta, absolute banger though it is. Alex Haley’s Roots is just one important text cited in the song. There are references to Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man and Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart too. And the last time I felt this way when listening to hip-hop was probably The Roots’ album named after that same Achebe novel. The first time was absolutely Public Enemy. In all cases, we are talking about musical bangers, for sure. But Kendrick, like Chuck D, like Questlove and Black Thought, is operating on a level I can neither identify with nor fully understand. Admiration and respect needs to be offered, more than just a hand in the air.

So I stepped away from Kendrick – right as he was getting far more than flowers. A Pulitzer Prize in fact.

But this year’s Mr. Morale album hit me harder than any of his other records. Containing both head and heart music, it was less overtly about floor-shakers and more about head-scratchers. The double-serve album both a therapy session and meditation on the trauma and grief from his upbringing and the systemic racism that we pay lip-service to breaking through. It is also a rejection of mantle – the saviour of hip-hop has to focus on saving himself. Kendrick is a family man now and that is where his head and his heart is, and the new music reflects that, with an onus always on surviving, being elevated to saviour and rejecting that now – as he goes in search of what really matters.

To see Kendrick Lamar live in concert is to experience the fully glory of hip-hop as performance-art. It’s always been as performative as it is about actual performance, Snoop Dogg married for 30 years but popping out on stage still to sing about bitches and hos, he knows what side the bread is buttered on, and how to get more, often without terribly much effort.