Reflections on the Black Interior in Kendrick Lamar's Mr Morale and the Big Steppers

We had watched Atlanta’s Amsterdam episode more than once. Paper Boi, wandering the city in silence, detached, unsure, free in w ays that felt almost mythic. It wasn’t just television. It was something like a mirror. A whisper. A promise that Black men could live unperformed and unbothered, even if just for a moment.

So we followed the call.

My friend, then leading a justice organization at one of the most elite universities in the country, and I booked the flight. I was balancing a full-time job, taking 15 credit hours at Howard Divinity, and trying to smuggle Afro-surrealism into the walls of the theological academy. Amsterdam wasn’t an escape. It was a site of pilgrimage. Of exhaustion. Of expectation. Of becoming.

We didn’t go to explore; we went for Kendrick. Mr. Morale & The Big Steppers had already turned our inner worlds upside down, but seeing it live felt necessary. Urgent. And when the lights dimmed and the beat dropped, we weren’t at a concert. We were at a reckoning. Kenny wasn’t just rapping, he was preaching. Each song is a sermon. Each lyric is a lament. Each silence is an altar.

That night, something cracked open in me. It was the beginning of my descent into dreaming not as escape, but as a sacred method a theology of the surreal. I didn’t have the language for it then.

But before I named it, I had to walk through the world that raised me. Hip-hop. The Black church. Blues houses. Juke joints. Each one a sanctuary. Each one is an archive. Each one was a Black sound that didn’t just ask you to listen but to move. To protest. To weep. To get free.

An Ode to Mr. Morale & The Big Steppers: New Jazz Reformation

The first time I heard Mr. Morale & The Big Steppers, I wasn’t analyzing lyrics or looking for metaphors. I was trying to survive the night.

I had just returned from celebrating the life of a Black man who died too soon, an older friend whose legacy stretched farther than his years allowed. He left behind an adult child, only 24 years old. The same age I was when I lost my father.

Grief doesn’t knock politely. It barges in, dragging old losses back into the room like unpaid debts. That night, I couldn’t sleep. I needed something to interrupt the ache. Something to drown out the quiet that was getting too loud.

So I put on Kendrick.

I thought I’d zone out for an hour, let the music carry me somewhere numb. But that album didn’t let me escape; it pulled me under. I sat still. I heard confessions that felt too close. I heard pain mapped into poetry. I heard silence weaponized as a hook. And when it ended, I just sat there.

The only words I could say were: What the hell did I listen to?

But not in disbelief, more like recognition. Like I had just walked into a temple I didn’t know I needed, where the preacher was wearing a crown of thorns made of therapy bills and unresolved daddy wounds.

This wasn’t an album, it was an exorcism, a jazz funeral with an 808. A Black man whispering his way through survival, through shame, through sorrow, and somehow making it sound like praise.

Kendrick wasn’t offering answers. He was handing out mirrors.

That’s when I realized: Mr. Morale & The Big Steppers wasn’t here to entertain. It was here to disrupt the emotional stillness Black men are taught to live in. This was the start of a reformation, not just for hip-hop, but for us.

A New Jazz Reformation where improvisation is theology, healing is a hook, and confession is the new altar call.

Ziggo Dome as Sanctuary: Two Nights, One Revelation

I went to see Kendrick twice.

The first night, I just wanted to witness it, whatever “it” was. We were on the floor of the Ziggo Dome in Amsterdam, but far enough back that the whole thing felt like a beautifully choreographed blur. We watched him, Kenny, command the stage for nearly two hours, pushing past his set time because something had run late. He didn’t rush. He didn’t fold. He just kept going. Holding the space like a seasoned preacher who knows the Spirit showed up late but came heavy.

That night, I saw precision. Artistry. Discipline. But I was still watching from a distance.

The second night changed everything.

We arrived earlier, made our way closer, and stood in that crowd with more intention, more stillness, more anticipation. And that’s when it hit me: I wasn’t at a concert. I was in church. But not the church I grew up in, this was a different kind of altar. There were no pews, no choir robes, no bulletin. But there was a Black man on stage naming demons, casting shadows, and inviting us all to speak our pain out loud.

And because we were close right there, near the front, the boundary between performer and prophet blurred. Somewhere between the space cake we split and the mosh pits that cracked open around us, we got caught up in the Spirit. Not metaphorically. Spiritually. The crowd moved us, sometimes pulling me and my homie forward, other times tossing us back like waves. It felt less like dancing and more like floating.

And Kendrick? At one point, he danced with four women. But to me, it wasn’t a performance, it was a procession. It looked like he was walking with the ancestors: four midwives, four guardians, four witnesses to the work he was doing on that stage.

That semi-cool day in October, in a country far from where I’d buried my father, studied my theology, or led my students, I saw something ancient. Something sacred. I didn’t have the language yet. But I knew something had shifted.

I had seen theology, but I couldn’t name it.

Not yet.

I Left Dreaming

After that second night, I didn’t have clarity. I had current. Something electric. Something ancient. I didn’t walk away with a thesis I walked away with questions. Visions. Sound.

I left dreaming.

Dreams that would take three years to begin to define. Not just academically, but spiritually. Artistically. Personally. I had encountered something that didn’t fit into a paper or a pulpit. It wasn’t doctrine. It was an atmosphere. A way of moving through grief, art, faith, and memory at once.

What lingered with me were not just Kendrick’s words, but the conditions of the moment:

• The sense that imagination was sacred, not childish.

• That therapy could be liturgy, if we let it.

• That grief wasn’t interruption, but invitation.

• That performance was survival, but vulnerability was worship.

• That the ancestors don’t always speak they dance.

• Hip-hop is a liturgical archive of Black interiority, a sacred record of what it feels like to live inside Black skin, to reckon with memory, masculinity, contradiction, and hope.

  • That interiority is revelation: the inward gaze as holy ground, the self as sanctuary.

    
    

And maybe most of all, salvation is not always an event; it is an environment—a shift, a space that lets you breathe again, that lets you name again. In that moment, salvation wasn’t an altar call; it was a cracked-open hour where my body, mind, and spirit were given permission to speak in the same voice.

I wasn’t rescued. I was recognized.

These were not ideas I wasn't trying to publish. I was just trying to live. Trying to breathe. Trying to hold together the grief of a friend, the shadow of my father, and the sound of a man who made pain rhythmic.

I didn’t have a name for it then.

I only knew: I had seen the veil tremble. And I wasn’t going back to sleep.

The Reformation Was Me

This wasn’t just an album.

It was a turning point, a holy disruption, a reformation not of the church but of the self, not of belief but of being.

Kendrick’s Mr. Morale & The Big Steppers didn’t show me God in the way I was taught to look. It showed me the God who shows up when your mind won’t stop racing. The one who sits with you when your dreams feel too heavy to carry. The God who doesn’t perform miracles on command but whispers to your soul when the crowd is loud and you still feel alone.

That album marked the beginning of how I would express the encounter I believe God placed in my chest. Not in tongues. Not in shouts. But in dreams. In fragments. In the swirl of hip-hop, therapy, scripture, grief, jazz, and the beauty of not having all the answers.

I went to Amsterdam to see a show. What I got was a sacred interruption.

I didn’t find salvation in the songs. I found it in what the songs allowed me to feel.I found it in the way the floor shook beneath us. In the silence between two bass drops.In the crowd, lifting me like communion bread. In the dancing ancestors. In the mosh pit. In the mirror.

And when the lights came up, I was different. Still undone. Still questioning. Still healing. But dreaming now. Always dreaming.