At the start of his first concert in the Netherlands since February 2018, the most important rapper of his generation sits behind a piano on an immense, empty stage. Turning his back to the audience, he plays the simplistically effective and briefly touched piano tones that set the mood for ‘United in Grief’, the track with which he also released his recent album. mr. Morale & The Big Steppers opens.
It only takes a moment before a close-up of the face of Kendrick Lamar appears on the video screen, who, in gradually increasing intensity, starts rapping quickly and passionately on the staccato chords. As tempo and fierceness increase, Lamar stands up and stacks his raging phrases infused with a rattling drum break with a raw voice that breaks slightly in the height.
Audience raps, jumps, screams
The audience in Ziggodome whoops, raps and jumps and yells: “Kendrick! Kendrick!”
The concert has just started and Lamar, the first pop artist to win a Pulitzer Prize for his music, set the tone on this opening night of his European tour. He switches between moody and delirious, introverted and exhilarating – constantly restrained, in control and directing the tempo.
The audience, who already started to vortex with the opening acts Tanna Leone and Lamar’s cousin Baby Keem, is given a hip-hop show as a tightly directed, understated theatrical and musical journey.
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The album mr. Morale & The Big Steppers is strongly inward. Lamar takes the listener into his restless soul on rich, melancholic productions. The album leads live in decoration and atmosphere, and it is striking how Lamar interweaves older work in that context.
Helen Mirren as ‘therapist’
A pumping crowd favorite like ‘Backseat Freestyle’ creates a burst of energy in the audience but also feels like a logical outpouring in a more therapeutic context. Before hit ‘HUMBLE.’ erupts, actress Helen Mirren – who talks to Lamar from tape as a ‘therapist’ between songs – urges him not to let his ego overwhelm him again. Also the explosive ‘DNA’, rapped live by Lamar with sublime breath control. gets into this umfeld an additional charge.
The visual decoration is sober and somewhat gloomy. There are at times the better known effects at concerts at this level. The flames and plumes of smoke spewing upwards, the catwalks that connect separate stage parts that can rise and fall. But at its core it is Lamar, somewhat displaced on a large stage, with dancers now and then dressed in black and white with their loose-looking, alienating choreography. With distorted shadows behind him on the screen, or a silhouette of the rapper himself, who carries sharp arrows bent over in his back.
Soulful and melancholy
The energy is lower and the atmosphere more melancholy than at a regular rap concert. Lamar constantly opts for delays in flow and intensity, such as when he calmly performs ‘Father Time’, reclined in a chair, or performs ‘Crown’ in a soulful and warm voice towards the end of the concert from behind the piano.
Lamar creates a tension in which the more energetic songs provide the release in a sublime dose. In ‘Worldwide Steppers’ he pushes his words out almost franticly at high speed, standing in the middle of a hypnotically blinking circle of bright lights on the catwalk. And in ‘Mirror’, from a transparent cube full of smoke, in which four men in white suits have previously ‘tested him for Covid’, he lets his raps pulse seamlessly with the percussive sounds in the song.