Shortly after the release of his fifth studio album MR. MORALE & THE BIG STEPPERS, Kendrick Lamar has released a first music video for one of the album tracks. In the visually expressive video for “N95”, the professing Christian floats over water in a pose reminiscent of Jesus images and in another scene lies with a scantily clad woman in a bedroom decorated with countless crosses. The rapper once again directed with Dave Free. The two founded a creative agency together in 2020 called pgLang, which was previously responsible for the recently released music video for The Heart Part 5.
N95 is an American production standard for particle-filtering respirators, similar to the European FFP2 standard. In the song, Kendrick Lamar criticizes the materialistic lifestyle of many people, especially rappers. He advises getting rid of such false bringers of salvation, since, like masks, they hide a person’s true character:
“Take off the Chanel, take off the Dolce, take off the Birkin bag (Take it off)
Take all that designer bullshit off, and what do you have?”
MR. MORALE & THE BIG STEPPERS: Kendrick Lamar’s fifth album
Kendrick Lamar’s album MR. MORALE & THE BIG STEPPERS was released on May 13, 2022. Divided into two parts, it contains 18 songs and has a running time of over an hour. Feature guests include Portishead’s Blxst, Sampha, Baby Keem and Beth Gibbons. In the run-up to the release, the 34-year-old rapper is not releasing any singles from the album, but another part of his “The Heart” project. On “The Heart Part 5,” Kendrick Lamar pops up on a sample of the Marvin Gaye song “I want you‘ from the perspective of various prominent people, for example he raps from the perspective of OJ Simpson, Kanye West, Kobe Bryant and Will Smith. The highlight: In the music video for the almost six-minute song, Kendrick Lamar slips visually into the skin of the respective person thanks to deep-fake technology.
MR. MORALE & THE BIG STEPPERS is the fifth studio album by Kendrick Lamar. Before DAMN. The albums GOOD KID, MAAD CITY (2012) and TO PIMP A BUTTERFLY (2015) were released.