“And to the killer that sped up my demise / I forgive you, just know your soul’s in question,” raps Lamar, and later, “I don’t need to be in flesh just to hug y’all / The memories recollect just because y’all / Celebrate me with respect.” He wants more than to just commune with deceased legends he wants to hold a mirror up to himself, his peers, and his community - for what they’ve built, where they have to go, and what he needs out of them. By the third verse, he has taken on the persona of fellow Los Angeles rap staple and friend, the late Nipsey Hussle, who was gunned down in 2019. Morale & the Big Steppers - is drenched in paranoia and death. Like its predecessors, “Part 5” - released as a stand-alone single ahead of his new album, Mr. “Get used to hearin’ arsenal rain / Analyze, risk your life, take the charge.” Part of a long-running series that started in 2010, each chapter of “The Heart” acts as a sort of Kendrick State of the Union: where he’s from, what he’s seen, and, most important, where he’s at now. Kendrick sounds haunted on “The Heart Part 5.” “Desensitized, I vandalized pain, covered up and camouflaged,” he raps over a flip of Marvin Gaye’s “I Want You” (which, kudos to K.Dot, is not an easy sample to clear in 2022!). His father ended up being okay, and the event gave Morby more life, too. “Seems to say this is what I’ll miss after I die / And this is what I’ll miss about being alive.” As the song grows from a twangy acoustic guitar to incorporate a full band, choir, and horn section - clearly influenced by the time Morby spent working in Memphis - that line becomes a rallying cry, with Morby sounding more urgent than ever before. “Got a glimmer in his eye,” Morby notices. Morby found the titular photo after his father collapsed at a family gathering: a picture of their family when his father was around his age. “This Is a Photograph,” the first single off his new album of the same name, turns that motif into a song that feels distinctly alive. The singer-songwriter contemplated the afterlife on his 2019 opus, Oh My God, and wrote his 2020 follow-up, Sundowner, after three deaths (the musician Jessi Zazu, his former producer Richard Swift, and his hero Anthony Bourdain) impacted him. Lately, Kevin Morby has been fascinated by death.
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