Kendrick Lamar's current tour, supporting his excellent May album Mr. Morale & The Big Steppers, pretty much confirms what we've suspected about the gifted rapper for 10 years now: He is a generational talent, one whose music and image will far outlive him.
Kids will still be cranking up "DNA" and "Wesley's Theory" 25 years from now, just as they're cranking up Prince and Michael Jackson today and trying to imagine what it was like to be in the same room with them.
The answer, in Kendrick's case, is electric. The feeling is electric. Even without the star attraction figured into the equation, The Big Steppers Tour, which came to Las Vegas' T-Mobile Arena on September 10, is pure spectacle.
The nearest comparison I can make is David Byrne's American Utopia, another hybrid entity of avant-garde theatrical flourishes and booming, crowd-pleasing hits. The scale is massive: The show employs a small army of dancers, building-sized video screens and a stage with a catwalk whose length approximates an airport runway.
But these elements aren't there simply to draw attention to themselves. Kendrick, who took the stage in a broad-shouldered black suit holding a ventriloquist's dummy styled to look just like him, skillfully employed them all to further his (Pulitzer Prize-winning) storytelling—making sublime visual comments on what he was saying, taking stylized guesses at what he was thinking. Occasionally a narrator would speak up to chastise him ("Your loyalty has been convenient for what serves you").
The staging occasionally allowed him to grow to giant size via the enormous video screen behind the main stage, which at one point displayed a "shadow" view of him with arrows sticking out of his back. Or the set around Kendrick would go dark, save for a square of light shining directly down on him—literally putting him on the spot.
A quartet of dancing women in diaphanous red dresses crowded around Kendrick during "Die Hard," at one point forming a chain behind him to push him forward onto the catwalk. During "Alright," he was encased in a clean room-like plastic box and attended by dancers in hazmat suits: "Mr. Morale, it's time to take a COVID test. This is for your own good."
The no-filler set also included "Love," "Money Trees," "Humble," "King Kunta," "Backseat Freestyle" and some 20 other tracks, including duets with his opening acts Tanna Leone and Baby Keem. (It was an emotional night for Keem, who lived in Vegas for a time and gave heartfelt thanks to "my hometown that raised me.")
There's little more I say about the show that could sell it better than Kendrick did. Shortly after "Bitch, Don't Kill My Vibe," he thanked the crowd for coming to T-Mobile, and added, "This is the greatest show on Earth. And we here." He was correct on both points.
