Hey I'm Brian Hyatt and this is Rolling Stone Music Now. After a five-year wait, unless you count the excellent Black Panther soundtrack,

Kendrick Lamar has returned with a new album, Mr. Morrill and the Big Stepers.

This one is controversial.

It's gotten, really for the first time in his career, some mixed reviews.

I think wherever you end up landing on it it's undeniably a fascinatingly

honest and deliberately messy album and of course since it's Kendrick it's quite

often phenomenal on a musical level.

Either way I wanted to dig as deeply as possible

into this new album, and to do so I have

for his second time on this podcast,

the very talented journalist and author Marcus J. Moore who happens to be Kendrick Lamar's

biographer. He wrote The Butterfly Effect, How Kendrick Lamar Ignited the Soul of Black America.

And you can go back and listen to our episode where we talked about

that book which you should also be sure to pick up. As it turns out this new one is

not Marcus's favorite Kendra Gautam but nevertheless he had a ton of expert insight.

So obviously he wrote what I would say is the definitive book about Kendrick

and you gave us a great sense of where he was.

Upon your first few listens, here we are a few days after the album came out, what do you think we're learning about where he is now versus where he was then?

I feel like in listening to this record we're hearing a person who is finally taking stock of the trauma that he dealt with growing up.

Whereas he did that on previous records so obviously he did that on

Good Kid Mad City and to Pepper Butterfly and Dam and you know everything he's talking about his past.

But I feel like this is the first time where he's trying to actually

...