![]() (According to Lil Yachty, anyway, it took Drake just 11 minutes to write it.) On the track, we hear a familiar Drake-reflective and somewhat paranoid-but he digs deeper, with much more clarity and energy than we’ve heard from him of late. And to think, it only took linking up with Jack Harlow on vacation in Turks and Caicos for this moment to happen. “Churchill Downs” is one of Drake’s best verses in years. They’ll tell you he never lied.” -Jordan Rose After commenting on culture vultures that have infiltrated the rap community, Cole asserts his dominance in the game when he spits, “Nigga want me on a song, he gon’ see the wrath of the reaper/ I’m prolly gon’ to hell if Jesus ask for a feature,” before dramatically closing his verse by once again laying claim to the title of “best rapper alive” and challenging anyone who disagrees with him to “go and ask the best rappers that died. Cole takes his myth-making to the next level in the opening moments of his “Johnny P’s Caddy” verse, illustrating his birth like that of Hercules or another demigod: “On the night I was born, the rain was pourin’,God was crying/ Lightnin’ struck, power outage, sparks were flyin’/ A real one here.” Going into his last album, The Off-Season, Cole said he had rediscovered his passion for the craft of rapping and fine-tuned his skills like he was a rookie in the game again, and all of those writing exercises are reflected in verses like these. Morale & The Big Steppers: the only way to be “set free” and break generational curses is by looking inward and embracing the darkest parts of your past. This pivotal third verse on “Mother I Sober” encapsulates a central theme of Mr. “ I pray our children don’t inherit me and feelings I attract/ A conversation not bein’ addressed in Black families/ The devastation, hauntin’ generations and humanity,” he spits with the passion and conviction of a man healed. It’s through therapy that Kendrick learns the trauma his mom faced was inadvertently passed down to him because it was never addressed, and that the only way to break this toxic cycle is by having difficult conversations and healing from past experiences. “Pure soul, even in her pain, know she cared for me/ Gave me a number, said she recommended some therapy,” he raps, revealing the moment when his wife Whitney suggested that he should go to therapy to face his unhealthy relationship with sex and unearth childhood trauma that he had long buried. The whole song is revelatory, and in the final verse, Dot fully comes to grips with how the cyclical nature of family trauma affected him as an adult. Morale & The Big Steppers is a therapy session for the rapper, but not until the project’s penultimate track “Mother I Sober” does he finally reach his breakthrough. The entirety of Kendrick Lamar’s latest studio album Mr. Despite religion being at the backdrop of “Communion,” Che still recognizes that “it’s gon’ take more than a prayer just to fix that” as she embarks on the journey to defeat her demons. This verse is equal parts a confessional and therapy session, as she explains how childhood trauma has made it difficult for her to maintain relationships as an adult. Che Noir morphs the booth into her confessional as she takes communion in the house of rap, transmuting her darkest thoughts into the blood and the body that she passes out to her congregation of listeners in the powerful opening verse of her song “Communion.” “Tragic news, pain that left me in the saddest mood/ Depressed and family assumin’ it’s just my attitude,” Che raps, illustrating a struggle that many Black folk have faced, coming from homes that don’t take mental health seriously because of stigmas created by systemic issues that have stifled their access to understanding it better. Church is meant to be a place of worship where one brings their pain and trauma to the pulpit in order to be saved.
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