Gotta disagree on the Kendrick analysis in this thread. In my view he’s been calling on the black community to better themselves and solve their own problems since TPAB but has been more or less ignored. I think this angle has been totally ignored by critics too. Kendrick has been toeing a very fine line between saying what he thinks needs to be said without being so overt as to fall out of favor. MM&TBS strikes me partly as Kendrick growing exhausted from being ignored and giving up on trying to deliver this message to focus on his own more personal issues.
A couple of cherrypicked pieces of evidence:
TPAB
Institutionalized:
Kendrick talks about the black obsession with wealth and clout and how they’re brought up to be willing to do anything, eg crime, to acquire it. He admits he’s guilty of this mentality and acknowledges that blacks cannot progress until they cleanse themselves of it.
“Shit don’t change until you get up and wash your ass nigga”
The Blacker the Berry:
He talks about the oppressor/oppressed narrative that blacks are told for most of their lives and how they use the resulting victim complex to externalize their own issues. Most of the song he repeats this narrative only to twist it back with the final lines;
“So why did I weep when Trayvon Martin was in the street?
When gang-banging make me kill a nigga blacker than me.
Hypocrite!”
MM&TBS
N95:
He’s calling out activists by using materialism as a metaphor for virtue signaling and doing things for appearance only without truly caring about issues or working to solve them.
“Tell me what you would do for aesthetic
[…]
Where the hypocrites at?
What community feel they the only ones relevant?”
Savior:
This is where Kendrick grows exhausted in my opinion. He talks about how people look up to idols for guidance on what to think without thinking for themselves, but points out that as the one lookup-up-to one wrong opinion can cost you. He again calls out the fakeness and the virtue signaling and how even staying silent on certain issues will lead to people attacking you.
Maybe my analysis is retarded but I think Kendrick routinely uses himself as a surrogate for the black community in general and is often critical of his own mentality as an indirect way of criticizing the mentality of blacks at large. I think the song “Savior” in particular talks about how difficult it is to provide criticism directly without getting cancelled and that he’s tired of treading lightly. Later, on “Mirror,” he says “I choose me, I’m sorry.” Although it’s outside the context of the song it’s almost as if to say “I’m done trying to be your savior. I’m going to focus on my own problems now.”
