The Big Steppers Tour: Kendrick’s masterclass in performance art
The First Direct Arena was brimming with people. The two-hour wait between entrance and entertainment hardly felt like it at all; the busy chatter of eager fans swallowed up any impatience that might be felt, and this excitement continued into the peformances. First up on stage was Tanna Leone: a relative newcomer to the music scene, Tanna performed roughly half of his debut album Sleepy Soldier to the eager onlookers in the crowd. After a short, 15-minute break, it was Kendrick’s cousin Baby Keem’s turn to woo the crowd. Entering the crowd’s peripheral with his unmistakable ‘trademark usa’ was never going to fail to get everyone moving; the mosh pit was already alive to the fusion of trap, rock and alternative rap. Keem continued with a ten-minute snippets format, performing minute-long segments of a lot of his best-knowns; ‘HONEST’, ‘MOSHPIT’, ‘Scapegoat’, and even performed his stint of Kanye West’s ‘Praise God’. He finishes, promising the crowd, “I’ll see y’all later”.
Image Credits: @LifeofTamoo on Twitter
Just minutes later, the white curtain across the stage ascends, revealing Kendrick Lamar and his entourage of dancers – all in unconventional black tie. Clad from head to toe in black, he kicks off with ‘United In Grief’ and ‘N95’ from his new album in what is, at this point, a fairly spartan production of man and mic. His band is hidden off to the side of the stage behind a curtain, and Lamar’s only company as he begins his show is the bright white spotlight above him, and a ventriloquist’s puppet in his image, that he operates as he raps the emotional opener.
The audience’s support was unfaltering throughout his set and in his low-key way, Lamar played into it; he let the crowd take verses and choruses and led them as if he were conducting a grand orchestra. The control that Kendrick demanded over the crowd was something to behold: any command that he gave, whether that be “Hands up” or “jump”, would see thousands follow suit in an instant. Beyond that, though, there wasn’t much in the way of audience interaction. Aside from thanking the Leeds crowd for coming when they could have been “anywhere in the world”, for the most part Lamar preferred to let his formidable flow do the talking.
Witnessing The Big Steppers Tour live reveals just how intricately planned and subtle a performance it is; he doesn’t engage in fancy footwork like one might expect. Instead, he steps across the stage with purpose. Much of his animation beyond that is nearly all from the waist up; subtle hand motions, quickly turning his head, bobbing, and those trademark windmilling arm movements, particularly during the manic ‘M.A.A.D. City’ and the closer, ‘Saviour’. When Kendrick’s silhouette was beamed onto the back of the stage, I was amazed to realise that it wasn’t live. He’s moving along, nearly flawlessly, with a previously filmed silhouette of himself with images of arrows in his back (during ‘Count Me Out’) or flocks of birds around him (during ‘Worldwide Steppers’).
In the final quarter of the set, Baby Keem re-enters the stage. His entrance is certainly arresting; the stage is bathed in red light as the pair go bar for bar on a couple of their collaborations: ‘Vent’ and the ‘Family Ties’, as well as Keem’s new song ‘a life of pain’– but at three songs, his cameo perhaps outstays its welcome ever so slightly, particularly given the absence of Kendrick’s best songs from 2015’s To Pimp A Butterfly. Closer ‘Savior’ is a lyrically dense way to end the show: the verses deal with the artist’s own contradictions as he wrestles with cancel culture, Covid, the war in Ukraine, and the Black Lives Matter movement. The show ends abruptly after Lamar finishes the final verse – the dancers bolt offstage, and he quickly thanks the audience as the platform on which he’s standing sinks beneath the stage, the house lights come up, and it’s over.
This is Lamar’s best tour yet; it is thoughtfully produced and expressive. It truly showcases Lamar’s talents as a performer and director without making any compromises in quality. As with Mr Morale & the Big Steppers, it paints a picture of Lamar as one of our most unconventional megastars. He is not a saviour, as he stresses on the record, but an unadulterated artist and, now, an excellent live performer.
