Kendrick isn’t occupied with being the sage, unerring rapper we all want him to be – “The cat is out the bag, I am not your savior,” he proclaims on track 5 of The Big Steppers. “My ego is alive and well,” he tells me. “That bravado comes out in my music every now and then just from a skill basis and me being a student of the culture, of what rap thrived on and that was competition […] When I see the accolades, it’s beautiful, I love that but there’s also awareness in knowing when I need to use it, that part of the ego, and when I need to put it up. And I think this album in particular is a more personal album for me. This is me stripping away my ego. On my last album, my ego was there. You’ll hear it on records like “HUMBLE.”, you hear a lot of bravado on “ELEMENT.”. But this is taking the cape completely off and saying it’s okay to replace the ego with vulnerability.”

Hip-hop usually doesn’t give acts the longevity to evolve to the point where they can step off the pedestal and appraise themselves in this way. “The same way Nas, Jay, Big, Pac, laid the blueprint for me, some of the text messages that I have in my phone about records like “Mother I Sober,” “Father Time,” and “Aunty Diaries,” some of these things these guys are telling me and expressing to me, it’s overwhelming, and it’s beautiful because it shows me the evolution of where hip-hop is going and how far it will go even after me when I want to fade in the shadows.”

And that’s the way it is with Kendrick: after presenting a disarming body of work, it’s as likely that he’ll disappear again for half a decade as it is that you’ll find him strolling through the streets of Accra with a milling crowd of onlookers. He’s eager to know this new place that vaguely feels like home. On a quest for “pure inspiration,” which Ghana eagerly answers. 

“What I got out of the trip was there’s still individuals that have a heart with no intentions. When you’re in this business, man, you have some really good people, you have people that have evolved to not knowing love because they’ve become so desensitized to hurt or getting over on people or having a straightforward outlook on what money does for them in the grand scheme of things.” It’s easy to get lost in the industry, he ponders, but “the simple things in life still matter. To see a man waking up in the morning and he’s saying, ‘My only intention today is to go out and bring back fish for my family. That is my goal for today.’ That shit is mindblowing to a person that has several things to do when they wake up – and they can’t even get one thing done because they’re so focused on doing multiple things at one time.” 

There’s a profound similitude when we strip life back to its essence. Suddenly the proud survival of a Ghanaian fisherman isn’t so far removed from an international superstar’s own hard-knocks upbringing in Compton. 

“That made me think of the ’90s,” he begins to reminisce. “It ain’t how it used to be. But in the ’90s, it was a family, it was a community. It was us. We were outside every day. There was no internet, there was no Instagram, there was no Twitter. We were outside. Our neighbor was our brother, we fought with these dudes. A lot of people don’t know that gang culture is derived from brotherhood and fellowship, the same dudes that we fought with, we grew up with. So it’s a personal type of love, a different type of love where you can fist-fight your brother next door and then hug them at the same time. That’s what I saw when I went to Jamestown. Everyone’s family. These people came up together and they hurt together, they bleed together, but they love one another, and that’s what I’ve seen in Compton, being a child in the 90s, born in ’87, and watching my uncle’s fellowship, their friends and our aunties. We spent nights at each other’s houses and learned from our mistakes. Going out, figuring out how to bring back food to our families. It was just something that I felt before. In order to feel that again, I had to go outside of myself and go outside of my home community to see that.”

Accra has become the beating heart of a specific kind of African renaissance, combining a thriving creative youth with a concise policy effort to welcome back Black diasporans. And many superstars – from Muhammad Ali to Beyoncé – have made the pilgrimage. So it’s not the wildest thing that Accrans now have Kendrick Lamar anecdotes under their belt too. But Kendrick didn’t follow the usual PR script. Even without the engineered meet-and-greets and tentative collaborations, on the ground, his encounters revealed a deep appreciation for his craft and his journey so far – as if to say, We’ve been rooting for you. We believed in you from the very beginning.

“People would tell me, ‘you have a huge following and you have a huge impact in Ghana,’ but that only goes as far as them telling you. I had to go there and experience it. I’ve been hearing it for years, but I don’t know, until I’m in the city, I’m talking to people, I’m seeing the smiles on their faces, they asking me questions that I haven’t heard since my first mixtape, holding up T-shirts of my old mixtapes, that’s what I needed to feel. It’s only so far that words can take me to explain the impact that was in Ghana.” He speaks of the energy he received with awe. He’s not usually this comfortable in crowds, they can be overbearing, but this was different. “You can feel the level of pure love and respect,” he explains. “And when you feel that, you don’t mind taking 1,000 pictures, you don’t mind just touching them and talking to them. It’s a freeing feeling for me as well. They may feel like they’re getting something [out of it] and getting their spirits lifted, but it was vice versa, there was a mutual feeling.”

There was one commercial stop on his trip, however. A “private” album release party held by Spotify felt like more of a formality. The who’s who of Accra piled into the Rehab Beach Club, stretching the guestlist to its limits. Kendrick showed up with his entourage, greeted a few Ghanaian artists, and left again. The event easily became fodder for overnight critics, some artists allegedly felt slighted, and some fans protested the elitism of such an event. Kendrick Lamar quietly left the country, without saying a word. 

“My focus primarily was for self,” Kendrick tells me over Zoom. “It had nothing to do with music. And that’s no disrespect to all the artists that are out there. I met a few crazy artists that I had to go back and do my research on when we did the Spotify event. But yeah, the intention was really to isolate myself. I didn’t want to think about music too much […] Maybe the next go around, my full intention will be to get up with the people that I’ve learned to study and listen to.”