Kindfast

  When Mr. Morale & the Big Steppers, Kendrick Lamar’s fifth studio album, was released on May 13, one of the album’s standout tracks quickly became “We Cry Together,” as much for its raw subject matter as its slightly irregular format. (The song sounds more like a radio play or rap battle than it does a traditional hip-hop offering.) Taylour Paige (Zola, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom) assumes the role of Lamar’s star-crossed lover his trigger and his muse and today the hyperreal song has come to life further with the worldwide debut of a six-minute short film of the same name. The short film based on the album’s eighth track, in which a quarreling couple communicates both everything and nothing, was produced by Lamar’s creative collective pgLang and shot with live audio and no cuts in a single take a fitting approach for an album rendered in blues and Blackness, woven with elements of both trap and free jazz. “We Cry Together” (the song) was recorded in February 2020, and the accom...