From the Ringer Podcast Network, this is Dissect, long-form musical analysis broken into short, digestible episodes.

This is episode seven of our season-long analysis of Kendrick Lamar's Mr. Morale and The Big Steppers.

I'm your host, we examined Mr. Morale's six-track rich interlude featuring Kodak Black.

It was there we hypothesized about Kodak's symbolic role in the morality play that is Mr. Morale.

Ultimately, we landed on Kodak being a representative, big stepper, someone whose behavior

is heavily influenced by his environmental conditioning, someone who, to use Eckart

Tolley's phrase, lives more or less unconsciously, lives through and for their ego.

Thus, when Kodak is paired with Tolley and Kendrick, represented with a spectrum of

human consciousness, with Kodak Black representing unconsciousness, someone still heavily

influenced by environmental conditioning and ego, Eckart Tolley representing enlightenment or

pure consciousness, someone who has transcendent environmental conditioning and ego, and

Kendrick Lamar representing a middle ground

between the two, someone who is in the process of transcending his ego and conditioning

in order to reach a deeper level of consciousness and behavior. And this middle ground, this

in-between state, is exactly what we hear Kendrick exhibit on the album's next song, the subject

of our episode today, Rich Spirit.

Taking my baby to school, then I pray for, because you bitches ain't never been cool,

writing testament, painting pitches put me in the Louvre.

We're immediately immersed in a Rich Spirit's nocturnal, meditative environment, as hazy, ambient chords sound as if we're hearing them from a distance.

The distant, intimate nature of these chords is reinforced in Rich Spirits video, where we see Kendrick in a dark room alone peeking at the bright world outside through a crack in his window curtain.

He squints his eyes at the light,

implying that he hasn't been outside for some time. The remainder of the video takes place

...