S13E8 - Dissecting 'We Cry Together' by Kendrick Lamar
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This episode is brought to you by Max. The Emmy award-winning series Hacks returns this April. The new season follows Debra Vance making a move from her Vegas residency to Hollywood showbiz. Tensions rise as Debra and Ava try to get their late night show off the ground and make history while doing it. Starring Jean Smart and Hannah Einbinder, Hacks season four is streaming Thursday, April 10th

exclusively on max. Don't forget to check out the official hacks podcast on Spotify.

This episode is brought to you by Max. The Emmy award-winning series Hacks returns this April. The new season follows Debra Vance making a move from her Vegas residency to Hollywood showbiz. Tensions rise as Debra and Ava try to get their late night show off the ground and make history while doing it. Starring Jean Smart and Hannah Einbinder. Hacks season four is streaming Thursday, April 10th exclusively on Max. And don't forget to check out the official Hacks podcast on Spotify.

From the Ringer Podcast Network, this is Dissect, long-form musical analysis broken into short, digestible episodes. This is episode 8 of our season-long analysis of Kendrick Lamar's Mr. Morale and the Big Steppers. I'm your host, Cole Kushner.

Last time on Dissect, we examined Mr. Morales' seventh track, Rich Spirit, a song that exposed Kendrick's dichotomous relationship with his spiritual journey of healing. On one hand, the song shows signs of Kendrick's progress. He's fasting from sex, isolating himself from the toxicity of the internet, and even reading Eckhart Tolle.

At the same time, Kendrick is still very much in the grip of his ego, which appropriates his spiritual gains to validate himself and judge others who are not as awakened as he is. In the words of Eckhart Tolle, Kendrick's ego has snuck in through the back door, giving Kendrick the false belief that he's more spiritually developed than he truly is. According to Tolle, this is a common stage in the awakening process, where one alternates between polarities of consciousness.

And then most people do not drastically go from one to the other. They go through a prolonged transitional period where they are partly still the suffering entity and partly the liberated consciousness. So that can go on for quite a while. And many of you are probably at that stage where you move between being liberated

and being back in the narrow personal sense of self with its reactivity, its complaining, its unconscious thinking, and so on.

Kendrick at this point in Mr. Morales' narrative is clearly in this transitional stage of his spiritual development, and Rich Spirit made clear that he's fallen for the ego's classic trick of priding himself in his new spirituality. However, as the album continues into its next track, Kendrick gets a reality check when his spirit is tested and he reacts not like a conscious sage, but an unconscious big stepper who is entirely possessed by his ego. You know what? Fuck you, bitch. Fuck you, nigga. Nah, fuck you, bitch. I

Fuck you bitch. Nah, fuck you bitch.

Of all the songs on Mr. Morale, We Cry Together leans most heavily into the theatrical setting of the album, as it's essentially a five-minute musical drama and features an actual actress in Taylor Page. The piece depicts a hyper-explicit argument between a verbally abusive couple, which within the context of Mr. Morale's narrative, we could pretty safely assume is based on arguments between Kendrick and Whitney. The track begins with an interpolation of Florence and the Machine's 2018 song, June.

The single line we hear Florence Welsh sing is, hold on to each other. The lyric was in part a response to the Pulse nightclub mass shooting that killed 49 people in June of 2016. Here's Florence speaking about the lyric with the Exposure podcast. I think it was a time of like,

like chaos and collective heartbreak and sadness. And there was this cry, almost a weird maternal cry.

cry that kind of came from that which is the chorus which was like hold on to each other this seemed to me a very kind of feminine female cry of like please like take care of each other hold on to each other and it just came out very like instinctively um so it was kind of about that time um

really and I was playing shows in America and you could just feel people's need to feel held at that point you know

Kendrick sampling Florence's maternal cry for connection and unity amidst chaos is consistent with the feminine role as being a divine guiding presence throughout Mr. Morale. The majority of the album's feminine presence is provided by Whitney, who's the one guiding Kendrick on his healing journey, and whom Kendrick compared to the Seraphim angels on Die Hard.

Florence's grand maternal cry feels thematically akin to this depiction, giving voice to the need for healing on a global scale. Thus, it should come as no surprise that Whitney appears next on the song, giving voice to its most important line.

Between the we and the title We Cry Together, Florence's global cry for communal support, and Whitney's blatant universalization of the track's ensuing drama, Kendrick is clearly inviting us to interpret this song symbolically.

The question is, why is one couple's fighting emblematic of the entire world? Well, this is where we have to return to the teachings of Eckhart Tolle and his concept of a new earth, which we've discussed a few times this season. To recap, a new earth describes a transformed state of the world that is brought about by the evolution of human consciousness, consciousness that is more present and in tune with the divine or transcendent dimension.

Because the state of the external world is always a manifestation of the mental states of individuals, Tolle believes that the only way humanity will avoid destroying itself is through this mental transformation, which can only happen at the individual level.

To quote his book A New Earth Directly, In the first episode of the season, we drew parallels between this idea and Mr. Morales' opening declaration, I hope you find some peace of mind in this lifetime. I hope you find some paradise.

Peace of mind describes a content internal state, while paradise, often synonymous with heaven, describes an ideal external state. This primed us to interpret Kendrick's individual journey to find peace of mind as being symbolic of the journey of all human beings attempting to do the same in this lifetime. Kendrick's Morale Era moniker, OK Lama, also pointed to this universal quality, which was most blatantly expressed by OK Lama's quote, I am all of us in the Heart Part 5's music video.

It seems very clear that Kendrick was inspired by Tolle's concept of the intrinsic connection between the individual and the whole. How each of us is, by nature, a reflection of all of us. Understanding this, Whitney's statement that this is what the world sounds like makes sense. Kendrick is once again reinforcing the idea that we are all but reflections of each other. That humanity is nothing more than the individuals it's composed of. And if we're adhering to this theory, if We Cry Together depicts what the world sounds like,

then the song must be a dramatization of some broader universal human quality. And in my interpretation of the song, that universal human quality is almost certainly Eckhart Tolle's concept of the pain body. According to Tolle, the pain body is an energy field that lives inside every human being and is the accumulation of old emotional pain.

To quote A New Earth, "The remnants of pain left behind by every strong negative emotion that is not fully faced, accepted, and then let go of, join together to form an energy field that lives in the very cells of your body. It consists not just of childhood pain, but also painful emotions that were added to it later in adolescence and during your adult life, much of it created by the voice of the ego.

It is the emotional pain that is your unavoidable companion when a false sense of self is the basis of your life. This energy field of old but still very much alive emotion that lives in almost every human being is the pain body." According to Tolle, the pain body has a dormant state and an active state within every human being. The length of a dormancy period depends on the individual. It can be a few months, a few weeks, or a few days.

It awakens when it needs to renew itself, where it actively seeks out negativity to feed on. This feeding primarily occurs in two places: in one's mind in the form of a relentless, uncontrollable chain of negative thoughts, and in the drama of interpersonal relationships, especially with intimate partners or close family members. Now the pain body will try to feed to add to its energy. It wants you to completely identify with that

energy field that it represents that it is. So it will feed on your mind, but in relationships it will also feed on reactions, your partner's reactions. It will unconsciously of course, you don't know that when you're identified with it, you don't know that this is what you're doing. You will try to make your partner react in a certain way that feeds your pain body also by provoking anger for example.

It's done unconsciously. So the reaction your partner's reaction will be feeding your pain body and that is what I call the need for drama in a relationship and

In A New Earth, Tolle also details the relationship between the pain body and the ego, which he describes as close relatives that need each other. It's the ego and its constant need for validation and superiority that will blow a minor negative event or remark out of proportion, turning it into a drama that is used as food for the pain body. He dubs this symbiotic relationship between the ego and pain body an unholy alliance, saying, quote,

The pain body is one of the most powerful things the ego can identify with, just as the pain body needs the ego to renew itself. It's the emotional aspect of the ego. So really, the pain body is part of the ego and it's a very unhappy entity. But because its very existence consists of this unhappy vibration, it does not want an end to its unhappiness because an end to its unhappiness is the end to the pain body.

Just as the ego can hijack healthy endeavors like spiritual growth, the ego and pain body together can take total control of our relationships because they offer this unholy alliance a potentially endless supply of drama. With two people carrying heavy pain bodies, patterns of emotional or physical violence can develop so that each other's pain bodies are replenished at a regular interval. After the feeding, the couple makes up, the pain bodies go dormant for a while, a

a day, a week, a month, until another ego-charged fight offers another feeding. And it's during these moments when the ego is totally identified and consumed by the pain body that the most unconscious dysfunctional behavior arises in individuals. Kendrick alluded to Tolle's idea of unconscious dysfunctional behavior in worldwide steppers.

when he called every human being a killer and compared humanity to walking zombies trying to scratch the itch of their ego and feed their pain body, just as unconscious zombies feed on human brains. Most of humanity has been trapped in the egoic consciousness for thousands of years and it has produced what we now know as human history. So much suffering created not by natural disasters but by humans.

creating so much suffering for other humans and so many people, millions upon millions killed, not only in warfare between nations, but killed by their own governments. All these atrocities, these millions upon millions of people killed, they were not killed by psychopaths,

But the number of people killed by criminals and psychopaths is very, very small compared to the number of humans killed by normal humans. Normal. Understanding Tolle's interrelated concepts of the ego, the pain body, and unconscious dysfunctional behavior, we can return to We Cry Together and Whitney's universal demarcation of its drama.

The song's violent argument is a dramatization of a pain body feeding, a replenishing exchange of negative energy the pain body requires to survive. It's two people totally identified with their egos and possessed by their pain bodies. They are both in a state of total unconsciousness. When viewed through this lens, it's not hard to envision how this specific episode could potentially escalate into something more destructive and violent.

And so when Whitney says, this is what the world sounds like, she is pointing to the underlying universal source of all dysfunctional behavior across humanity, the unholy alliance of the ego and the pain body. This is what the world sounds like. You got me fucked up.

After Whitney's statement, We Cry Together sinks into the remainder of the song's chilling groove, produced by The Alchemist. The beat samples jazz bassist Gary Peacock and his song Valentine, featuring pianist Art Landy. The Alchemist grabs a single measure of this piano flourish to create his loop, which when pulled out of the context of the original song, takes on an eerie quality.

A big reason this piano riff feels a little menacing is the presence of two dissonant intervals: a tritone created between an F and a B natural and a minor second created between a B and a B flat. The tension created by these intervals provides the perfect musical setting for the tension between this couple.

Kendrick and his producers also lean into the theatrics of the piece through a strategic use of audio effects. If you listen carefully with headphones on, you'll hear a number of subtle details in Kendrick and Taylor's voices, like panning them slightly left or right to simulate them walking around a house as they fight. Also, when they first come onto the track, you can hear their voices slightly muffled, then keys jingling and a door opening, at which point their voices become more distinct.

Clearly the fight started outside the home, perhaps in the car ride home together, and the sound design creates the illusion that we're being dropped right into the middle of the action. Fuck you. I swear I'm tired of these emotional assholes.

Now the ensuing theatrical fight between Kendrick and Taylor has a pretty interesting backstory. According to producer Soundwave, the song itself dates back to 2019, when Kendrick recorded a demo version of the song in which he performed the woman's parts using a pitched up voice. While Kendrick himself hasn't spoken about the genesis of the song, some have speculated that he might have been inspired by Wu-Tang's The RZA and his 1998 song Domestic Violence, which features a brief dramatized exchange between a man and a woman.

While Riz's track uses an argument as a launch pad for a verse performed primarily by himself, Kendrick's version sustains the argument throughout the entire track. It was actually Kendrick's creative partner Dave Free who suggested actress Taylor Page to play the woman.

and according to Soundwave, she recorded her part almost entirely in one take. When asked about her performance, Paige spoke on the universal quality of the song, emphasizing how the conflict of this one couple reflects the conflict of the world. Quote, I think I was drawing from personal experiences and relationships, but also my experience with the world and how frustrating it is.

Like, what is going on here? What are we doing? What are we talking about? What are we prioritizing? We don't relate to each other. We really can't hear each other. It's just hysteria. I was like, please God, use me as a vessel to just let all of that come through because I feel like we're all at capacity.

This was over two years ago when we're all kind of scratching our heads about the world we're living in. And now, even two years later, I think we're at our breaking point even more."

We'll be right back.

We descend fully into the couple's fight at the start of verse 1. While we're thrown into it midway, there are some clues about its origin. Specifically, the last line we just heard from Taylor, "Fuck around on a side bitch, then come fucking up my shit," very explicitly calls out the fact Kendrick's character has been cheating with a side piece, implying that this side woman is mostly used for sex. The man attempts to justify his actions by calling her ungrateful, unstable, and always looking to bring him down, even when he's trying to do right.

Given these relationship dynamics, I can't help but think of Mr. Morales' opening lines, when Kendrick asked, "What is a bitch in a miniskirt? A man in his feelings with bitter nerve. What is a woman that really hurt? A demon you're better off killing her." These lines offer two different perspectives of a woman as processed by a damaged man. The bitch in a miniskirt is objectified and seen as a sex object. The woman who feels and expresses emotion is seen as a threat.

It feels like these perspectives are being played out here in We Cry Together, as the side bitch seems to be a sex object and the woman expressing her emotions is being treated like a demon, something the man is attempting to eradicate. Of course, this level of deflection is a result of the man's inability to be vulnerable or sustain any injury to his ego. His ego-identified mind is telling him his cheating is actually the woman's fault. If she wasn't so ungrateful and emotional, he wouldn't have to cheat on her.

The woman's pain body has obviously been triggered too, so she lashes out at the man's insecurities attempting to push his buttons and cause as much emotional pain as possible. She calls him irresponsible, broke, cheap, and in denial about his own standing in life. It's a direct assault on a man's responsibility to provide.

Her attacks are purposefully emasculating, which of course will only inflame his pain body and cause him to lash out even more. This then leads to the song's chorus, where the couple's pain bodies rapidly exchange negative energy through a mirrored exchange of distilled explicit refrains. Noah, fuck you, bitch. Fuck you, nigga. Nah, fuck you, bitch.

Fuck you, bitch.

While both the n-word and bitch have been repurposed into terms of endearment, especially within hip-hop culture, we can't help but hear the original derogatory meaning in the context of this hook. Bitch became an insult as early as the 15th century, when it was applied to so-called sexually promiscuous women, demeaningly comparing them to a female dog in heat. The n-word on the other hand stems from the Latin word for black and became weaponized as a racial slur in the 18th century.

In their ego-possessed episode, the couple resorts to these historically derogatory terms in order to inflict as much pain as possible. This is the sound of the pain body laid bare, because behind the venom of anger and vitriol, there is clearly a tremendous amount of suffering. Now, there's been speculation this chorus was inspired by a scene from the 1993 film Poetic Justice starring Tupac and Janet Jackson. In the scene, the two get into a heated exchange on the side of the road.

Don't fuck you up, motherfucker! Fuck you up! Fuck you bitch! Fuck you! Fuck you! Fuck you bitch! Fuck you! Fuck you!

Knowing Kendrick's affinity with Tupac and the fact he named an entire song after this movie, this inspiration point seems at least plausible. Now, after the first chorus, We Cry Together continues with a second verse that in large part just continues the theatrical drama of the argument. For this reason, I don't think it's entirely necessary to cover line by line. So we're going to jump to the third verse, where the fight begins to center broader divides between men and women.

You just can't apologize. Egotistic, narcissistic, love your own life. So you the reason why strong women fucked up. So you the reason for Trump. You the reason we overlooked. Underpaid, under... If you look, I don't speak. Then I'm called. I am paid. Never yours, I remain. You the reason bitches start fucking with bitches when they change. You the reason bitches start calling y'all bitches cause y'all useless. You the reason Harvey Weinstein had to see his conclusion.

Taylor's character begins this section saying, find it funny, you can't just apologize. This is more evidence the fight was started around the man cheating on the woman, and that rather than being empathetic to her justified anger, he has been deflecting and refusing accountability. She then says, egotistic, narcissistic, love your own lies.

This line resonates more deeply beneath the thematic umbrella of Eckhart Tolle's teachings, who as we discussed, would attribute this entire fight to the ego and the way it manipulates reality to strengthen its self-image. This is then followed by a general attack on the American patriarchy, as Taylor says Kendrick's character is the reason it's a man's world, blames him for men like Donald Trump and Harvey Weinstein obtaining positions of power, and alludes to the wealth disparity between men and women.

I think her blaming Kendrick for these things is ultimately pointing to the general lack of respect some men have for women and how this lack of respect allows them to view women as mere vehicles to fulfill their desires, be it sexual or psychological. Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein is an example of how this objectification can manifest into abusive behavior.

It's because Weinstein viewed women as sex objects to be dominated that he exploited his position of patriarchal power to habitually abuse and assault women. Had Weinstein viewed women as human beings that really hurt, instead of bitches in a miniskirt, he could have never have justified his actions to himself. To quote Eckhart Tolle, to reduce the aliveness of another human being to a concept is already a form of violence."

Indeed, the idea that abusive behavior begins in the mind calls back to Tolle's concept of a new heaven and a new earth, the idea that transforming the state of humanity is only possible by transforming the minds of its individuals. And through Tolle's lens, when it comes to toxic or abusive behavior, all roads lead back to unconsciousness, the mind's complete identification with the ego.

And I think this is the similarity between Weinstein and Kendrick that Taylor's character is illuminating. It's the unconscious egoic mind that justifies his cheating. It's why he refuses to apologize or take accountability. And when he mixed this level of narcissism and entitlement with a complete lack of self-awareness, i.e. complete unconsciousness, that's how more extreme forms of abuse manifest.

Thus, we get Taylor's reference to R. Kelly, another serial sexual abuser who exploited his patriarchal power for his own egoic validation with no regard for his victims. Again, Taylor points to the mental state that allows such abuse, saying, you're the reason R. Kelly can't recognize he's abusive. The implication here is that Kelly didn't actually think what he was doing was wrong.

Through Tolle's lens, he couldn't recognize his immorality because he was completely identified with his ego, completely trapped in the psychological prison of his own egoic unconsciousness.

When Tosh got a man

Kendrick's character responds to Taylor's attacks on men with his own barrage of attacks on women. Because he's taking the side of all men, he can't acknowledge R. Kelly's abuse. Rather, he uses the mention to call her a hypocrite for playing his music, as if that were somehow equal to his abuse.

He then leans into this hypocrisy claim by bringing up times in which she had conflicts with other women, saying she was jealous when her friend got a boyfriend, feeding into the stereotype of jealous women. He also claims that when Nate got a job, most likely an ex-boyfriend, she wanted to stay at home or not work, which he finds hypocritical coming from a so-called feminist. These are the reasons he says it's a split decision, broads like you and real victims.

In his mind, she is unfairly including herself in the Me Too movement because it's convenient for her and helps her argument against him. And this is his ego's way of manipulating any truth in her words, allowing him to continue justifying his cheating. I think ultimately both of them fall for the same trap, escalating their anger for each other into rash generalizations about men and women.

While there is some truth in both sides, their arguments are incredibly reductive and don't stand up to real scrutiny. Not that that matters much in a fight when you're just trying to win by any means necessary. And in a fight like this, winning simply means the one who could hurt the other person the most.

However, I do think the descent into gender politics was a purposeful turn, further developing the idea that we cry together is what the world sounds like, because this is sometimes where the road of pain ends up. I was hurt by a woman, so all women are the problem, and vice versa. According to Tolle, this is how the ego turns an individual into a concept and creates enemies, giving the ego something to blame for its problems. The ego needs some kind of

antagonist. It needs always the other because it defines itself through the other, the one who is not different from me, who is not me. It needs not only the other, it needs to emphasize what I call the otherness of the other. And that's a terrible thing to do to a human being. What you're actually doing is you're imposing an identity on the other.

and see the other through this friction of an identity. And so you're never meeting that human being at all. You're only meeting the constructs of your mind.

Tolle's idea of the ego's need for the other not only applies to men and women, but really any generic divides based on a single characteristic. Democrat or Republican, black or white, straight or gay, and so on. And this is again why We Cry Together can express in a single fight what the world sounds like.

Because through this conceptual lens, so much of the world's conflict can be reduced to the ego's need for the other, be it an individual, a community, an ethnic group, a political party, or an entire country. This radical reduction is a classic dehumanization tactic, making abuse and judgments against large groups easier to justify.

Now, even though We Cry Together has already communicated so much about humanity and the human condition, the song's final moments contain a brilliant twist ending that adds an entirely new dimension to the drama.

Fuck me.

While most of us probably have grown used to this turn at the end, we shouldn't overlook just how effective it is. Within seconds, the very same words to expel the most extreme vitriol and hate are used to express sexual desire and love. Thus, Kendrick uses the positive and negative duality of the words "fuck", "bitch" and the n-word

as a reflection of the thin line between love and hate in this relationship, something Eckhart Tolle has spoken about in relation to the pain body. No, it seems that relationships are a great source of both pleasure and suffering for many people. And many people have experienced pain

how easily the pleasure of a relationship can turn into suffering and how quickly that can happen, how easily it seems that love can turn into hate in relationships. It can happen within a second. And so there's a source of great suffering there for many people. Why is it that there's so much conflict in relationships and does it have to be that way? So we need to look at

what the source of that conflict may be. The source of conflict that Tolle is referring to here is the pain body, and what we witnessed in this couple's drama was a pain body feeding. And this sudden subsidence of drama, according to Tolle, is classic behavior of the pain body. Once it renews itself, it goes dormant again, and the couple suddenly wakes up from their unconscious episode.

And that gives energy, the pain body gobbles it up. It loves your negative thinking because the more negative thinking, the stronger it gets again. But after a while, it's had enough. It's like a big meal, then you can't eat anymore. And then suddenly it goes back to sleep and you feel, oh, what was all that about? And sometimes if it's in a relationship,

you make up. So then suddenly everything is fine again. And it's like you both wake up out of some kind of weird nightmare. But the strange thing is this, the weird nightmare happens every two weeks or three or every once a week, who knows? Maybe once a month or every three months, it varies a lot. But it comes again and again. And until you begin to recognize it for what it is, then the awareness comes in.

"We Cry Together" is not only an expression of a pain body feeding, it also accurately captures its active and dormant states. And the sudden dormancy we experience at the end of the song allows the couple to compensate for the extreme pain body episode with another exchange that is equally extreme: sex.

In its purest form, sex is the physical exchange of affection between partners. However, because Kendrick has already so firmly established his sex addiction by this point in the album, we can't view this as simply makeup sex. It is, unfortunately, just another escape.

It is being used to soothe like a pacifier, numbing the trauma of the fight with a cocktail of pleasure chemicals released by the brain during and after sex. This is why in the immediate aftermath of the sex we hear the theatrical tapping of the Big Stepper's sonic motif, which is followed by Whitney's voice illuminating its central meaning. "Stop tap dancing around the conversation."

Throughout this season, we've been tracking Kendrick's development of the Big Stepper symbolism, with each successive track adding depth to its meaning. At a base level, it plays off of hip-hop's Big Stepper, a rugged hustler making big moves in the streets. In N95, Kendrick added a layer by linking the Steppers to dance steps, singing, serving up a look, dancing in a drought. Hello to the Big Steppers, never losing count. We interpreted this to refer to those who present an image of themselves that is false or misleading.

For example, flaunting material goods to project an image of success when you're really living in dire circumstances. It's all a dance, a show, a play. Then in Worldwide Steppers, Kendrick universalized this characterization and linked being a stepper to Tolle's idea of the ego and unconsciousness. How we're all big steppers, hustling in our own best interest and ultimately willing to do harm to others to get what we desire. Then in Father Time, Kendrick revealed that much of the stoic masculinity of the big stepper

as really overcompensation for a lack of male role models and the historic pressures to survive a harsh environment. Rich Interlude then presented a more extreme form of the Big Stepper in Kodak Black, someone heavily controlled by his environmental conditioning and at risk for extreme unconscious pain body episodes.

Now, when we cry together, we have experienced an unconscious pain body episode, and Whitney, the divine feminist voice of reason, the angelic guide on Kendrick's healing journey, she returns to bluntly articulate the truth beneath all of this unconscious behavior.

She says, "Stop tap dancing around the conversation." So obviously this directly reveals that the stepper's sonic motif is indeed tap dancing shoes on a theater stage. It also formally expresses what we've already talked about at length this season. How all this unconscious behavior, all the masks we wear, all the external validation sought by the ego,

It's all an avoidance of deeper psychological issues that need real attention. Whitney is here to quite literally put an end to the show. She is calling out Kendrick's theatrical portrayal of this drama and demanding that he get to work on himself. This adds a meta aspect to her experience of the track, because obviously Whitney is Kendrick's real-life partner who is putting an end to the theatrical drama based on her and Kendrick's relationship.

So the implication seems to be that all this artistic expression is great and important, but there's also real-life work that needs to be done. And it's the kind of deeply psychological work that can't be accomplished through art alone. Kendrick has to take off the theatrical mask. He has to stop tap dancing around the real conversation, the real work. He needs to go to therapy. Conclusions

We Cry Together formally leans into Mr. Morales' theatrical backdrop in order to dramatize the pain body. However, while the song is quite literally a piece of theater, it simultaneously exposes the theater of our daily lives and the masks we wear to present ourselves to the outside world. Because intimate relationships are a domain in which the acting and mask wearing could only last so long.

As we all know, at some point in a relationship, our imperfections are laid bare, and we're forced to either confront or run from those imperfections. We can take accountability and work on ourselves, or we can blame the other and leave, only to eventually start this cycle over with someone new. An understanding that we cry together is intended to reflect the hostile state of humanity, i.e. what the world sounds like. This same cycle applies to our approach of global conflict.

We can change presidents, we can change legislation and policy. However, human history has proven these measures to be temporary band-aids on a humanitarian wound that has bled for hundreds of thousands of years.

One war ends only for another to begin somewhere new. We think we have evolved past the genocidal horrors of the 20th century only to witness a genocide right before our eyes in the 21st. In a Eckhart Tolle's view, this cycle of self-inflicted human suffering that is symbolized in We Cry Together, it will continue indefinitely until there is a mass awakening, an evolution in human consciousness. So that at every time period,

the human collective, the unconsciousness that is embedded in the collective will manifest through certain groups of people. And if you close one door, another one opens and this manifests over there. Now, if we go then to a higher level, a higher perspective, then you see that the entire consciousness of humanity

is involved in an evolutionary process. And you might know from your own life, and I know from my life, that the awakening process for quite a while involves intense suffering. So humanity as a whole is going through, also through intense suffering, because we are all going through the awakening process.

As Tolle states here, the silver lining of suffering is that it's often a catalyst for transcendence. And in the story of Mr. Morale and Kendrick's spiritual journey, which again is meant to mirror or reflect the journey of all of us, the explicit suffering of We Cry Together is the catalyst for a major turning point in the story. Because Whitney's call to stop tap dancing around the conversation snaps Kendrick out of his unconscious pain body episode and he suddenly makes a big progressive leap forward.

Of course, this is Mr. Morales' next track, Purple Hearts. A song we'll examine note by note, line by line, next time on Dissect.

If you enjoyed today's episode, please tell a friend about the show, share it on social media, or leave a review. It really helps. You can also support the show by purchasing our limited Season 13 merchandise at dissectpodcast.com. All right. Thanks, everyone. Talk to you next week.