Hidden Meanings Behind Kendrick Lamar's "We Cry Together" Short Film Explained

Breaking down everything you missed in Kendrick Lamar's newest visual, a short film featuring Taylour Paige for the track "We Cry Together" off of his newest studio album, "Mr Morale and the Big Steppers"
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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 accompanying short film was shot weeks later in mid-March, just a day before quarantine was mandated in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. Directed by Jake Schreier, Dave Free and Kendrick Lamar, “We Cry Together” (the film) premiered in a limited, week-long run (one screening per day, with phones collected in advance) at the Laemmle Royal Theater in West Los Angeles in June. Since then, it has qualified for Oscar consideration in the best live-action short category.

Taylour Paige spoke to THR about the creative processes behind making the tandem song and short film, Los Angeles as a setting and how the artistic collaboration came about because, Paige says, “on a spiritual level, our souls are just from the same planet.”

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