“Mother I Sober” is the eighth track on disc two of Kendrick Lamar’s fifth and final studio album with Top Dawg Entertainment, Mr. Morale & The Big Steppers, and the seventeenth track overall. It features Beth Gibbons on the Chorus and Sam Dew on the outro, respectively.

Lamar opens up with heartfelt and personal lyrics, confronting his trauma head-on by describing his upbringing and the traumatic experiences that came with it. He details his mother’s experience with sexual abuse and her fear that Lamar might experience assault as well. Later on, Lamar asserts he was never subject to drug addiction, but rather lust. Lamar then feels a sense of despair and hopelessness as he opens up about cheating on his, at the time, fiancé. He sees his actions in the same vein as the actions of his mother’s abuser. He then describes the ongoing remorse and guilt associated with his mistakes.

Shortly after, Lamar broadens his viewpoint on the toxic, oversexualized culture faced by the African American community and how it must be brought to attention. He exclaims, however, that the sexual abuse many black children face can be a biproduct of the culture itself, which doesn’t always promote ideals of safety and security. This is later coined as the ‘generational curse’ of black communities. Toward the end of the song, Kendrick metaphorically frees himself and everyone affected by this toxicity by employing transparency, pride, and positivity, thus aiming to break the so-called generational curse. This all progresses the theme Kendrick reasserts throughout the project: that he is only human.