To get it out of the way: Yes, Kendrick Lamar, on the Super Bowl halftime show stage, addressed Drake by name. He didn’t say “pedophile,” but he did say that he was trying to strike a chord and that it was probably A minor. And it sounded like most of the stadium said it, too.
Ever since Lamar dropped “Not Like Us,” the knockout punch in his feud with Drake, in May, the term “victory lap” has been thrown around a lot. There was the Pop Out performance in Los Angeles where he performed the song six times. There was a music video that united the entire city in his victory. Last week, the track won all five of its Grammy nominations and earned the same rapturous audience participation when Lamar went up to accept his Record of the Year award. But there couldn’t be a bigger stage or a great culmination to his winning streak than tonight’s Super Bowl.
But Lamar was not content with merely putting on a good show. The set was a thrilling piece of theater, a middle finger not just to his musical foe but to jingoist media. (A welcome reprieve from the evening’s multiple ads for Fox News, another previous adversary of Lamar’s.) Kicking off the performance was not Lamar but Samuel L. Jackson dressed as Uncle Sam on a stage modeled after a video game controller. Throughout, Jackson punctuated the music with decrees about whether the rapper was playing the game correctly; bringing his boys out from Compton lost him points, while the performance with SZA gained some back.
Not since Beyoncé performed “Formation” backed by dancers dressed as members of the Black Panther Party nearly 10 years ago has a Super Bowl performance been so outwardly political. “The revolution is about to be televised,” Lamar said near the top. “You picked the right time but the wrong guy.” Aside from the Uncle Sam of it all, Lamar was flanked by dancers dressed in monochromatic red, white, or blue outfits, arranging themselves into an American flag around him as he delivered “Humble.” He then launched into “DNA,” another single from 2017’s Pulitzer Prize-winning DAMN. that directly punches back at Fox News. True, that part of the track wasn’t performed here, and true, the set was short of a revolution. But it was uncompromising and pushed what can be done on this stage into new territory.
That territory was far beyond the confines of the stadium; Lamar performed explicitly for the audience at home. While it probably was fun to be in the stadium, Lamar’s focal point was the camera. Performing “Man At The Garden” and “Peekaboo”—two tracks from 2024’s GNX—the rapper stood inside the “X” on the video game controller, positioning each corner of the letter as a different room for the camera to spin around and peer into. The stunt played into the funhouse vibe established by Jackson’s character, obscuring where Lamar was at a given moment from the viewers at home. But when he wanted you to know where he was, you know. “Hey Drake,” he spit directly into the lens, mouth twisted with wicked glee. A lot of us at home undoubtedly wore a similar expression.
A lot of this fun came from the feeling of getting away with something. In the lead-up to the performance, pundits speculated whether or not Lamar would perform “Not Like Us.” Of course, he had to—it was probably the single biggest track of 2024—but Drake has already shown himself to be embarrassingly litigious about it. Lamar, naturally, was undeterred. The speculation of whether or not he would go there only made the payoff sweeter, especially after a mid-set fakeout when he teased the song’s beat before ultimately going into “Luther” and Black Panther’s “All The Stars” with SZA. But Fox, censors, and lawsuits be damned; there was no force that could keep this song off the stage.
Is this the end of this particular victory tour? Perhaps, if only because Lamar has no more worlds to conquer. Die-hard fans will certainly continue to unpack the set for days and weeks to come, but Lamar pulled off the feat of not only feeding them, but electrifying casual observers and, one imagines, even those who may not have engaged with his work before. And if they didn’t like it, too bad. The game is over, and the winner didn’t even appear in the second half.
