Kendrick Lamar’s Tremendous Bowl Halftime Present: The Peak of All Rap Battles?

After all he carried out “Not Like Us.”

Within the lead-up to Kendrick Lamar’s headline efficiency on the Tremendous Bowl LIX halftime present on Sunday evening, many of the chatter targeted on whether or not he would play the tune that was successfully the knockout blow in his monthslong battle with Drake final yr. The tune that turned Lamar’s signature hit, and a generational anthem. The tune that received each report and tune of the yr on the Grammys only a week in the past. The tune that appeared to recalibrate hip-hop’s energy rankings, maybe completely.

So sure, Lamar performed the tune. Towards the tip of the set, in fact, increase anticipation with a few transient musical nods to it, toying with the viewers’s feelings and thirst.

However what’s going to at all times be remembered from this efficiency just isn’t the musical decisions Lamar made, or the aesthetics of his choreography, or the silhouettes of his outfit. What is going to stay is his grin when he lastly started rapping that tune. It was broad, persistent, virtually cartoonish in form. The grin of a person having the time of his life on the expense of an enemy.

Lamar is maybe essentially the most sober of all of hip-hop’s modern greats, a ferocious storyteller who values tongue-tripping polemics and introspection; he isn’t precisely a beacon of pleasure. Throughout the beef, he appeared to tackle the dismantling of Drake as vital homework.

“Not Like Us” was a popped champagne cork, although. On the Tremendous Bowl stage on the Caesars Superdome in New Orleans, it was hinted at, parceled out after which, lastly, launched into with a Lamar idiom: “They tried to rig the sport however you possibly can’t pretend affect.”

After which, that smile. What a smile. His subsequent efficiency was jubilant and a bit naughty. When he rapped, “Say, Drake, I hear you want ’em younger,” he regarded arduous into the digicam whereas motioning downward along with his left hand, as if patting the top of a kid. He rapped the road naming Drake’s associates and their flaws. Given what the tune contends about Drake — it refers to him as a “licensed pedophile,” amongst different issues — the choice to carry out it was virtually definitely closely prelitigated. (Drake has sued the report label behind each rappers for defamation for releasing and selling the observe.) And there have been concessions made: Lamar didn’t rap the phrase “pedophile,” changing it with a prerecorded scream, and the digicam switched away from him simply earlier than he landed the tip of the sing-songy punchline, “A minorrrrrrr.”

It was fairly a spectacle — maybe the height of any rap battle, ever. And that’s not even counting the transient second during which the tennis nice (and rumored former Drake paramour) Serena Williams was onstage, Crip Strolling together with glee.

Provided that a lot of Lamar’s set, conceptually, got here all the way down to the query of “Not Like Us,” he largely saved issues curiously low-key the remainder of the time. Fairly than pack in every of his hits — there was no “Alright” or “Bitch, Don’t Kill My Vibe,” for instance — he leaned on songs from his most up-to-date LP, “GNX”: “Man on the Backyard,” “Peekaboo” and, on the very starting of the set, a little bit of an unreleased observe that he used as album promotion.

SZA got here out to carry out two of their duets — “Luther” and “All of the Stars” — however they felt undercooked and virtually pointedly nonideological. They could possibly be learn as a commentary on the type of concessions artists — Black artists specifically, and rappers much more specifically — have traditionally needed to make to make sure broader palatability and acceptance. (The halftime present had its first hip-hop headliner in 2022.)

Lamar himself underscored that time, with the inclusion of a one-man Greek refrain: Samuel L. Jackson, dressed as Uncle Sam and goading each Lamar and the viewers all through the set.

Simply after the 2 SZA songs, Jackson stated, “That’s what America needs — good, calm. You’re virtually there — don’t mess this …” which Lamar then interrupted with “Not Like Us.”

This was Lamar’s different profitable stroke right here: weaving the metanarratives of the evening’s efficiency into the efficiency itself. Ought to he carry out a tune full of accusations that has develop into the topic of a defamation swimsuit? Can a Black performer ethically carry out on the halftime present of the Tremendous Bowl, the crown jewel of the N.F.L., an establishment that has taken on further political valence after the Black Lives Matter motion and Colin Kaepernick’s kneeling protests?

After “Squabble Up,” Jackson popped as much as excoriate Lamar: “Too loud, too reckless, too ghetto — Mr. Lamar, do you actually know the right way to play the sport?” It was each jeer and caricature. And so Lamar adopted with “Humble.,” throughout which his dancers — outfitted in purple, white and blue tracksuits — took on the formation of the American flag.

On the prime of the set, Lamar warned, “The revolution ’bout to be televised — you picked the proper time however the flawed man.” However broadly talking, although Lamar nodded to those bigger struggles, he largely restricted his passions to his most private one. This was one in every of music’s greatest levels, freed up for vendetta.

No less than one one who was a part of the halftime present had a distinct concept of the right way to use the efficiency to advance an agenda. Towards the tip of the set, he pulled out a banner combining the flags of Palestine and Sudan that featured a coronary heart and a fist. Was this a part of the efficiency, one other stage of commentary woven right into a present already full of it?

In footage captured from contained in the stadium however not broadcast, that particular person was chased off the primary stage only a few seconds after whipping out the flag. He ran across the subject for a spell earlier than he was tackled by a coterie of safety guards in fits and carried off the sphere. That revolution, at the very least, wouldn’t be televised.