Kendrick Lamar gave a discreet performance during the Super Bowl halftime show. He was the first solo rapper to take the stage with the largest audience in the world for a musician, an estimated 120 million viewers, but fell short on spectacle. The comparison with Beyoncé's recent show at the Christmas game, so complex, ambitious, and exciting, was deemed odious.
In an unexpected decision, he chose to fill the repertoire with songs from his latest album, GNX (Squabble Up, Man At The Garden, Peekaboo, Luther -featuring SZA, his only guest- and TV Off), and only included two old anthems: DNA and Humble. GNX is excellent, but his fans were probably expecting a greatest hits compilation.
Given this scenario, the rapper from Compton was aware that he had to at least play the morbid card of Not Like Us, the most popular rap song of 2024 and one of the most controversial songs of the past year. Throughout his performance of almost 15 minutes, he flirted with the idea of singing it. "I want to play my favorite song, but you know they love to file lawsuits", he said with a smile while looking at the camera.
Like any guilty pleasure, morbid curiosity is denied in public with gestures and enjoyed intensely in private. We are all morbid. Or, if you prefer a more refined term, we are curious. We all sneak a peek at traffic accidents, we all want to know about the misdeeds of others.
In the US, there has been a huge surge of morbid curiosity surrounding Kendrick Lamar's performance at the Super Bowl halftime show over the past week. The surge grew and gained volume and speed until tonight it all poured out under the dome of the Superdome in New Orleans.
Would Kendrick Lamar sing Not Like Us? Would the whole country celebrate his massive attack on Drake and joyfully chant the phrase "A minoooor," as seen at the Grammy Awards a week ago, where even Taylor Swift sang it while raising a toast with her champagne glass? And even though the song has surpassed one billion streams on Spotify and was blessed and approved by the music industry with five Grammy Awards, including Song of the Year and Record of the Year, would Kendrick Lamar dare to sing it after the lawsuit filed by Drake against his record label?
Well, it's Kendrick Lamar, the same Kendrick Lamar who has won awards, but above all, admiration and respect like no one else in 21st-century rap. That Kendrick Lamar who, with six albums, has established himself as a moral compass in African-American culture in the US. The same Kendrick Lamar who infuses a triple meaning into every verse and delivers them with the skill of a ninja and the power of a truck. This Kendrick Lamar who spent part of 2024 destroying Drake's reputation with the explicit intention of killing him as an artist and burying him several feet underground: accusing him of being a certified "pedophile," of mistreating his partner, of infidelity, of having unrecognized offspring, of being a "master of manipulation," a "habitual liar," a puppet, and, well, of being a bad son, a bad father, a bad artist, and even a bad Black man.
So yes, it has happened: Kendrick Lamar has finally satisfied the morbid curiosity of an entire country by singing Not Like Us at the end of his Super Bowl halftime performance, with "A Minooooor" chanted by the entire crowd... and probably in millions of homes. What do the NFL's and its sponsors' lawyers matter when even the teams themselves have adopted the song as a war cry?
The 37-year-old rapper from Compton will not be paid a dollar for the performance. It is customary among artists chosen for the Super Bowl halftime show: the NFL and Apple, this year's sponsor, cover the production costs of the show, so the musician's benefit is the immediate impact of occupying this privileged showcase: streaming numbers soar, as do ticket sales for his concerts.