Kendrick Lamar’s Super Bowl Halftime Show: The Peak of All Rap Battles?

Or course that did “not like us.”

In the period prior to Kendrick Lamar’s main performance in the mid -time show of the Super Bowl Lix on Sunday night, most of the talk focused on whether he would play the song that was effective in the knockout coup in his battle of months with Drake last year. The song that became the characteristic success of Lamar and a generational anthem. The song that won the album and the song of the year in the Grammys only one week ago. The song that seemed to emphasize the power classifications of hip-hop, perhaps permanently.

So yes, Lamar played the song. Towards the end of the set, of course, accumulating anticipation with a couple of letters that musical settle, playing with the emotions and thirst for the audience.

But what will always be remembered of this performance are not the musical elections that Lamar did, or the aesthetics of his choreography, or the silhouettes of his outfit. What will remain is his smile when he was finally rapping that song. It was wide, persistent, almost caricaturesco form. The smile of a man who has the moment of his life at the expense of an enemy.

Lamar is perhaps the most sober of all the great contemporaries of hip-hop, a fierce narrator who values ​​the controversies of language and introspection travel; It is not exactly a lighthouse of joy. Duration of the meat, it seemed to assume the dismantling of Drake as the necessary task.

“I don’t like us” it was a printed champagne cork, he thought. On the scenario of the Super Bowl in the Caesars Superdome in New Orleans, he hinted, separated and then, finally threw himself with a Lamar language: “They tried to manipulate the game that you cannot falsify influence.”

And then that smile. What a smile. His subsequent performance was jubilant and a bit mischievous. When he rapped: “Say, Drake, I listen to you as a young man,” he looked at the camera hard as he made a gesture down with his left hand, as if stroking a child’s head. They violated the line that appointed Drake associates and their defects. Given what the song holds about Drake, it refers to him as a “certified pedophile”, among other things, the decision to make it was almost certain that it was very prelitigated. (Drake has sued the record label behind both rappers for defamation for releasing and promoting the track). And concessions were made: Lamar does not rapper the word “pedophile”, replacing it with a pregradrated cry, and the camera moved away from it just before landing the end of the stab of the singer, a miscarriage, a minorrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr. “

It was a great show, maybe the peak of any rap battle, never. And that does not even tell the moment of the lyrics in which the great tennis (and it was rumored that Drake’s former lover) Serena Williams was on stage, walking along with Glee.

Since much of Lamar’s set, Conceptuaxy, he reduced to the question of “not like us”, he kept things curiously discreetly the rest of the time. Rather than pack in each of his hits – there was no “alright” or “bitch, don’t kill my vibe,” for example – I read on songs from His Most Recent Lp, “GNX”: “Man at the Garden,” “Peekaboo” and bitinning of the set, a bit of setining of the set, of the set of the set, of the set, or bitinning of the set, or bitinning of the seTINING of the Setining of the Setining of the Setining of the establish Establishment of the placement of the configuration of the configuration of the placement of the configuration of the configuration of the configuration set configuration.

Sza went out to perform two of his duets, “Luther” and “All The Stars”, but they felt little cooked and almost not ideological. They could be read as a comment on the type of concession artists, black artists in particular, and the rappers equally more in particular, have had to do to guarantee wider palatability and acceptance. (The part-time show had its first hip-hop poster in 2022.)

Lamar himself stressed that point, with the inclusion of a single man’s Greek choir: Samuel L. Jackson, dressed as Uncle Sam and inciting both Lamar and the audience through the set.

Just after the two SZA songs, Jackson said: “That is what the United States wants, well, calm. You’re almost there, don’t get this …” Why did Lamar intromged with “not like us”?

This was the other winning coup here: weave the methanarrative of the performance of the night in the ITELF performance. Should a song full of accusations that have become a demand for defamation? Can a black interpreter act ethically in the part -time exhibition of the Super Bowl, the Jewel of the NFL crown, an institution that has assumed the additional policy valence after the Black Lives Matter movement and the knee -kaepernick kaepernick protests?

After “Squabble Up”, Jackson went out to excore Lamar: “Too noisy, too reckless, too Gueto – Mr. Lamar, do you really know how to play the game?” It was jeer and cartoon. And so, Lamar continued with “Humble.”, Duration that his dancers, equipped with red, white and blue crayfish, tok in the formation of the US flag.

At the top of the set, Lamar warned, “The Revolution” fights to be televised: you chose the right moment but the wrong guy. “But in general terms, he thought that Lamar nodded these biggest struggles, mostly limited his passions to the most personal. This was one of the greatest internships in music, released for Vendetta.

At least one person who was part of the part -time program had a different idea of ​​how to use performance to advance an agenda. Towards the end of the set, he took out a banner that combines the Palestine and Sudan flags that presented a heart and a fist. Was this part of the performance, another level or comment interwoven in a program already full of it?

In images captured from inside the stadium but not transmitted, that individual was expelled from the main stage only a few seconds after taking out the flag. He ran around the field by a spell before being approached by a safety guards in costumes and left the field. That revolution, at least, would not be televised.