“You picked the right time, but the wrong guy.”
-Kendrick Lamar
On February 9th, 2024, Kendrick Lamar took to the largest audience in the world, the most important place in the world at one of the most crucial moments, when the world’s eyes would be on him: the first Super Bowl Half-Time Show since Donald Trump’s election for his second term. The Half Time show is always one of the most memorable performances any artist ever gets to organize; it will be spoken about for decades afterwards. Knowing this, it is absolutely the most opportune stage upon which to display their talent, their artistry and their message. Kendrick did not disappoint, telling a story of how black artists in America are taught to ‘play the game.’ In other words, how acceptable does one make themself to appeal to the mainstream, majority white American culture? How much, as a black artist, does one choose to selectively show or hide certain parts of oneself to become palatable to white people?
On a stage displaying the square, triangle, circle and x of a Playstation controller, Kendrick moves us through various points of his career, not in order of release, but on a roller coaster of how well he ‘played the game.’ During the transitions of certain songs, Samuel L. Jackson appeared, playing the part of Uncle Sam to play the role of the voice ‘acceptable blackness,’ admonishing Kendrick when he plays songs from his discography that are not agreeable for the wider, white audience at home. The performance was chock full of politically charged symbolism, such as his all-black dance troupe forming a US flag which is eventually split down the middle, to the dancers crashing together near the end of the show, symbolizing a divided America that can still come together and refuse to feed into the racism that still shapes the cultural landscape of the United States.
“No, no, no, no, no. Too loud, too reckless, too… ghetto! Mr. Lamar, do you really know how to play the game? Then tighten up!”
-Uncle Samuel L. Jackson
My partner and I watched the performance in utter silence aside from a few breaks to exclaim with surprise, “Samuel L. Jackson!” and “Is that Serena Williams?!” We also had to rewatch Kendrick’s cheeky smile when he referenced Drake directly a few times over. We’ve been talking about this performance constantly since it happened. Much like many of my favourite live performances, it felt like a cultural reset had occurred, like we are now in a fundamentally different world than we started in. And, for once in the past few months, that feels like a good thing.
I am, admittedly, new to Kendrick Lamar and his music and I write this article from that perspective. I discovered his music through my partner, who is a superfan of the rapper. Hearing that his music got my partner through some rough times immediately gave me an idea of what kind of realm such an artist might sit in. Aside from my partner, I had heard the name Kendrick Lamar on the tongues of some music reviewers and other pop culture connoisseurs that I watched on YouTube. Most memorably, I remember Nathan Zed (I can’t recall which of his videos it was as this was quite a few years ago, but I highly recommend his channel) discussing the greatness of Kendrick’s album To Pimp A Butterfly some years ago — a piece of information I tucked into the back of my mind for a future point in time.
The first Kendrick album my partner showed me a few years ago was on a day where we decided to show each other albums that helped us through our own respective depressions: I showed them Nirvana’s opus of an album Nevermind, and they showed me the Pulitzer prize winning DAMN. At the time, I wasn’t sure exactly what it was about this album that earned it its Pulitzer. I could tell it was a great album, but what gave it that extra edge? I told myself I’d look deeper into it and take apart the lyrics at some point in the future.
A few years after that, in April of 2024, my partner came to me to frantically explain the beef that had been currently happening between Kendrick Lamar and Drake and we poured through the lyrics of the songs that had been released so far, interpreting the lines and watching videos explaining anything we might have missed. Few things will feel as electric as following each new track drop until the beef more or less ended after Kendrick refused to respond to Drake’s The Heart Pt. 6, the name itself a bastardisation of Kendrick’s on-going Heart series. It had been more or less decided that Kendrick was the obvious winner. Even Drake sounded weary of the back-and-forth on The Heart Pt. 6, and the lyrics claiming that Drake had false information fed to Kendrick about himself came off more as an injured dog barking at passers-by than a believable game of 4D chess Drake was playing.
Nothing Drake could have said at that moment could have topped Kendrick’s biting intellect throughout the entire beef. Important to note, from the first moment Kendrick entered the ring on the track Euphoria, he had already illustrated how the beef would go in the first few verses and Drake did nothing but prove Kendrick right over and over with each new track he released. Did my partner and I still turn to each other with a wide-eyed ‘oh, he went there’ look the moment we first heard Kendrick say, “Dear Adonis, I’m sorry that man is your father,” over that haunting piano sample? Absolutely. Did we look at each other with our jaws on the floor the first time we heard the “a-minor” line in Not Like Us? You know we did. At the end of the day, it can be argued that Kendrick played mean, but it’s undeniable that he played the game of hip hop better than Drake did, and that was why he was the obvious winner across the board.
More recently, in November, I saw folks on the interwebs saying that Kendrick had dropped a new album and excitedly went to share it with my partner. I was a bit pleased to discover I was the first to drop the news to my partner that day. Score one for my chronically online habits! When they got home from work that Friday, we immediately listened to it together while cooking dinner, dancing and discussing the production, and the impressive speed and flow of Kendrick’s rhymes. As an amateur to music production, I’ve also been listening in my own time, exploring how each song was put together, mentally examining how the deep, ominous synth on “wacced out murals” worked with the lyrics, what the Debbie Deb sample added to “squabble up,” the victorious horn sample that appears towards the end of “tv off.”
My partner has been trying to get me into Kendrick’s other albums, and I have been doing my promised deep dive. A few weeks back, my partner put To Pimp A Butterfly on while we were discussing my writer’s block I’d been having with my novel and, the moment they hit play, I immediately knew that this was something special. Though my personal knowledge and specialty fits more into the rock and alternative scenes, I’ve always had some idea of what good hip hop sounded like, what it could be. I had heard good hip hop music before so I had an idea of what I might hear, but I was still taken completely off-guard by the album opener “Wesley’s Theory.”
Now, if there’s one thing I like in an artist, I really like being unable to predict what I will hear next. I love surprises, and I love an artist who never does the same thing twice, and this made me immediately interested in finding the thread through Kendrick’s discography. The first thing that stands out to me, personally, is how each album is like an amusement park ride that tells a story. You’ve got moments of tension and release, a narrative that plays out from beginning to end. I also find myself surprised, as I move through To Pimp A Butterfly, DAMN. and Mr. Morale & the Big Steppers, at how funky and rhythmic many of the songs are, between beats that resemble the more expected hip hop beats. This may be in part thanks to Kendrick’s longtime collaborator, Thundercat, a producer and talented bass player who brings his trademark funk and jazz inspired sounds into projects. Working with the right producers is a big part of the reason why Kendrick’s music just doesn’t quite sound like anyone else. Also worth noting, when I listen to these albums, I feel that there is just no desire on any of these records to sound like what’s happening in music at the time. For artists who don’t have a strong vision, this can work against them, but for Kendrick this works in his favour, carving out space to go his own way and stand out.
In light of having gained a better understanding of Kendrick’s artistry, it gave me pause. I wondered if, from an outside perspective, engaging in the beef would take away from certain groups of music fans from being able to see Kendrick, the artist. I don’t believe that many older white folks who were around for the first waves of hip hop (and likely didn’t get it at first then either) really had heard of Kendrick before the beef, or at least that’s what I saw happen in my vicinity. Those in this demographic that I know seemed to not understand Kendrick and even outright oppose his music. And, in a manner, this was surprising to me.
I mean, is it ever truly surprising when the older generation doesn’t get this ‘newfangled’ music? Not really. But I think the reason why it surprised me so much that older folks don’t seem to get Kendrick is that, when I hear his music, I hear a strongly concentrated form of hip hop that brings elements of the classic sound underlaid with strong sample choices, while also bringing in a new and refreshing element to the sound. YouTube video essayist — and man who knows hip hop way better than I ever could — F.D. Signifier in his essay I’m What the Culture Feeling described Kendrick as a hip hop purist, which more or less confirmed what I suspected from my own listen. Even older white folks, who might not have warmed up to hip hop when it first entered the mainstream pop culture landscape, are nowadays proudly listening to classic rappers: Tupac, Snoop Dogg, Dr. Dre. They put these artists’ songs on their workout playlists and reminisce about hearing it on the radio even though there is a decent chance that, at the time, they changed the station. It confounds me a bit that they don’t see the artistry to Kendrick’s music, but some people are just waiting for the time it becomes mainstream, and therefore ‘acceptable.’ And thus, we return to the theme of the Half-Time show.
I am sort of left with the assumption that the dislike of Kendrick amongst older white folks comes from three basic places:
The first one is the most obvious, white folks don’t like things that challenge their worldview and Kendrick’s music does that. It does not change itself to become palatable to the mainstream white audience. Second, it’s still too new to them to be considered ‘acceptable’ yet, in much the way early hip hop became much more widely listened the more time has gone on. Thirdly, he had been beefing with Drake who was much more ‘acceptable’ to enjoy amongst white people. Drake played the game a black rapper is supposed to play, avoiding all the supposed pitfalls Uncle Samuel L. Jackson warned Kendrick against during the performance: “too loud, too reckless, too ghetto.” Drake’s music fits into the pop landscape in an easy to consume kind of way. That isn’t to say Drake’s music is all simple, and that simple is bad; it’s more complicated than that of course, but generally that is the perception.
Another element that plays to this attitude towards Drake in my personal vicinity is that I am Canadian (from Vancouver instead of Toronto, but still.) In Canada, there is a view of Drake as our Canadian boy who made it big, went international, and became the king of mainstream hip hop. Canadians have a kind of pride around celebrities who were born here or grew up here. We are absolutely itching to tell you that Seth Rogen, Ryan Reynolds, Jim Carrey, Mike Myers are all Canadian and to explain if we have any connections to them. When we visited family in Chicago, it was a month before Christmas and Michael Bublé was everywhere we went singing Holly Jolly Christmas, so we bragged about how Bublé grew up in a town adjacent to the one we live in and how he had eaten at a restaurant my sister waitressed for at the time.
So, to those who don’t look into the nuances around the Kendrick-Drake beef, they likely just see an American rapper having petty beef with ‘our boy,’ the acceptably black man who makes acceptably mainstream hip hop. Those of us on the ground, really digging into the meaning of what was happening culturally, saw the real battle as being the battle of an artist versus an entertainer, a hip hop purist versus someone who is perceived to not quite respect the roots of the genre and, on the deeper level, the guy who was certainly flawed but working through things against the guy who had been seen skirting the line around acceptable behaviour with underage women and seemed to relish in the power he wielded.
Notably, to the point about hip hop, Drake took some offense to Kendrick’s verse on Control, by Big Sean, which featured a call out of many of his contemporaries in rap, urging them to compete with him to be the best in the genre. After hearing these lines, Drake was apparently confused by Kendrick later being nice to him in person, claiming “It just didn’t feel real to me.” (this moment can be seen in F.D. Signifier’s video that I linked to above starting at the 51:25 mark). Considering a core part of hip hop’s roots is competition, this moment amongst others made Drake seem like an outsider to the very genre he had topped in sheer number of singles released straight to the Hot-100. It was a stain on Drake’s career, an oxymoron that followed him up until this beef, which set up an easy win for Kendrick.
And now, at the Super Bowl Half-Time Show, Kendrick gets his ultimate vindication: he gets to call Drake out on the world’s largest stage, he gets to deliver his message of unity celebrating black American culture to the world, and he gets to show that he was indeed what the culture was feeling. If this is Kendrick Lamar’s victory lap, count me in as a new fan excited to see what is the next race he will run.
“The revolution ‘boutta be televised.”
-Kendrick Lamar
I will end this article on this thought: was Kendrick’s performance incredible, thoughtful and creative? Undoubtedly. Still, as an artist myself and as I live through the week it has taken me to write this, I’m left with many questions related to something I believe Kendrick also explores in his music. Can a performance like this be considered revolutionary? Maybe it’s sort of a cliche for an artist to ask oneself this, but now when the world is dipping back into a very scary place, with fascism on the rise across the Western world and the United States as its new colony, can music save us? Is this performance part of the revolution? Will my novels one day be part of the revolution, when they are published? Every day, we are so bombarded with distressing news that my head spins.
As I write this, I see articles discussing protests happening all across the United States, protesting all the systems and protection being gutted by the current administration, but the news is too busy covering the protest-worthy actions to even show us that there is an opposition on-going to these actions. It settles in my brain that the original poem may have been right: the revolution will not be televised. You won’t see the fight on TV; you won’t see those whose lives will be affected the most on TV. Even during Kendrick’s performance, a dancer who snuck in a Palestinian flag merged with the Sudanese flag was not shown on the televised performance. They were tackled and pulled off stage seconds after holding up the flag.
I can’t help but feel that the real message in all this is to not allow oneself to be placated, even when artists are positioning themself as revolutionary and telling you the revolution is happening before you, look a little ways behind the camera. None of this is to admonish Kendrick; if Kendrick had done anything too obvious or radical, the NFL would have probably cut the feed, so I get it. I think his message has been clear enough from other songs of his.
This is far from over and you should keep paying attention to what’s happening beyond what you can see on TV. Thinking about all this, the state of the world right now, a very different Kendrick Lamar lyrics comes to mind right now, in regards to seeing how many larger news media companies have covered the past few years in politics:
“Turn his TV off.”
-Kendrick Lamar
