COURTESY | X

The Eagles weren’t the only winners this Super Bowl Sunday. Though rapper and Pulitzer Prize winner Kendrick Lamar did declare a final victory in his public sparring with competitor Drake during the halftime show this year, reducing the entire show to a diss misses the larger point of his set. 

Uncle Samuel L. Jackson began the Super Bowl halftime show by declaring that “this is the great American game.” The headlining rapper used the Apple Music Super Bowl LIX halftime performance to tell a story about the hoops, cheat codes, and concessions tied to being black in America, while also urging black Americans to end the game.

Lamar made history as the first solo rap artist to headline the show. 

In a press conference hosted by Apple Music in the days leading up to the show, Lamar said, “I think I’ve always been very open about storytelling through all my catalog and my history of music. And I’ve always had a passion about bringing that on whatever stage I’m on.”

And a story he delivered. The stage was divided into four quadrants marked with an X, a square, a triangle, and a circle, mirroring the buttons on a Playstation controller. The dancers were dressed in monochrome sweats — red, white, or blue. During his song “Humble,” the dancers formed an American flag with Lamar at the center. But throughout the performance, the dancers remained segregated and separated into matching color groups or lines. 

The choreography as a whole was unified but not uniform, and aside from select moments with simple, crisp movement, the dancing as a whole was authentically energetic and powerful because of that.

After his first two songs — “Bodies” and “Squabble Up” from his most recent album, titled “GNX,” released Nov. 22, 2024 — Jackson reprimanded the singer, saying the performance was “too ghetto” and asked if he really knew “how to play the game.” 

Jackson went on throughout the set to guide Lamar in the direction America wants him to go.  He deducted one life for the “old culture cheat code” of bringing his “homeboys” with him. Then, after “All the Stars” featuring an appearance by R&B singer SZA, he cheered with approval, triumphantly declaring, “That’s what America wants, nice and calm.”

The show showed Lamar toying with balance of past lives and future promises, chronicling Lamar’s lived cultural experiences alongside with the hustle of trying to remain culturally relevant and producing quality work. 

Maybe I’m a part of the problem, but SZA’s portion of the halftime show, albeit nice and calm, was my favorite part. After a playful tease of Lamar’s hit diss track “Not Like Us,” the shot pans over to SZA posed like an elegant cake topper. She delivered nothing short of a vocally stunning performance. More can be expected of the duo at their joint Grand National Tour, starting in April, on the heels of two wildly successful albums released last year. 

After a lot of public discourse about whether or not Lamar would perform “Not Like Us” amidst multiple lawsuits, Lamar approached the end of his set and launched into his five-time Grammy award winning song “Not Like Us.”

In a shot now immortalized on social media and made into thousands of different memes, Lamar turns, smiles right at the camera, and recites the lyric “Say Drake, I hear you like ‘em young.” After a few more taunting bars, one could hear the audience loudly and proudly join him in on his “a minor” lyric.Lamar even wore a silver “a” chain, which many speculate to be in reference to the infamous lyric. 

Serena Williams, who allegedly dated Drake and broke his heart around 2015, has a few seconds of screen time showcasing her crip-walking, a dance move originating in 1970s Compton area where both Williams and Lamar are from. Though she’s received some backlash for the dance moves’ affiliation with gangs, it was one detail in a much larger show about hometown roots, familial loyalty, and pride. 

The element that confounds, or maybe nuances, Lamar’s message is the fact that Drake is mixed-race with an African American father and a Jewish mother. In saying Drake is “not like us,” Lamar is also highlighting the divides not only outside but from within the black community. 

Lamar’s “Not Like Us” lyrics reject the Toronto native as a “colleague” and instead pin him as a “colonizer” in a hip-hop world now identified predominately by the American west and east coasts. The accusations of Drake’s predator status are only part of the larger diss. 

Lamar included his hits while still making room for songs that serve his message the best. At the beginning of the show, Lamar states, “The revolution ‘bout to be televised. You picked the right time, but the wrong guy.” This references Gil Scott-Heron’s 1971 song, “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised”, which was a cultural critique following the civil rights movement. Harkening back to this line, Lamar repeated the line “turn his TV off” at the end of his performance repeatedly until the lights in the audience spelled out “Game Over.” 

This could be a reference to it being game over for Drake, as Kendrick clearly won their beef with a Grammy sweep — a complete shift in the industry’s perception of his opponent — and a halftime show reaching 113 million viewers. This could be in reference to black Americans refusing to play the game and standing up to the government in some way. No matter what, Drake was clearly not invited to play in the first place.