The last person anyone expected to see first at Kendrick Lamar’s Super Bowl halftime extravaganza in New Orleans on Sunday night was Samuel L. Jackson dressed up like Uncle Sam - but there he was, loudly introducing one of the most visionary rappers America has ever known. “Salutations,” Jackson shouted to an estimated 120 million viewers about to get their heads rocked. “It’s your uncle! Sam. And this is the great American game!”
What came next was proof that Lamar knows how to play. His 13-minute halftime show was a nonstop surge of locomotive rhyme, bold and stylish like showbiz, but canny and intricate like art. And for those hoping Lamar would use this once-in-a-lifetime pedestal to speak truth to power, he did that, too. But with subtlety. “The revolution ‘bout to be televised,” Lamar announced near the start of the proceedings, clad in a loose leather jacket and boot-cut denim. “You picked the right time but the wrong guy.” The wrong guy? Was he referring to one President Donald Trump, watching from upon high in the Caesars Superdome skyboxes?
More than any other figure in contemporary pop, Lamar is deeply associated with the Black Lives Matter movement of the past decade - and now, at a moment when many Black Americans feel their rights being rolled back under Trump’s orders to dismantle efforts toward diversity, equity and inclusion, a faction of Lamar’s followers may have been wishing for a more forthright declaration. But this was the game that Lamar agreed to play. So instead, he leaned hard into the most urgent tracks from his stellar new album, “GNX,” delivering elaborate rhymes while navigating the field-wide stage in sly, scissoring steps. Talking the talk. Walking the walk.
With contributions from a phalanx of dancers and his frequent collaborator, the emotive singer SZA, everything managed to feel as streamlined as the flow of Lamar’s consciousness. Even the momentum killers were by design - like after the one-two boom “GNX” and “Squabble Up,” when there was an interruption from Uncle Sam. “No, no, no, no, no! Too loud! Too reckless! Too ghetto!” Jackson shouted, anticipating the Monday morning news-show blowback with saying-the-quiet-part-loud animation. “Mr. Lamar, do you really know how to play the game?”
He knew how to play games within games. The other big question mark hanging over the Superdome on Sunday was whether the set list would include “Not Like Us,” the seething diss track Lamar launched at Drake last summer, only to watch it become a national phenomenon, winning all five Grammys it was nominated for just last weekend. Lamar teased the song’s nuclear strings near the middle of the set like something out of the James Brown handbook, then circled back to it toward the big finish. Let the record show: Instead of calling Drake and his crew “pedophiles” at the Super Bowl, Lamar replaced the word with a nonverbal scream. As for the song’s most lethal line - “Ain’t you tired? Tryna strike a chord and it’s probably A Minor” - he basked in the sound of an entire stadium shouting it along with him.
“Ain’t no other king in this rap thing, they siblings,” Lamar rapped in summation a few moments later, during an especially concussive rendition of “TV Off.” Then, the song ended abruptly. The lights went dark. The camera cut to a bird’s-eye view. And the portions of the audience that were still illuminated in the darkness spelled out two words: “GAME OVER.”