From the charts to the Grammys to the Super Bowl Halftime show, Kendrick Lamar has had one of the busiest and successful months of any rapper in hip hop history.
Sunday, Feb. 2 was Grammys night, where Lamar was nominated for five awards for his era-defining diss track targeting Drake, “Not Like Us.” By the end of the night, Lamar walked out of the building with five Grammys in his arms, including awards for Record of the Year and Song of the Year.
Sporting a Canadian tuxedo, one of Lamar’s cleaner digs at Drake, he accepted the awards with grace, dedicating them to his city of Compton and his partner, Whitney, as the crows screamed every word to the hit track while he walked on stage – a hint at what was to come the next week.
Lamar’s real stand-out moment of the last month was his highly-discussed Super Bowl Halftime Show. While the performance, directed by Kendrick Lamar and Dave Free, in collaboration with their collective label pgLang, contained deep messaging and new music, the show itself was polarizing.
Despite the issues that traditional Super Bowl viewers found with the layered halftime show, you wouldn’t know from the numbers, as Lamar’s performance was the most viewed in American television history with 133.5 million live viewers.
Besides appearances from SZA for performances of “luther” and “All the Stars,” as well as “Not Like Us” and “tv off” producer Mustard and Serena Williams dancing, Lamar was the center of attention for the 13 minute performance.
MC Samuel L. Jackson, sporting an Uncle Sam outfit, led us through the show, referring to Lamar’s opening performances of the GNX snippet and “squabble up” as “too loud, too reckless, too ghetto,” a comment not unfamiliar to black americans throughout the country, just attempting to be themselves.
Lamar followed by playing two of his biggest hits “HUMBLE.” and “DNA.” from his Pulitzer Prize winning album “DAMN.” This is when we get to see Lamar pull out the new material.
Listeners heard the horns leading into the fan-favorite diss track targeting Drake, “euphoria,” and we knew we were in for an exciting night. This was followed by a stand-out moment where Lamar performed “man at the garden,” one of the more subdued and introspective tracks on his new record “GNX,” alongside a large group of gold-grill-bearing black singers.
Uncle Sam points out the “culture cheat code” of bringing “your homeboys with you,” which opened one of the best choreographed moments of the night – “peekaboo.”
Of course SZA sounded angelic as ever, showing great chemistry with Lamar, and eventually leading into the moment we had all been waiting for “Not Like Us” at the Super Bowl.
As a fan, this was simply amazing. Hearing the entire stadium scream the “a minor” line, watching Lamar walk with so much swagger around that stage and indulging in the incredible artistry at play. It was everything I could have wanted.
Lamar streams skyrocketed following his performance. “GNX” returned to number one, selling over 200 thousand copies in its twelfth week, thanks to an increase in streams as well as vinyls shipping out, and he became the first rapper in the history of Spotify to pass 100 million monthly listeners.
This has reminded me of one of Lamar’s 2017 lines on Future’s “Mask Off” remix, saying “How y’all let a conscious [rapper] go commercial while only making conscious albums?”
This recent run shows a cultural shift towards thoughtful, conscious writing, in a way that hasn’t been the commercial way in the rap genre in years, and with Kendrick Lamar leading the way, the culture is in safe hands.
