Kendrick Lamar’s Super Bowl halftime show announcement is bigger than his victory over Drake…..
The 2024 iteration of the Drake and Kendrick Lamar rap battle — a battle that saw Lamar spend the summer eviscerating his opponent with an avalanche of songs that ranged from scathing to haunting to chart-topping — started with a song called “First Person Shooter” that had Drake and J. Cole saying they were “big as the Super Bowl.”
On Sunday, Lamar took one final victory lap around his rival by announcing that he would perform at the Super Bowl LIX halftime show in New Orleans on Feb. 9, 2025. The surprise is a final, definitive reminder that Lamar has completed one of the most undeniable one-sided victories in rap history and leaving us with months to speculate and dissect what his performance will entail and ultimately mean in relation to the messages he’s conveyed in his entire career.
With one 90-second teaser video for the halftime performance, Lamar put the notion of a Drake rematch to bed. Not only does the video mark Lamar as the first rapper to be the sole headline act (he previously performed a medley that included Dr. Dre, Snoop Dogg and Eminem in 2022) advertised for a Super Bowl halftime show — a declaration that he is the big dog in rap — but his comment in the video that “you know there’s only one opportunity to win a championship, no Round 2s” is a direct jab at Drake’s recent social media post quoting 2004 Detroit Piston Rasheed Wallace saying, “We will win Game 2.” If Drake wants to get his lick back, it seems that Lamar is content with letting the fireworks from a Super Bowl halftime performance drown out the sound of retaliatory fire.
Yes, Lamar is moving on from this generation’s Great Rap Feud, but not before having hundreds of millions of people sing along to “Not Like Us,” the battle’s climactic diss record (complete with the intriguing possibility of New Orleans native and Drake mentor Lil Wayne joining Lamar on stage … that can’t happen, right?). That moment will prove to be the final nail in a coffin that had seemingly been buried under thousands of pounds of Billboard-topping dirt.
However, that isn’t the only reason “Not Like Us” is the most interesting aspect of Lamar’s Super Bowl halftime show. Any Super Bowl halftime show comes with the backdrop of the original call to action from Jay-Z and Roc Nation in their mission statement about what they want to accomplish with the artists who perform. In 2019, Roc Nation was brought on to produce the halftime show to “amplify the league’s social justice efforts,” according to the NFL. Yet, the shows have failed to do that. Usher and The Weeknd, et al., have been entertaining, but the social justice message has been lost.
