Kendrick Lamar’s Drake-baiting was a smokescreen – his Super Bowl show represented a righteous nation baring its teeth

“Salutations!” beams Samuel L Jackson, spinning around the centrefield of New Orleans’s Caesars Superdome clad in a traditional all-American red, white and blue tailcoat and wisps of white beard, our host and personification of the new US resistance. “It’s your Uncle Sam, and this is the great American game!”

The stakes of the Super Bowl halftime show have never been higher. As Kendrick Lamar appears crouched in a spotlight on the hood of a classic GNX car beneath the crab-like eyes of Donald J Trump – the first sitting president ever to attend a Super Bowl – he seems impishly intent on using the biggest moment of his career so far to charm and disarm the cruel world order. “The revolution about to be televised, you picked the right time but the wrong guy,” Lamar raps. And, among 120 million global viewers, the right-thinking world holds its breath for scandal, spectacle and a second, ideologically polarised 2025 inauguration.

There’s a lot to unpick. Firstly, America’s Crybaby in Chief has already exploited this most iconic of US events to forward his plan to Make America Hate Again. The NFL’s field-side banners reading “END RACISM”, a mark of progress for an institution with its own troubled history on racial equality, have been replaced with ones suggesting we “CHOOSE LOVE” because, well, racism in Trump’s America is just dandy. Now here comes conscious rap’s most defiant and outspoken champion, whose 2015 track “Alright” became a Black Lives Matter anthem, promising a halftime to make America and the world “think a little”. Part biker jacket Batman, part bass-riding bomb.

Meanwhile, on the cultural plane, Lamar’s increasingly heated beef with Drake has reached a point of potential paradigm shift. Many commentators expect this Super Bowl appearance – a huge sales, streams and profile boost for almost every previous performer from Beyoncé to last year’s star Usher – to catapult Lamar far above his rival, not just in terms of impact and respect but on paper too.

A Pulitzer-winning laureate, the Compton-born Lamar is already hailed as among the greatest and most insightful rappers of all time, whereas Drake (checks notes) brought sexy back again, but more trap. Now “Not Like Us”, the most celebrated in a flurry of Drake diss tracks dropped by Lamar in recent years, has eclipsed many of Drake’s own streaming records and brought on a significant challenge to the Canadian superstar’s crown. Last week, the song took home the Grammys for both Song and Record of the Year, prompting the entire Crypto.com Arena to sing along with contentious lines accusing Drake of paedophilia, over which Lamar’s rival has launched legal action. Will Lamar perform it tonight? Can he not? For once, forget the guest stars, these next 12 minutes are all about the statement, and the song.

Facing a high-pressure career landmark, a rap coronation and, who knows, maybe a once-in-a-lifetime chance to stagger the downward course of American history, Lamar seems remarkably unruffled. His mischievous grin suggests, perhaps, that he knows the fundamental underlying message of his show will go way over the head of the doofus Potus but strike the heart of the nation.

That troupes of Black dancers in red, white and blue spew out of Lamar’s GNX like a cool retro clown car and form the US flag for G-funk opener “Squabble Up” is the most forthright finger in Trump’s face from a proud and unbroken Black America. But that the show then throws these citizens into a series of America-coloured Squid Game games in light-up arenas of cubes and crosses – to the brutal yet haunting “DNA”, a track about the multitudes contained within Lamar and his heritage – is a metaphor for the exploitation and manipulation to come, which will likely have bounced straight off Trump’s impervious skull.

As if just for him, Jackson plays like a satire of Maga’s inner voice. “Too loud, too reckless, too ghetto!” he yells when the beats get deep, nasty and Afro-flecked. “I see you brought your homeboys with you,” he snarls as Lamar gathers a block party of friends around a street light to debut “Man at the Garden”, “score-keeper, deduct one life.” The arrival of SZA, draped across a circular stage for the slow R&B of “Luther” and a swelling, soulful “All the Stars” from Lamar’s Black Panther soundtrack, however, pleases him with its (ironic) submissive conformity. “That’s what America wants,” he grins, “nice and calm.”

There’s no rallying outing for “Alright”, Lamar perhaps wanting his subversive message to seep rather than blare from his set. Instead, he chooses to soundtrack the new era with the electronic fanfare and ominous church bells of “Euphoria”, another of his Drake diss tracks and a nice lay-up for a few playful theatrical insights into his inner monologue.

“I wanna perform their favourite song but you know they love to sue,” he shrugs between tracks as a hint of the “Not Like Us” synth riff plays out, but it’s a few more teasing minutes before he piles into the notorious number in full, Serena Williams making a brief dancing cameo and the line about “certified paedophiles” conspicuously edited (presumably for legal reasons).

Caesars Superdome does ultimately get its chance to chant along with the assertion that any chord Drake struck would probably be “A minor”, and no one would argue that this is the moment Lamar rises to the very pinnacle of rap royalty, usurping all previous kings.

But as Lamar raps at one point, “this is bigger than the music,” and as he closes the set with “TV Off”, an entreaty to turn off the Trumpian news chaos and focus on the more vital matters of unity, purpose and survival, tonight will undoubtedly go down as one of the most important halftime shows in the history of the event, if not the most significant mass-televised rap performance of all time. The Drake-baiting was a smokescreen; what really happened was a righteous nation showed up and bared its teeth. The great American game has only just begun. Go Eagles.