Kendrick Lamar Rewrote the Rules of the Halftime Show

Kendrick Lamar performs onstage during Apple Music Super Bowl LIX Halftime Show at Caesars Superdome on February 09, 2025 in New Orleans, Louisiana. Credit - Gregory Shamus—Getty Images

When the NFL announced Kendrick Lamar as the Super Bowl halftime show performer in September, both his critics and fans expressed doubt that he would be up for the job. To naysayers, Lamar was too verbose, too political, too obscure for pop music’s biggest stage, which has typically featured culturally safe icons belting universally beloved anthems to the stadium rafters. Some instead clamored for New Orleans's own Lil Wayne, a living embodiment of the raucous creativity and bacchanalia of the city hosting Super Bowl LIX.

Conversely, Lamar’s fans worried that the narrow confines of the televised gig would require him to compromise his artistry; that even the act of him performing on such a corporate stage was a sign of him selling out or renouncing his activist, anti-establishment roots. There seemed to be no way that Lamar could both win over the masses yearning for spectacle and his diehards hoping for a thunderbolt of Pulitzer-level genius.

But Lamar’s superpower has long been his unique ability to navigate this exact tension between message and reach: to tell stories of American pain and oppression without coming off as preachy; to challenge audiences lyrically and musically while widening his listenership. And on Sunday, this balancing act was on full display. Lamar delivered a Super Bowl performance wholly unlike any other before it, in which the aim was not to summon nostalgia or comfort but to demand full attention and active listening from his audience.

What Lamar lacked in singalongs, he made up for in narrative, visual stagecraft, and sly political commentary—while also slamming the casket on his rap feud with Drake for good. “The revolution ‘bout to be televised,” he warned his audience at the top of the show. “You picked the right time, but the wrong guy.”

Read More: How Kendrick Lamar Went Pop in His Own Way

Lamar’s performance began with a close-up of a beaming Samuel. L Jackson, dressed in a full Uncle Sam suit, gesticulating pompously and proclaiming: “This is the great American game.” Jackson seemed to represent the audience’s expectations for a halftime show performer: razzle-dazzle, patriotism, and gratitude to be on such a grand stage.

But when the camera cut to Lamar, he was crouched down, mumbling quickly, shrouded in darkness—and performing not a hit, but a snippet of a 2024 verse that didn’t even make it onto his recent album, GNX. After he transitioned into the confrontational “Squabble Up,” Jackson’s Uncle Sam returned to the stage, chagrined. “Too loud, too reckless, too ghetto,” he shouted in a manner reminiscent of his Django Unchained character, a loyal house slave named Stephen. “Mr. Lamar, do you really know how to play the game?”

Lamar did not concede to the character’s criticisms. While he could have leaned on his guest verses on his songs by much more famous stars—like Beyoncé’s “Freedom” or or “Bad Blood” by Taylor Swift, who was in the stadium cheering on Travis Kelce—Lamar instead opted to mostly draw from GNX, even the B-sides. He rapped an a capella version of “man at the garden” in front of a group of finger-snapping, beatboxing friends, as if they were freestyling at the lunch table, then transitioned into the silly, sullen “Peekaboo.”

These relatively obscure and deeply L.A.-indebted songs risked alienating perhaps more than just a small portion of his audience. To bridge the gap, Lamar leaned heavily on a phalanx of over 80 dancers, who appeared in various formations over the performance’s 13 minutes. Donned in solid reds, whites, and blues, they at various points recalled an American flag, Compton gang members, HBCU step teams, the doppelgängers in Us. They sprawled into mosh pits, rotated in kinetic circles, and marched like soldiers striding into war and then protesters at a rally, their energy conveying the joy and messiness of America’s body politic.

While his dancers were compelling, Lamar knew all too well that he needed another element to keep the audience engaged. And for many people leading up to the performance, the central question of the night was whether he would perform “Not Like Us,” his brutally mean diss track against Drake, a song whose us-versus-them posture was embraced by communities across the world and scored Lamar five Grammy trophies last week, including Record of the Year and Song of the Year.

Read More: The Drake-Kendrick Beef Was Good for Both of Them—Until It Wasn’t

“Not Like Us” proved Lamar could thrive in creating not just complex album-length poetry but in bite-sized viral moments; that he had mastered the tone, brevity, and snark of the TikTok era. The song was so devastating that Drake sued Universal Music Group—both his and Lamar’s label—for defamation, casting Lamar’s ability to legally perform the song into doubt.

Lamar alluded to this threat halfway through: “I want to perform their favorite song, but you know they love to sue,” he said onstage, before veering into a sultry subsection of the set featuring his former labelmate SZA. Jackson’s Uncle Sam praised this section, calling it “nice and calm,” no doubt vocalizing the thoughts of many other uncles across America. For the moment, Lamar seemed to be diffusing the conflict.

But Lamar has proven his pettiness in battle over and over this past year—and acutely understands the power of conflict as a hype generator and social media driver. “I do believe in love and war, and I believe they both need to exist,” he said in a Vanity Fair interview a few months ago.

So he launched viciously into “Not Like Us,” providing a new preamble: “40 acres and a mule, this is bigger than the music/ They tried to rig the game, but you can’t fake influence.” If the Caesars Superdome wasn’t exactly the home field advantage that Lamar had at his concert “The Pop Out” in Inglewood—in which he performed “Not Like Us” five consecutive times—the entire crowd still howled along to the song’s definitive line: “Tryna strike a chord and it's probably A minor.”

Lamar then provided two moments that were virtually invisible to the crowd in New Orleans, but quickly went viral on social media—another tactical decision from Lamar’s team, co-led by his longtime collaborator Dave Free, to focus their efforts not on the ticketgoers but the at-home audience. First, Lamar looked directly into the camera and cracked a wide, menacing grin while mentioning Drake’s name outright, instantly creating a meme format.

He created another viral moment when Serena Williams emerged onstage, crip-walking to the song’s chorus. Williams’ appearance had several layers: Williams is from Compton, Lamar’s city; and she and Drake were rumoured to be romantically linked a decade ago, with Drake saying that the song “Too Good” was written about her. After the show, Williams posted a video on Twitter, saying gleefully: “Man, I did not crip walk like that at Wimbledon—I would have been FINED!”

Lamar then closed his set with the triumphant fanfare of his recent single “TV Off,” which he recently wrote seemingly for this exact moment: “Walk in New Orleans with the etiquette of L.A.,” he rapped. “TV Off” is perhaps the best recent showcase of Lamar’s artistic adaptability: He’s not some sort of humorless poetry scold, as many depict him, but has modulated his approach for many stages, eras, and audiences across his decade-and-a-half career. In the Soundcloud & blogosphere era, he embraced the nerdiness of rap obsessives seeking genre rebirth with Section.80. In the wake of Michael Brown’s killing, he took to the streets and burrowed deep into the nation’s conscience with To Pimp a Butterfly. And as the mainstream Marvel-ized in the late 2010s, Lamar became a pop maximalist, happily trading verses with Rihanna and Taylor Swift on radio anthems.

The unrelenting pace of the TikTok era threatened to leave a more careful, measured artist like Lamar behind. But in its fierce regionalism, gobsmacking energy, and memeability (“MUSTAAARRRRRRRD!”), “TV Off” proved that Lamar is still a cultural titan even outside the confines of the Drake feud, and that he’s as culturally and aesthetically relevant as he’s ever been.

“TV Off” also contains a sly political message, which was rendered all the more poignant at the Super Bowl: By instructing viewers to turn their TVs off at the end of his set, Lamar implored listeners to not just be passive consumers, but to play an active role in shaping the future of culture, politics, and beyond.

In its framing, narrative approach, and density, Kendrick Lamar’s Super Bowl was unlike any that have come before it. To some, it mystified; to others, it kicked open the door for what this format could be. Just because something is expected of you, he seemed to be saying, doesn’t mean that’s the path you should take. Maybe Kendrick, in his own words, does deserve it all.

Contact us at letters@time.com.