Rapper and songwriter Kendrick Lamar Duckworth has won 22 Grammys, 37 BET Hip Hop Awards, 11 MTV Video Music Awards, a Primetime Emmy and a Pulitzer Prize. Through it all, he’s managed to remain mostly niche and reserved throughout the years, making music for a specific audience and actively staying out of the public eye as much as possible. He is an artist through and through, making some of the most creatively inaccessible music for a man of his status — work that he himself has dubbed “short films.” Until now.
Over the past year, Kendrick participated in a messy rap beef with Canadian pop rapper Drake. Initially from March to May 2024, the musical conflict featured vicious cuts like “euphoria,” Drake’s “Family Matters,” the violent “meet the grahams” and finally “Not Like Us.” Lamar’s popularity from “Not Like Us” not only propelled him to universal recognition, but it also cemented his name as a household artist, winning him the spot on Super Bowl LIX’s halftime show this past Sunday.
There’s one problem though — “Not Like Us” is a song accusing Drake of serious crimes that have yet to be proven in a court of law. And while Kendrick censored the core allegations on Sunday, Kendrick references them through a few viral lyrics using clever wordplay. This performance was sung along with a crowd of 133.5 million viewers during the most watched broadcast in television history. With this monumental moment, Kendrick has reached another level of worldwide popularity. It is, of course, not without controversy or compromise.
Layered with symbolism, Kendrick’s performance gives commentary on a modern American climate, doing so through the lens of “Uncle Sam” L. Jackson and a storyline told through the theme of a Playstation (owned by Sony, owner of Drake’s label) video game. It might seem that Lamar’s outright hatred towards Drake was the center of the show, but in classic Kendrick fashion, he uses the drama to make a bigger statement about issues in the U.S.
The beef all started when rapper J. Cole — who has been almost entirely uninvolved throughout the arguments and publicly apologized for when he was — claimed that he, Drake and Kendrick were “the big three,” to which Kendrick fired back, and so it began. Maybe Kendrick has now used his platform to redeem the beef into a conversation about the ethical behavior of the upper class, but “Not Like Us” is not a song about the rich and powerful — it is a song about Drake. You could argue it is just a representation of the greater upper class since he’s a part of it, but that’s a little bit of a stretch even for Kendrick, a man known for endless wordplay, double meanings and constant references. Really, this is a beef based on insecurity, something Kendrick has notably struggled with. Kendrick’s intellect admittedly isn’t one shared by many, and growing up in one of the most violent cities in America, loneliness is inevitable.
His most recent album, “GNX,” sees Kendrick relentlessly praise himself in songs like “man at the garden” — where the refrain is “I deserve it all” — and in the shockingly sub-par title track which repeats “Tell em Kendrick did it.” We do see the honesty and humility Kendrick has become known for on songs like “reincarnated,” but throughout the album, we see Kendrick with a newfound confidence that might be well-deserved and much needed — but it is dangerous. It almost seems like this album was made simply as a collection of songs that would be appropriate in both tone and content to play at the Super Bowl, where he played nearly half the album. The majority of Lamar’s catalog would be a bit too dark and abstract for such a commercial setting, and so, to a degree, Kendrick had to go commercial. “Luther” is a song genetically engineered for commercial success — as the only fully clean song on the album — and it features the return of SZA, who saw success with their collaboration “All The Stars,” also performed at the Bowl.
Whether or not Kendrick will remain overconfident and highly commercial is uncertain, but “GNX” has been criticized for its lack of depth and short length, especially in comparison to his previous work. It took up almost half the track list this weekend though, the other half consisting of an unreleased song, two of the three diss tracks, “All the Stars” and two of Lamar’s breakout hits, 2017’s “DNA.” and “HUMBLE.” In both “HUMBLE.” and another 2017 song, “PRIDE.,” Lamar criticizes materialism and tells himself, his competition and his audience to stay humble. Let’s just hope that the song that gave Lamar his fame to begin with still rings true, because there’s not a lot of it to be seen on “GNX,” named after Kendrick’s dream car, the Buick Grand National. As Kendrick says in his song of the same name, “Pride’s gonna be the death of you and me.”