The Kansas City Chiefs got absolutely wrecked last night. In their quest for a record-setting Super Bowl three-peat, the Chiefs were hopelessly outclassed by a Philadelphia Eagles defense that wouldn’t let them do anything. Again and again, the Chiefs’ generational-genius quarterback Patrick Mahomes was sacked, stripped, intercepted, and humiliated. On commentary, Tom Brady did the professional work of refusing to show any glee over Mahomes’ plight, but you could just tell. Donald Trump, reportedly very popular in the Mahomes household, did not stick around to watch the full evisceration. The Eagles never even bothered to blitz Mahomes. The final score was 40-22, and as one-sided as that looks, it offers no real indication of how badly things went for Mahomes. This was an ass-kicking of historic proportions. But Patrick Mahomes had at least one thing going for him last night: He’s not Drake.

Kendrick Lamar's Full Super Bowl Halftime Show performance #SuperBowl pic.twitter.com/OxZED0YXDn

— popculture (@notgwendalupe) February 10, 2025

“Not Like Us” was the reason that Kendrick Lamar was chosen to play this year’s Super Bowl Halftime Show, but I honestly considered the idea that he might not perform that song on the broadcast. Kendrick is a mercurial type, an artist with a habit of zagging when people want him to zig. He’s got a huge catalog that’s worth celebrating, and I imagined that he wouldn’t want last year’s Drake feud to overshadow the rest of his towering career. A few months ago, people wondered if he might bring Drake onstage during the show, making a spectacle out of peace instead of war. That went out the window when Drake fired off lawsuits and then slunk away to tour Australia during Super Bowl week, but then it seemed possible that Kendrick might bring out a guest like Lil Wayne, Drake’s onetime mentor and Kendrick’s onetime idol. Wayne was publicly heartbroken when he didn’t get the Super Bowl gig, but he reportedly has no problems with Kendrick. Still, you couldn’t bring out Wayne and then do “Not Like Us.” And then there’s the matter of Drake’s legal team, who fired off a statement before the Halftime Show, effectively conceding that things were about to look worse for their client.

new statement from Drake’s legal team ahead of the Super Bowl halftime show, where Kendrick Lamar could reach ~100 million people at once with “Not Like Us”

Drake has sued (his and Kendrick’s label) Universal Music Group, calling their promotion of the song defamatory pic.twitter.com/eXEXpIbMsi

— Joe Coscarelli (@joecoscarelli) February 9, 2025

I should’ve never doubted the purity of Kendrick Lamar’s hate. He didn’t just perform “Not Like Us.” He teased it through the whole performance. He did a bit of “Euphoria,” one of his other momentous Drake disses. When “Not Like Us” finally hit, Kendrick’s battlefield ecstasy beamed its way straight out of New Orleans and into my living room. He relished it. He reveled in it. As the intro kicked in, Kendrick rapped a few new bars to explain the stakes of what was about to happen: “It’s a cultural divide, I’ma get it on the floor/ 40 acres and a mule, this is bigger than the music/ They tried to rig the game, but you can’t fake influence.” The statement was clear: Kendrick was asserting his place in the rap universe and asserting the rap universe’s place in the wider cultural fabric. He drew battle lines and boundaries, and he made sure to point out the people who will always be on the outside. That’s Drake.

Kendrick restrained himself from barking out the world “pedophile” on the Super Bowl stage. But when he got to the first moment where he mentioned his adversary by name — “Say Drake, I hear you like ’em young” — Kendrick locked eyes with the camera and flashed a malevolent million-dollar smile. A few seconds later, the vast Superdome crowd — people who’d come for football, not for rap beef — howled along with Kendrick’s “A-minor” punchline. Then, the nail in the coffin: Serena Williams, Drake’s Compton-native ex, Crip-walking at the 50-yard line like she’d just won Olympic gold at the Wimbledon grass court in 2012.

“Man I did not crip walk like that at Wimbledon, I would’ve been fined!”

— Serena Williams following her appearance at Kendrick Lamar’s #SuperBowl halftime show.

pic.twitter.com/iP4gjrtBMR

— Pop Base (@PopBase) February 10, 2025

To date, Kendrick Lamar has only performed “Not Like Us” at two shows: Last night’s Super Bowl and last year’s victorious Juneteenth Pop Out concert, where he ran it back five times. But that one song casts a cultural shadow that seems to grow every week — including last week, when it cleaned up at the Grammys. It’s now arguably Kendrick’s signature song — the track that anchored the entire Halftime Show, serving the same function that the euphoric all-star rendition of “Yeah!” served at Usher’s Halftime Show last year. The contrast between those two songs is telling. “Yeah!” was a 20-year-old staple, a nostalgic anthem for a generation that’s just now getting old enough to have nostalgic anthems. “Not Like Us,” meanwhile, is unsettled business, and its shockwaves continue to reverberate.

Even in recent years, the Super Bowl Halftime Show has been a place for nostalgia. That was the case back when the NFL was booking people like Paul McCartney or the Who every year, and it’s still key to most of the recent spectacles. Shakira and Jennifer Lopez, the Weeknd, Dr. Dre and friends, Rihanna, Usher — all of them reached back to the tracks that made them household names in the first place. In the time that Roc Nation has produced the Halftime Show, all of its performers have been active artists, and many of them have had current hits to perform. But all of them also had deep catalogs of familiar jams to trot out. Kendrick Lamar could’ve done that. He didn’t. He went back to the DAMN hits “Humble” and “DNA” and the Black Panther SZA duet “All The Stars,” but everything else in his set came from the past year. Rather than going the greatest-hits route, Kendrick attacked the songs that are in the air right now. It was a bold choice, and it probably alienated some portion of the many, many millions who tuned in.

Kendrick’s setlist leaked online ahead of the show. On his podcast, Joe Budden and his colleagues dismissed the idea that the leak was real — that anyone would be stupid enough to believe that Kendrick Lamar would step up with “the worst Super Bowl lineup I’ve ever heard,” that he wouldn’t perform surefire crowd-pleasers like “Alright” and “m.A.A.d. City.” But that’s what he did. Kendrick didn’t just perform GNX deep cuts like “Man At The Garden”; he used the unreleased song-snippet that hit the internet just before the album release as his opener. Naturally, there’s been some befuddlement there. The conservative pundits who always log on to complain about the Halftime Show are mad again, and some of them are using the word “boring.” But I’ve also heard from a few older people who barely kept up with the Drake beef and who weren’t sure what was going on. By its very nature, a Super Bowl Halftime Show is for everybody. But this one? This one wasn’t really for everybody. This was for the people who kept up, who paid attention.

Speaking as one of those people, I had a great time. There’s a real thrill in seeing someone you’ve followed for years, since he was touring half-empty college cafeterias as another name in the rap-blog roundtable, stepping up to the biggest stage in the world. Kendrick Lamar is deeply attuned to his own mythology, and he knew that fans would pick over every new line and artistic decision, so he gave us a lot to pick through. Even the selection of guest-stars had layers of meaning. I’m sure lots of people immediately recognized Serena Williams, but how many people knew about her Compton upbringing, her long-ago flirtations with Drake, her Crip-walking mini-controversy, or her shoutout on “Not Like Us”? Kendrick also got Samuel L. Jackson to dress up as Uncle Sam and to essentially reprise his jive-talking Greek chorus role from Spike Lee’s barely-seen 2015 musical Chi-Raq.

The Uncle Sam thing wasn’t just a cheap pun, and it definitely wasn’t Kendrick pandering to American nationalism, as some immediately theorized. Instead, Jackson was there to play the voice of America — the one that chides Kendrick from being “too loud, too reckless, too ghetto” after “Squabble Up.” Throughout, Jackson acted like he was coaching Kendrick toward respectability, and he pantomimed delight after “All The Stars”: “Yeah, that’s what I’m talking about! That’s what America wants! Nice and calm!” Then the “Not Like Us” beat kicked in and Jackson looked appalled. We didn’t see him again.

The other guests were not surprises. SZA was announced ahead of time, and you knew she’d be there anyway. SZA and Kendrick have a stadium tour coming up, and they just announced its European dates this morning. They’ve got something to promote; that’s the only reason that “All The Stars” appeared in the first place. DJ Mustard had to be there, and it was a treat to see the guy who made My Krazy Life with YG getting a chance to dance to one of his own beats on this stage. But Kendrick Lamar has plenty of superstar collaborations — hits with Beyoncé, the Weeknd, Future. Taylor Swift was right up there in one of the boxes, hanging out with HAIM and Ice Spice, getting booed when her face appeared onscreen. Maybe Kendrick could’ve gotten her to do “Bad Blood,” a diss track for a less petty age. But that wasn’t the point. The point was to show Kendrick’s vitality — to let the world know that his peak is happening right now, before our very eyes.

That vitality is enough to exile Drake from the world stage, but it only works in certain ways. One of the most visually striking moments of Kendrick’s Halftime Show came when he stood in the center of columns of dancers in red, white and blue — forming a visual representation of the American flag, with the iconography of gang colors somewhere in the mix. That’s a political statement, perhaps — the artist at the center of a divided America. But it wasn’t direct, and it wasn’t even as direct a statement of protest as Beyoncé arriving in Black Panther-inspired garb during the Coldplay set in 2016. When you’ve got Donald Trump literally in the stadium, maybe something louder is in order. Instead, the most powerful political statement of Kendrick’s set didn’t come from Kendrick himself. It came from the figure who appeared onscreen waving the flags of Palestine and Sudan before being quickly tackled by stadium security. I have to assume that Kendrick had nothing to do with that, though it would’ve been cool if he’d planted it. (For the record, Roc Nation denies any involvement, and the protester is now banned for life from NFL games.)

Presumably, many of the people who yelled along with Kendrick’s “A-minor” line were the same one who cheered when Trump stood up to salute during Jon Batiste’s national anthem. Kendrick Lamar is too prickly and particular to make the obvious political statements that plenty of us might like, and it’s not like he could’ve actually changed anything if he’d done anything more over-the-top than what he did. He’s told us over and over not to expect him to act like a prophet or a messiah, and his own political leanings might be more complicated and contradictory than some of us might like. Instead, his Halftime Show was about establishing Kendrick as a king of rap, a guardian at the gates, not as anything bigger than that. He succeeded at that goal.

Kendrick Lamar’s stage show wasn’t as visually grand as the one that Rihanna did with the moving platforms a couple of years ago, and he didn’t do anything as theatrically precise as Usher’s shirtless-on-rollerskates spectacular. But I thought the performance was still thrilling. Kendrick kept things moving. He wore bell-bottoms that got an entire New York Times article. He had fun visual ideas, like the clown-car Buick Grand National with an infinite supply of dancers. Those dancers were a little looser, a little less militaristic than what we’ve come to expect from shows like that, and the relative roughness felt like a statement of his own. The show also made for a ridiculous display of pure rapping — Kendrick ferociously zooming through his wordy tracks while running and stomping and strutting all around the stage. He did it all without any hypemen or obvious backing tracks, and he made it look easy. If this bored you, then it’s your own fault for not paying enough attention.

I don’t think Kendrick Lamar’s Halftime Show belongs next to the Prince and Beyoncé sets on the list of all-time greats. Maybe that wasn’t the goal. Instead, Kendrick Lamar pulled off a few things. He highlighted GNX — an album that, in retrospect, is full of epic tracks that were specifically engineered to echo around stadiums like that one. He showed the precision of his craft and the electricity of his presence. He took one more victory lap after the ridiculous, legacy-defining year that he just had. And he made sure everyone understood that he’d already won, that it was game over. You know who wasn’t bored watching that? Drake. That’s who.