The logistics of a stadium show are an absolute fucking nightmare. They’re obviously a nightmare for the vast production teams that must scramble to turn hulking concrete bowls into one-night fantasy lands; that’s why every stop on a stadium tour involves a small army of technicians putting in insane herculean efforts. But those logistics can also be a nightmare for the regular people who pay vast sums of money to get inside the stadiums. Football stadiums are the largest structures that can serve as readymade non-festival concert venues in the United States. If you’re among the tiny group of acts who can headline a stadium tour in 2025, you have ascended to the highest heights of the music business. But is the spectacle of the stadium show truly worth it? Kendrick Lamar and SZA’s Grand National tour got me thinking about that question — less because of the show itself, more because of the civic clusterfuck that surrounded it.

It was my son’s first concert. I should say that right out front. My kid is 12 years old, and he was just starting to figure out his own rap tastes when the Kendrick Lamar/Drake situation went supernova last year. He loved that. (So did I.) My son was already into Kendrick, but he’s been all-in for a while now. He’s picking out favorite deep cuts and watching YouTube videos about lore. (Kid is trying to school me in the overarching concept behind Good Kid, m.A.A.d. City, and I’m like, “Yeah, duh, I reviewed that when it came out.” Little smartass thinks he can share fun facts with me.) When the Grand National Tour was announced, I figured that would be a perfect first show, and I was mostly right. But then we spent hours soaked to the bone, huddled under awnings, waiting for Lyft rides that would never come. That part was less perfect.

.@kendricklamar’s performance in night 5 of the Grand National Tour in Charlotte, North Carolina was historic! pic.twitter.com/5iDTbr3daL

— Kendrick Lamar Fan Page (@KendrickLamarZZ) May 4, 2025

It’s always crowded after a stadium show. There was a ton of other shit going on in downtown Charlotte on Saturday night, too — a music festival, some conference, lots of wedding receptions or whatever — and the entire city was thronged with wet people waiting for Lyfts and with the Lyfts strugging to pick all of them up. My son and I were out there for a good three hours before finally getting a car. Along the way, I somehow managed to lose the $55 T-shirt I’d bought him. The end result was some National Lampoon’s Vacation shit — just an endless string of clueless-dad fuckups that led to his first live-music experience devolving into a painful shitshow. Mistakes were made, is what I’m saying.

Given the hellacious pain-in-the-ass conditions of the stadium-show experience, it’s incumbent on the performer to figure out how to make it a magical evening that justifies the expense and the headaches. The Grand National Tour reflects a moment where Kendrick Lamar is actually in a position to do that. I didn’t realize this until it was happening, but the Charlotte date of the tour was the one-year anniversary of “Family Matters” and “Meet The Grahams,” the punch-counterpunch combo that set us up for the “Not Like Us” knockout blow a day later. Kendrick isn’t just coming off of a historic rap-feud victory; he’s also doing the best numbers of his life. After GNX and the Super Bowl, Kendrick Lamar is the biggest rap star in the world at this moment. His SZA duet “Luther” is about to hit its 10th week at #1. I can’t think of another rapper who has ever launched a stadium headlining tour on the level of Grand National. If anyone was ever going to do it, it was Kendrick Lamar, right here and now.

But even with all his imperial-moment momentum, Kendrick Lamar might not be a stadium act on his own. The Grand National Tour is a true co-headlining affair, split almost evenly between Kendrick and SZA. The combination makes all kinds of sense. Kendrick and SZA are old friends and products of the same TDE system, and they’ve got a handful of big songs together. In their huge differences, Kendrick and SZA also cover a few of each other’s weaknesses. It’s a bit whiplash-inducing when the two main acts change up tones so radically with their own alternating mini-sets, and you could always tell which people were in the stadium because of Kendrick and who was there for SZA. But it was also cool to see their radically different approaches stacked up right next to each other.

Kendrick Lamar e SZA cantaram "Luther" juntos na estreia da Grand National Tour, neste sábado (19).

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— Tracklist (@tracklist.com.br) April 21, 2025 at 10:20 AM

SZA does all the pop-star-spectacle stuff. She has a unifying theme for her whole set — her famously peculiar love of bugs, which makes for some big visual flourishes. I guess I’m about to spoil some of the production choices of the Grand National tour. Should I be worried about that? I went out of my way not to check out any setlists before I saw the show, since I wanted to feel some element of surprise. And a big stadium show can be spoiled, since the scope of the spectacle means that the act has to pretty much do the exact same set every night. But if you’ve read this far down into a Grand National tour review, you might want to know about some of the things that happen on that stage. So without getting too deep into it, SZA rides on a big animatronic ant at one point, and there’s also a bit where she’s got on moth wings and she flies up above the stage in a really long skirt. Stuff like that. It’s fun.

I wish SZA had bigger hooks. That’s always been my issue with her. Her tracks have always struck me as being a little too languid and evanescent. I know that vaporous tone is the point, but it’s what’s largely kept me at arm’s length from her music. Still, when she’s up in front of an ocean of people, when enough of those people are singing along lustily, her hooks hook a little harder. SZA also seems unbelievably stoked that she gets to sing in front of that many people every night, and that performance of delight is a big part of pop stardom. Taylor Swift does that really well — radiating joyous pride while she’s up there, beaming good feelings out to the people in the upper deck who mostly see her as a bright, fuzzy dot in the distance.

Kendrick Lamar doesn’t do pop-star gestures in the same way. It’s amazing that a knotty and conceptual rapper like him, a descendant of Freestyle Fellowship and the other linguistically inventive bohemians of the early-’90s LA scene, could ascend to that Taylor Swift/Beyoncé level. The first time I saw Kendrick live was in a half-empty college cafeteria, a few months before my son was born. That night, Kendrick was tense and coiled, and you could feel his intensity on the other end of the room. He’s still tense and coiled now, but his intensity feels different when you’re on the other end of a stadium. Kendrick is a little looser and more comfortable of a stage presence than he once was, but he’ll never come off as someone who wants to give a big hug to everyone in the building. That’s not who he is.

But Kendrick has the songs. He has the moments. A decade and a half into his run, Kendrick Lamar has enough anthems that he can easily craft a stadium set of nothing but crowd favorites. He has lines that demand to be shouted en masse, lines that sounded like stadiums of people were already shouting them when they first formed in Kendrick’s head. Kendrick has been a big-room artist for most of his career, but the sound dynamics of a stadium are different. When enough people shout one line loud enough in a stadium, you get to hear it echo back and forth a few times. Those echoes could’ve swallowed up Kendrick’s performance. Instead, those parts felt urgent and communal. There’s a stretch of Kendrick’s set that goes “Humble” into “Backseat Freestyle” into “Family Ties,” and it feels amazing to hear those songs in succession in a space like that.

Very few of this century’s technological innovations have actually improved most people’s lives in any tangible way, but the people who figured out how to get live rap music to sound good in big venues are true heroes. That never used to happen. You’d go see your favorite rapper, and you wouldn’t understand that you were hearing your favorite song until it was halfway through because everything sounded like indistinct shouting and feedback. Now, Kendrick Lamar can stand at the 50-yard line doing intricate double-time stuff, and we can tell that he doesn’t have a hypeman or a backing track because of the rare moments where he stumbles slightly over his words.

Kendrick Lamar performs "Euphoria" on opening night of the Grand National Tour pic.twitter.com/OL1GA8MqCU

— Complex (@Complex) April 20, 2025

Kendrick Lamar moved into stadium-headliner position largely because of his feud with Drake, and he doesn’t shy away from that stuff at the tour. The diss tracks — “Like That,” “Euphoria,” and obviously “Not Like Us” — are all huge, cathartic singalong moments. But I don’t think Drake is the point of these shows, and Kendrick doesn’t seem like he’s in victory-lap mode anymore. Instead, those diss tracks are just very popular songs that he knows his audience will want to hear. But Kendrick also did his part of the Drake collab “Poetic Justice,” and SZA sang her bits from Drake’s “Rich Baby Daddy.” It was funny to hear Sexyy Red’s piped-in voice saying to shake that ass for Drake at this show, but people shook asses.

Kendrick Lamar performs “Not Like Us” during opening night of the Grand National Tour
pic.twitter.com/sDWXYG1O6b

— XXL Magazine (@XXL) April 20, 2025

Kendrick Lamar and SZA give off a real sense of co-worker warmth whenever they’re onstage together. You can tell that they both appreciate each other, and maybe that’s partly because they both do things that the other one couldn’t. SZA’s big songs are much sleepier than Kendrick’s, but she carries herself much more as a traditional pop star. Kendrick and SZA both have their own troupes of backup dancers, and they serve different functions. Kendrick doesn’t really take part in choreography himself. His dancers project hyphy energy or strike rigid, militaristic poses while arranging themselves onstage in geometrically striking ways. SZA takes part in her dancers’ florid, mystical movements, and the contrast seems intentional. Sometimes, the show feels like a weird guy trying to look normal and a normal girl trying to look weird.

The constant switches between Kendrick and SZA mean that the show sometimes has a hard time setting into its groove, but the individual pieces are all spectacular. Taken together, it’s amazing to see real-life evidence that both Kendrick and SZA, two very specific talents, have elevated themselves and each other to this level. Their joint show doesn’t really reach out to engage in the larger rap and pop worlds. Thus far, only one stop has included a surprise guest (Playboi Carti in Atlanta), and the setlists haven’t changed at all. The only boldfaced names onstage all night are Kendrick, SZA, and opener Mustard. Kendrick and SZA don’t even present themselves as being part of a larger TDE world. Instead, they are the twin forces at the heart of this pop-music moment. Late in the set, the two of them rise up on twin platforms to sing “All The Stars” in front of a sea of cell-phone lights. The image works as a literal illustration of what’s happening outside the stadium: Kendrick and SZA stand above all of their peers. It’s just them, alone, far apart even from each other.

A moment like that can’t happen in a club. You can’t see two of the greatest artists of their generation hovering above the field, looking like they’re being lifted up to outer space. It’s not easy to conjure a transcendent moment like that, and it’s worth putting yourself through at least some misery to witness it for yourself. My son is going to be complaining about all that time in the rain for the rest of my natural life, but I hope he also remembers that he got to see greatness in action.