A year ago, it would’ve been a long-shot bet to pick Kendrick Lamar to be the 2025 Super Bowl halftime show headliner.
In fact, it seemed as if his moment to play the biggest stage in the game had already come and gone in 2022’s Dr. Dre-led hip-hop extravaganza also featuring Eminem, Mary J. Blige, Snoop Dogg and 50 Cent.
And Lamar’s career had seemingly peaked with 2017’s “Humble,” his first solo No. 1 single, and its critically acclaimed album “Damn,” which led to his Pulitzer Prize in 2018.
“He was in what I would maybe frame as a midlife lull, a mid career doldrum,” Christopher Driscoll, co-author of 2019’s “Kendrick Lamar and the Making of Black Meaning,” told The Post. “You know, the wind had stopped … ‘Mr. Morale [and the Big Steppers,’ Lamar’s 2022 album] was a welcome offering from him. But it wasn’t ‘Damn,’ you know? It just didn’t have the same sort of resonance.”
But damn if Lamar hasn’t now scored the most prized gig in the biz as the first solo rapper to headline the Super Bowl when the Kansas City Chiefs tackle the Philadelphia Eagles at the Caesars Superdome in New Orleans on Sunday. And it’s all because of “Not Like Us,” the Drake diss track that last Sunday saw Lamar turn up the Grammys — and a champagne-swilling Taylor Swift — with five wins, including Record and Song of the Year.
First topping the charts last May, the final salvo in his battle with Drake turned into a hip-hop anthem for the ages — and turned Lamar into a Super Bowl halftime show headliner.
After an already legendary career, how did one song take Lamar to another, career-redefining level? Especially one that felt, well, not like him.
Well, it all started when Lamar, Future and Metro Boomin released “Like That” in March 2024. On that track, Lamar boasted that it was “just big me” in a reference to J. Cole calling himself, Drake and Lamar “the big three” on “First Person Shooter.” Drake retaliated against Lamar on “Push Ups” and “Taylor Made Freestyle,” and the battle continued back and forth until Lamar delivered the killer blow with “Not Like Us.”
“He’s won the Pulitzer. Some people could say that the beef was kind of beneath him, even if it was with Drake,” said Driscoll. “It’s like, you know, let it go. You don’t do that.”
But at a time when rap wasn’t booming, all that scrabbling reignited both Lamar and the genre.
“He took it back to not only his roots, but I’d say hip-hop’s roots,” said Driscoll. “He is a student of the craft. And because he’s a student of the craft first … he knows that the way to get the wind blowing again, so to speak, is through taking it back to the playground.”
For Lamar, 37, it was a pugnacious side of himself that was heard early in his career freestyling, battle-rapping and making mixtapes as K.Dot before he hit it big with 2012’s “Good Kid, M.A.A.D City”— and before he became a paragon of the Black Lives Matter movement with 2015’s “Alright.”
“My intent was to always keep … the nature of it as a sport,” Lamar said Thursday during an interview with Apple Music, which sponsors the halftime show. “I love when artists grit their teeth. Like, I still watch battle raps. I still watch Smack/URL, from Murda Mook to [Loaded] Lux to Tay Roc, my bro Daylyt. This has always been the core definition of who I am, and it’s been that way since day one.
“So I don’t think it was a thing for this year, it was always just a continuum.”
It’s an energy that Lamar carries over to his new album “GNX,” a surprise release that dropped in November and features the hit “Luther” with SZA, who will join him as his special guest on Sunday.
“It was a great transition from ‘Mr. Morale,’ because that was my most intimate,” he said. “I think it was necessary coming out of that cocoon and feeling like, ‘OK, now I can spread my wings and show every state of who I am, as far as Kendrick Lamar.”
But after the Compton, California rapper performed “Not Like Us” five times in a row at his Juneteenth Pop Out Concert at the Kia Forum in Los Angeles, the song has come to symbolize more than the Drake beef, with a universal appeal that has upped the ante for Super Bowl-sized consumption.
“At the end of the day, the song, I think, is about authenticity and belonging,” said Driscoll, who is one of the academics who has even taught college courses on Lamar. “That’s something that resonates with everybody. You know, he is able to always keep it real, in the sense of telling us where he is right now, who he is right now.
“He’s just so gifted at giving us himself, and in this case, the genius of it is that he ostensibly wrote this about another dude, but what he’s doing is creating this anthem that is for us. It’s for whatever moment is there, and that’s amazing. I mean, artistically, that’s just next-level poetry.”