Kendrick Lamar Wants More than Victory

Brooke Buckmir ’26 / Emertainment Monthly Staff Writer

Kendrick Lamar is on top of the world. In early 2024, he and fellow superstar rapper Drake’s long-going feud became heavily publicized, with the rappers playing a game of diss track boxing by releasing one after the other. But on May 4th, Lamar released “Not Like Us”, and that was the knockout for Drake. It debuted at number one on the Billboard Hot 100, and became the fastest rap song to reach 100 million streams on Spotify – fittingly defeating Drake’s 2018 hit “God’s Plan”. In September, Lamar was announced as the next headliner for the Super Bowl Halftime Show, and a week before the performance, “Not Like Us” earned him five Grammys. After crushing Drake in almost every way possible, many fans were excited for Lamar’s victory lap, and for him to humiliate the Canadian rapper in front of millions of people.

However, Lamar’s focus wasn’t to embarrass Drake. Yes, he gave a sly grin to the camera as he rapped the line “Say Drake / I hear you like ‘em young”, and wore a chain with the A-minor chord on it, referencing the double-entendre lyric from “Not Like Us”. But those moves were just indulgences in his sweet successes. The real meat of the performance came from elsewhere, starting with actor Samuel L. Jackson, dressed up as Uncle Sam and welcoming the audience to the “Great American Game”. This “game” could refer to football, or the performance itself, where the stage was designed to look like a Playstation controller. But Lamar means something bigger: living in America, trying to chase the American dream. Both are fundamentally unattainable as a black man. 

Choosing Samuel L. Jackson wasn’t just so the audience watching at home could have a famous person to giddily point at. Uncle Sam to some is a figure of American patriotism, but as Lamar explored on his album To Pimp A Butterfly, Uncle Sam is a representation of how capitalist America exploits and oppresses Black Americans. Choosing to have a black man play this role shows that black people can be brainwashed to uphold this racist system, with the promise that they too, could truly be equal to the white people that have always had the privilege. Diving into Jackson’s past makes the choice even more interesting—in the late 1960s, after Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination, he became a prominent Black Power activist. Nowadays, most people know him as Nick Fury. What both Lamar and Jackson have stood for for years has been abandoned, not out of their own volition, but because that’s only how society will accept them. The American audience transformed Jackson from the justice-seeking Black Panther into just another Hollywood actor, and Lamar from the Pulitzer Prize-winning rapper to the guy who dissed Drake. But even if the audience is only watching for Lamar to call Drake a pedophile, he wants to remind the audience exactly what he stands for.

Lamar opened his show with an unreleased track, telling the audience at the very beginning that he wasn’t going to conform to their expectations. If that wasn’t clear enough, after he finished, he announced that “the revolution ‘bout to be televised—you picked the right time, but the wrong guy”. As he performed his GNX track “Squabble Up”, the background dancers came out, dressed in red, white, and blue. It ended with criticism from Jackson: “Too loud! Too reckless! Too ghetto! Mr. Lamar, do you really know how to play the game? Then tighten up.” In this white American society, anything that is unapologetically and proudly black is demonized as lesser, both intellectually and morally. Jackson tells Lamar he needs to change his behavior and culture to be seen as more “approachable” to white people so he can have a chance at winning the aforementioned Great American Game. Lamar does as he is told by performing his 2017 hit “HUMBLE.” next. As he does, the dancers get into a formation that creates the American flag. It is a clear sign that America was built off of the backs of Black labor, from slavery to the exploitation seen today. It can also be seen as how blackness is ingrained in American history, no matter how many history books are filled with white faces. Lamar is undoubtedly mega-famous, with many hits under his belt, but many still questioned the decision to have him headline the Super Bowl Halftime Show, claiming that they’d never heard of him and wanted “real music”. He’s the most successful rapper in the country right now, but no matter how many victories he gets, he still hasn’t won the Great American Game.

Lamar continued with a melody of his more modern tracks, which all have Lamar’s signature nuanced and thought-provoking lyrics. These include “DNA”, a song about his complex relationship to black identity and culture, and “euphoria” a song that drills into Drake’s manipulative and exploitative nature and appropriation of black culture. In “man at the garden”, which shows Lamar proclaiming he has earned his immense success due to the sacrifices and hardships he’s gone through, he ends with the line “I deserve it all because it’s mine”. Jackson interjects to “deduct one life”, denouncing Lamar for implying that he deserves more than what life has given to him. He and his dancers then perform “peek-a-boo” inside of the X in the stage’s formation. X marks the spot—no matter what people say, Lamar is right where he’s supposed to be. He slows things down with “luther” and “All the Stars“, where collaborator SZA came out to sing the tracks with him. This is the first time we see Jackson happy with Lamar’s performance, saying “That’s what America wants! Nice, calm. You’re almost there, don’t mess things up”, in which Lamar interrupts him with the intro to “Not Like Us”. If Lamar didn’t have the courage to “mess up” American values, everything he stands for would hold no ground.

Even though “Not Like Us” was the fan favorite, he didn’t stop the political commentary. He added an intro to the song: “Forty acres and a mule, this is bigger than the music / Yeah, they tried to rig the game, but you can’t fake influence.” “Forty acres and a mule” references the promised reparations to Black Americans after slavery, that the government did not follow through with. Black Americans have been repressed since the beginning, and when equity is seen as an insult to the status of White people, they will continue to have a disadvantage. But Lamar doesn’t want you to believe things are hopeless. There are many forms of resistance, and as someone with a huge platform, Lamar has shown millions of people how to resist. Lamar’s influence is a reminder of the famous poem “Still I Rise” by fellow Black artist and past Lamar collaborator, Maya Angelou. Angelou’s most famous poem, it explores staying resilient and confident in the face of racial oppression, and how through resisting the world tearing you down, staying true to yourself will allow you to rise back up. People can criticize him, Uncle Sam can censor him, conservative political commentators can tweet how it was a “DEI halftime show”, but at the end of the day, Lamar has gained status as a cultural icon, all while never stopping his Black activism. Kendrick Lamar has done more than won: he has risen.

Lamar ended with “tv off”, where he repeats the phrase “Turn this tv off” as the final image of the show are lights forming the words GAME OVER. He wants fellow Black Americans to know that in order to achieve true victory, it’s not about winning the Great American Game, it’s about refusing to participate in it. You need to turn the tv off and open your eyes to see the truth—that you could never win the game in the first place. But once the tv’s off, you too, can rise.