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Now, please enjoy this blog post about Kendrick Lamar.

As someone who lives in Philadelphia, watching the Super Bowl felt like a dream. I would never pretend to know a ton about football, but I can identify an ass-kicking when I see one, and that was about all anyone needed in this case. The big narrative going in I guess was that Patrick Mahomes is the best quarterback and Jalen Hurts is not, and because of that the Chiefs were going to win. Except that did not happen, because in this instance at least, Patrick Mahomes’s aura fled his body and relocated somewhere in Oklahoma, while Jalen Hurts played like a man touched by the divine. 

Every throw, every tush push, every drive, was exactly in its right place (except for that one interception, which we shall ignore). After the game, he sat alone on the floor of the Eagles locker room, smoking a cigar and contemplating the Lombardi. No mugging for the cameras, no gloating or stunting — he appeared to be simply savoring the moment, the steady eye of a storm soundtracked by “Faneto.”

You can contrast this display of utter fucking coolness with any number of championship athletes in similar moments, Jason Tatum’s Kobe and KG cosplay being the most notable example, but it’s instructive to think of Hurts’s reaction as the benchmark for what how a winner can act in a way that makes you love them even more — comporting themselves with grace, appreciation, and an understanding of the difficulty of what one has accomplished. Anything else runs the risk of scanning as performative, or worse, being a sore winner. Which, if we’re being honest, is the mode that the world found Kendrick Lamar at the Super Bowl halftime show. 

While there was certainly a lot of stuff going on, the main thrust of the performance was very much in keeping with what has, for better or worse, increasingly swallowed Kendrick’s persona since his verse on that Metro Boomin and Future song: “Guy who really dislikes Drake.” He took the stage sporting a chain that looked a lot like the Amazon logo, but which apparently was the musical symbol for the key of Aminor, which is of course the payoff of the big punchline from “Not Like Us.” He brought Serena Williams, Drake’s ex, onstage to do a Crip Walk. He teased “Not Like Us” approximately one million times, and then played it and everyone was happy. 

My former colleague Noah Kulwin recently tweeted that “Not Like Us” was in danger of becoming Los Angeles’s “Empire State of Mind,” a saccharine and oversaturated civic anthem that no one who actually lives there would touch with a ten-foot pole. After the performance, he revised his take:

Massive, zeitgeist-snatching hits frequently become so for reasons beyond the song itself, and “Not Like Us” is no exception. The fact that Kendrick’s entire halftime show was centered around this now-Grammy-winning ad hominem character takedown that contains multiple gay jokes is deeply fitting for our current moment. We live at a time in which the nastiest and most shameless person wins, where you can just say some shit and if enough people react to it, it becomes the de facto truth. Regardless of the veracity of the song’s allegations — I’m disinclined to believe that Drake and/or members his camp are involved in grooming, though Baka definitely had a weird case and I am genuinely baffled that Drake still keeps him around, so who the hell knows — its popularity is reflective of a world in which Donald Trump is back in office and Elon Musk is trying to convince people that the U.K.’s Labour Party is actively covering up a pedophilia scandal. 

“MAIN RAPPER” OF THE MOMENT, STARTING WITH DMX, ACCORDING TO A RUBRIC I HAVE INVENTED BUT WILL NOT EXPLAIN

DMX
EMINEM
JAY-Z
50 CENT
JEEZY
TI
WAYNE
KANYE
KEEF (VERY BRIEFLY)
KANYE AGAIN AFTER YEEZUS DROPPED
DRAKE
FUTURE AND 2 CHAINZ (AT THE SAME DAMN TIME)
THUG?
PROBABLY TECHNICALLY J. COLE AT SOME POINT
UGH TRAVIS SCOTT I GUESS?
CARDI?
LIL BABY?
DABABY?
NOBODY FOR A LITTLE WHILE SO DRAKE AGAIN
KENDRICK

As you can see from my list above, there was a real power vacuum for a while there following the Travis Scott ascendency of the mid-2010s, and while Cardi B/Lil Baby/DaBaby were deservedly inescapable in their moments, there was no “main person” in an increasingly accelerating media environment that *demands* a main person to talk about. If anything, Drake held onto the crown for most of the 2010s and well into the 2020s, even as the quality of his music, as well as his actual relevance, declined, because no one rapper was able to suck up more oxygen than him for more than a few months. There was Drake fatigue, in other words, and by systematically dismantling the softest of soft targets, Kendrick was able to take the crown almost by default. 

But Kendrick Lamar has not pushed hip-hop, let alone pop music as a whole, forward in the way many of the above artists have. Instead, he’s artistically conservative, hearkening back to a lost era of rigidly defined “lyricism,” in the rappin-ass-rappin sense, that was more concerned with its status as such than what it actually said. 

When writing this, I have thought often of Kendrick’s verse on the remix to Future’s “Mask Off,” in which Kung Fu Kenny declares “Prince live through me.” The very act of saying such a thing represents a fundamental misunderstanding of Prince’s whole deal. If anything, Future in the mid-2010s, or Wayne in the late 2000s, or Cam’Ron before him, were way closer to the second coming of Prince, a freaky-ass individual who shattered the mold with a paradigm-shattering combination of virtuosity and free association with the confidence to disregard what came before and break new ground.

I will admit that I have never been the world’s biggest Kendrick Lamar fan, so you should take this entire essay with a grain of salt and/or feel free to yell at me on X, the Everything App™. But you have to admit that for someone whose entire appeal is based on their supposed artistry, Kendrick is a fairly artless rapper. Lil Wayne plumbed the depths of the English language and stretched its possibilities in the process. Chief Keef explored the tensions between minimalism and maximalism. Young Thug brought a new elasticity to the art of rapping. Kanye showed an ability to reinvent his entire persona with each album cycle in the way that recalled Bowie or Madonna. Eminem’s hyper-technicality was only part of his appeal; he wouldn’t have blasted out of the Rawkus stratosphere without an ability to cut shock value with a postmodern self-reflexivity that both mirrored and mocked pre-9/11 American culture. All of these rappers had their moment, and each pushed hip-hop forward in their own way. Kendrick, meanwhile, was really good at rapping and then knocked Drake down a peg at a time when he was shilling gambling apps on Instagram. 

Kendrick is a classicist at heart, perhaps the last in a lineage of Dr. Dre-anointed stars, stretching back from Snoop to Eminem, then 50 Cent and The Game. He gets wild with flows sometimes and isn’t above rapping over some left-field shit every once in a while, but his central appeal is that he harkens back to a purer era of rap, a Golden Age of Lyricism that I’d argue is as fictional as Reagan’s vision of the 1950s. The underlying sentimentality reeks of an empire in decline. 

Accordingly, “Not Like Us,” to me, has always sounded less like a pure diss track and more like an academic exercise. With its invocations of Compton and Death Row, accusations of disrespecting Tupac, and even Kendrick’s willingness to hit the homophobia button in ways that rappers just don’t do these days, the track is to Tupac’s “Hit ‘Em Up” what Jayson Tatum’s post-Finals celebration was to Kobe and Kevin Garnett’s: a knowing homage dressed up as a victory lap. 

Part of why I love hip-hop so much is its intertextuality and obsession with its own lineage; every rap line can feel like it’s in indirect conversation with everything that came before it. But the point of a diss song is to drop some shit that cuts the listener to their core. Think about Pac claiming that he cuckholded Biggie, Jay-Z threatening to put Nas on the Summer Jam screen, or Pusha T telling Drake, “You are hiding a child” with icy, menacing calm. By the time Kendrick dropped “Not Like Us,” though, he’d already won the beef simply by rapping circles around Drake. The thing that made the song effective wasn’t any particular line, it was just that it was the first Kendrick song maybe ever that you could actually dance to. He’d never tried to make a hit before, and by making one, he showed he could beat Drake at his own game. But even this gesture felt swaddled in reference: His flow on the song is halfway between Drakeo the Ruler and Suga Free. The instrumental is straight from a folder on DJ Mustard’s laptop labeled “Beats to Send to YG Unless Somebody More Famous Calls.” 

If Kendrick can be said to have a signature sound, it’s one rooted in West Coast jazz-rap, retooled for the post-Moogfest era where the bubbly bass can live alongside some squelchy Pro Tools plugins. But for all his popularity, the vast majority of his big hits have been him grafting his specific style onto someone else’s more accessible one. “Humble” adheres to the structural logic of its producer Mike Will. “Loyalty” sounds like a Rihanna song where Kendrick happens to get more airtime than she does. The “Swimming Pools” beat could have gone to either Ab-Soul or ScHoolBoy Q. “Like That” wasn’t his own song, “Fuckin’ Problems” wasn’t his either. There have been a lot of hits off GNX, but for the most part they draw from already-existing sounds in the LA rap scene, just gussied up for mass consumption by producer Jack Antonoff. 

There’s a very modern pressure for things to make sense, for the media we consume for entertainment to be like little puzzle boxes that add up to a perfect picture. We can see this most clearly in serialized television, where fanbases scrutinize every detail, generating theories based on shreds of evidence, revolting if a twist hasn’t been adequately seeded, or worse, was tipped off to the fanbases so heavily that they were expecting it all along. It’s a very atheistic, in the corny-ass Richard Dawkins sense of the word, way to consume art, devoid of any sense of wonder or acceptance that there are things in this world we simply cannot understand. This is what I value most about the work of David Lynch. He was able to denaturalize the familiar and ask us, or rather force us, to see things through fresh eyes. Sometimes dream logic is all there is. 

This was one of the reasons I loved the first season of Severance so much: Creator/writer Dan Erickson and director/showrunner Ben Stiller created a work in the lineage of Twin Peaks, Eyes Wide Shut, and The Sopranos, unafraid of its own illogic and open to a multiplicity of interpretations as a result. So far, the show’s second season continues to hold up its end of the bargain, even as its world expands to encompass wilderness off-sites and rooms full of goats cared for by viciously aggressive minders. Nonetheless, I have found myself enjoying the show less — not because of any inherent fault of its creators but because I have been compulsively looking the show up on Reddit, where a rabid fan army dissects every single detail to the point where they can’t help but get some stuff right. 

These people, as a mass, operate as if the point of the show isn’t simply to enjoy it for what it is and appreciate being surprised. Everything must make sense, but not so much sense that they see it immediately. I once found a thread where someone could not believe that the zip code of the real-life building that serves as the exterior of the Lumen headquarters was not in the same zip code as the one written on a piece of paper in a throwaway shot. In other words, this person did not understand that Severance, a show that might as well take place in an alternate dimension, was not real. This may be a way of audience members self-soothing and trying to make sense of something in our arbitrary and cruel times, but it is not the way to consume art: it’s the way to consume a crossword puzzle. 

Kendrick is the perfect rapper to appeal to this art-as-puzzlebox perspective, which is sort of the amoral cousin of what the artist and video essayist Brad Troemel refers to as literalism, that strain of 2010s criticism in which an artist’s morality, as well as the values depicted in their work, served as the primary lenses through which the quality of the art itself was determined. The redditization of art rewards a work simply for making references and hiding Easter Eggs within its text. It mistakes “depth,” as in something requiring a bit of work to understand what’s actually going on, for the sort of revelations about life and the world, or challenges to our long-held assumptions, that makes depth itself a worthwhile quality. Kendrick’s raps can be unpacked, sure, but often, what pops out is the lyrical equivalent of foam peanuts and bubble wrap. 

For all its pomp and provocation, Kendrick’s halftime show was similarly devoid of substance. There were references and symbols, sure, like Samuel L. Jackson playing the needling anti-hype man, Serena Williams coming out to gleefully Crip Walk, people dressed up like Squid Game characters, and Kendrick rapping in the middle of a group of dancers forming an American flag. Hell, he even kicked things off by inverting Gil Scott-Heron and declaring that the revolution would be televised. It all felt very avant-garde and was extraordinarily well-done, but did all of this craft actually add up to anything, or did the show simply consist of a collection of gestures designed to make it feel like Kendrick was “getting away with something” without actually touching the third rail? I guess what I’m trying to say is that in 2007, Prince used the Super Bowl halftime show as an opportunity to make his guitar look like a dick with balls in front of millions of people. 

Ironically, the one true and direct political statement contained in the performance wasn’t planned by Kendrick and his team at all: One of his 400 backup dancers unveiled a Palestinian and Sudanese flag during “tv off,” after which the man was forcibly removed from the stadium and banned from NFL events for life. The protester later said that he found the courage to go through with his plan because of Kendrick’s use of flags in his own performance, but Roc Nation, which produced the halftime show, had already issued a statement distancing itself from the gesture. So much for Kendrick the revolutionary.  

Another way of thinking about all of this is that artists often function like weathervanes, throwing shit out there that might not even mean anything to them but which, once in the audience’s hands, transcends the artist themself, starting an alchemical process that is consummated when their work is received by others. I say this not to detract from their work, but instead to celebrate it — making something that resonates on a mass scale, and that means many different things to different people, is an incredible thing. To engage in such a process, as a creator, is to let the Divine pass through you, “like trees to branches, cliffs to avalanches,” to borrow a Biggie line. You can try to direct people to a certain interpretation, but really, it’s out of your hands. This is why the biggest moment of the entire GNX album wasn’t some bar whose profundity left you doubled over; it was the fact that he yelled “MUSTARD” really loud on that one song — a goofy, off-the-cuff moment that people could make their own.

This critique I have of Kendrick is why I’ve always been more partial to Kendrick’s erstwhile TDE labelmate ScHoolBoy Q. His music isn’t any less laden with meaning than Kendrick’s purports to be, but I’d argue that Q is a more deft writer. He’s skilled at creating a gap between his lyrics and their meaning, less concerned with jamming as many words as he can into a verse and instead letting his lines breathe. “Figg Get da Money” is as scathing an indictment of urban blight and the shitty economic circumstances of many Black communities as anything Kendrick’s ever done, but he gets there by emotionlessly laying out an inventory of all the places and people in his hood in the first verse, then places himself within it as he pimps and robs and gives his daughter McDonald’s because it’s all he has access to. The song’s title, which doubles as its hook, takes on a newfound irony by the time he leaves the listener with an image of a homeless man fishing cans out of a recycling bin to sell them for cash. Kendrick, meanwhile, made a song about loving yourself whose hook was “I love myself!,” and a song about everyone being alright whose hook was, “We gon’ be alright!” 

As for the guy Kendrick has replaced: Drake has always ultimately been a pop musician who was uncannily adept at operating within the idiom of rap, so he was of course going to be comfortable serving as the face of hip-hop within the mainstream consciousness. But Kendrick is an awkward fit for the role, and it’s going to be interesting to watch what path he takes now that he’s got the crown. Will he keep making whatever the 2025 equivalent of “radio music” is, and if so, how craven will a guy who’s already collaborated with Taylor Swift and Maroon Five get? I shudder to think of Kendrick’s “Till I Collapse” era. Or will he get really exasperated with it all and make a whole-ass album with a free jazz outfit in an attempt to alienate his audience? Only time will tell. 

Now that the battle is over, the spoils meted out to the victor and the humiliation of defeat projected onto the loser, it seems like Drake is happier than he’s ever been. By defeating him in the field of Rap Combat, Kendrick also unburdened him. 

Suddenly, Drake has become hip-hop’s weird uncle who might be drunk but is definitely fun. He’s been making bad comedy skits on IG to promote some sports gambling app he’s an investor in, he started a finsta to leak music on and he’s repurposed it as a meme account. More than anything, he is no longer litigating the beef; on his new album with PartyNextDoor, he jokes about imagining someone “twerking with a dictionary” to Kendrick before declaring, “Fuck a rap beef, I’m tryna get the party lit,” and prophesizes he will soon walk into a strip club and getting hugs from from all the dancers because they missed him so much. This is no longer a rapper who takes himself particularly seriously, and as Eminem once rapped, “You better get rid of that 9, it ain’t gonna help / What good’s it gonna do against a man that strangles himself?” Kendrick may have killed the king and taken his place, but he birthed a happy jester.