Just when it seemed as if Kendrick Lamar had dropped his grudge against Drake, it turns out his ‘game over’ coda to the Super Bowl halftime show was just the end of regulation. On the Grand National tour, a four-month long stadium circuit for the Grammy-sweeping album GNX and SZA’s reissue album Lana, Lamar takes the music industry’s most bitter rivalry match into overtime.
The score-keeping has not stopped. The Grand National tour’s opening date in Minneapolis last week totaled more than $9m from more than 47,000 spectators, giving Lamar claim to the highest grossing hip-hop concert of all time – surpassing the record Eminem set after playing Melbourne, Australia in 2019. That’s what you get when you pair the hottest rapper in the game with an R&B queen who is coming off the critical and commercial success of buddy comedyOne of Them Days, SZA’s film acting debut.
Tuesday’s date at Atlanta’s Mercedes-Benz Stadium was yet another cross-cultural moment that drew 45,000 spectators on the same night Pearl Jam was playing across the street at State Farm Arena – a traffic twofer reminiscent of the spring 2023 weekend when Janet Jackson and Taylor Swift helddueling midtown concerts.
“Jesus is more important thanKendrick Lamaror Eddie Vedder,” one curbside evangelist shouted along the boulevard between the two show venues – but his message was lost on a crowd that was too busy adding to the city’s legendary gridlock.
There was some sense that even Lamar knew to expect a few thousand late arrivals given how the show kicked off. After an opening DJ set by Mustard, the Marquis de Lafayette in Lamar’s rap war with Drake, the lights went back up for 30 minutes as the speakers blared quiet storm classics from Anita Baker and Luther Vandross – GNX album inspirations whostoked feud rumorsin their heyday. But the enthusiasm and marijuana smoke thickened again when Lamar rose up onto stage in his now-trademark black Buick GNX and set the tone for a multimedia cavalcade that was more of a gapers block than a groove.
While Lamar rapped the first few bars of wacced out murals from inside the car, a giant backdrop screen showed him inset from the inside against an animated graffiti that echoed the tributes that Lamar makes in the song. The car and the screen were critical storytelling vehicles for a concert where conflict is a prevailing theme. Even Lamar andSZAare stylistically at odds.
Where he represents the cold and unforgiving concrete jungle (and Los Angeles more specifically), SZA is at home in nature among the caterpillars and praying mantis – which her dancers personified, Katy Perry-style, for SZA’s performance of Garden. For most of the three-hour show, the big screen treats Lamar and SZA with extreme prejudice – flattening the color in Lamar’s flared slacks and red tee to black and white while accentuating bringing out all the hues for SZA’s lush set pieces.
But early on in the show, the figurative wall between the two artists comes crumbling down on screen during SZA’s performance of The Weekend, revealing an orange-glowing wood – an unmissable nod to the recent LA wildfires. For her mid-show performance of Garden, SZA mounts a giant ant called Anthony while her dancers and backing orchestra are covered in vines and moss. The act crescendoes with her taking to the air in butterfly wings and a cocoon-shaped ballgown (that drops dramatically onto the stage floor) and “flying” into the twilight to Nobody Gets Me – her first time this year touring the song, about her ex-fiance. In an aside to the crowd, it wasn’t immediately clear whether it was her ex or her team that told her “to stop performing the song”. Either way, she didn’t “give a fuck. It’s about y’all.”
But the conflict that ultimately wins out is the one between Lamar and Drake. At various points between act breaks, the big screen played snippets of Lamar sitting for a deposition – a direct shot at Drake’s recent efforts to respond to their ongoing rap beef through legal channels. Initially, an (off-screen) counsel asks Lamar if allusions to violence were just him “being metaphorical” or whether they should be taken as a threat. (“Take it how you want,” was Kdot’s response.) In another deposition scene, Lamar is asked if his disappearing acts between albums is “just another form of attention-seeking”, which is how Drake has framed his dynamic with Lamar. Even SZA gets in on the legal back-and-forth, pushing back when the off-camera lawyer mispronounces her name and accuses her of seeking out dysfunctional relationships for their creative potential.
Not surprisingly, Lamar brings the house down with Not Like Us (before closing the show with Luther, his current chart-topping with SZA). And while the a-minorsingalong and other Drake callouts hit as hard as ever, it was a bit of a disappointment to see the crowd not connect with the song’s painstaking references toAtlanta. (Lamar dedicates a whole verse to the city’s history while exposing Drake as a culture vulture.) What’s more, Lamar’s political strokes struggled for urgency without Donald Trump and a worldwide Super Bowl audience to play against.
While this show will no doubt go down as another victory for Lamar against erstwhile biggest name in rap, it was still hard to come away from the night without thinking that Drake may have had a point when he suggested that Lamar’s oeuvre doesn’t easily convert to concert fare. Take Not Like Us and Be Humble off the 50-plus set list, and the “big numbers” – the ones that get the crowd holding their hearts and swaying and recalling those moments years later – are all SZA’s. In the end it takes two to take Drake down, but Lamar still gets the last shot.