Kendrick Lamar’s Super Bowl Halftime Show: The Peak of All Rap Battles?

Of course he performed “Not Like Us.”

In the lead-up to Kendrick Lamar’s headline performance at the Super Bowl LIX halftime show on Sunday night, most of the chatter focused on whether he would play the song that was effectively the knockout blow in his monthslong battle with Drake last year. The song that became Lamar’s signature hit, and a generational anthem. The song that won both record and song of the year at the Grammys just a week ago. The song that appeared to recalibrate hip-hop’s power rankings, perhaps permanently.

So yes, Lamar played the song. Toward the end of the set, of course, building up anticipation with a couple of brief musical nods to it, toying with the audience’s emotions and thirst.

But what will always be remembered from this performance is not the musical choices Lamar made, or the aesthetics of his choreography, or the silhouettes of his outfit. What will remain is his grin when he finally began rapping that song. It was wide, persistent, almost cartoonish in shape. The grin of a man having the time of his life at the expense of an enemy.

Lamar is perhaps the most sober of all of hip-hop’s contemporary greats, a ferocious storyteller who values tongue-tripping polemics and introspection; he is not exactly a beacon of joy. During the beef, he appeared to take on the dismantling of Drake as necessary homework.

“Not Like Us” was a popped champagne cork, though. On the Super Bowl stage at the Caesars Superdome in New Orleans, it was hinted at, parceled out and then, finally, launched into with a Lamar idiom: “They tried to rig the game but you can’t fake influence.”

And then, that smile. What a smile. His subsequent performance was jubilant and a bit naughty. When he rapped, “Say, Drake, I hear you like ’em young,” he looked hard into the camera while motioning downward with his left hand, as if patting the head of a child. He rapped the line naming Drake’s associates and their flaws. Given what the song contends about Drake — it refers to him as a “certified pedophile,” among other things — the decision to perform it was almost certainly heavily prelitigated. (Drake has sued the record label behind both rappers for defamation for releasing and promoting the track.) And there were concessions made: Lamar did not rap the word “pedophile,” replacing it with a prerecorded scream, and the camera switched away from him just before he landed the end of the sing-songy punchline, “A minorrrrrrr.”

It was quite a spectacle — perhaps the peak of any rap battle, ever. And that’s not even counting the brief moment in which the tennis great (and rumored former Drake paramour) Serena Williams was onstage, Crip Walking along with glee.

Given that so much of Lamar’s set, conceptually, came down to the question of “Not Like Us,” he mostly kept things curiously low-key the rest of the time. Rather than pack in each of his hits — there was no “Alright” or “Bitch, Don’t Kill My Vibe,” for example — he leaned on songs from his most recent LP, “GNX”: “Man at the Garden,” “Peekaboo” and, at the very beginning of the set, a bit of an unreleased track that he used as album promotion.

SZA came out to perform two of their duets — “Luther” and “All the Stars” — but they felt undercooked and almost pointedly nonideological. They could be read as a commentary on the sort of concessions artists — Black artists in particular, and rappers even more in particular — have historically had to make to ensure broader palatability and acceptance. (The halftime show had its first hip-hop headliner in 2022.)

Lamar himself underscored that point, with the inclusion of a one-man Greek chorus: Samuel L. Jackson, dressed as Uncle Sam and goading both Lamar and the audience throughout the set.

Just after the two SZA songs, Jackson said, “That’s what America wants — nice, calm. You’re almost there — don’t mess this …” which Lamar then interrupted with “Not Like Us.”

This was Lamar’s other winning stroke here: weaving the metanarratives of the night’s performance into the performance itself. Should he perform a song filled with accusations that has become the subject of a defamation suit? Can a Black performer ethically perform at the halftime show of the Super Bowl, the crown jewel of the N.F.L., an institution that has taken on additional political valence after the Black Lives Matter movement and Colin Kaepernick’s kneeling protests?

After “Squabble Up,” Jackson popped up to excoriate Lamar: “Too loud, too reckless, too ghetto — Mr. Lamar, do you really know how to play the game?” It was both jeer and caricature. And so Lamar followed with “Humble.,” during which his dancers — outfitted in red, white and blue tracksuits — took on the formation of the American flag.

At the top of the set, Lamar warned, “The revolution ’bout to be televised — you picked the right time but the wrong guy.” But broadly speaking, though Lamar nodded to these larger struggles, he mostly limited his passions to his most personal one. This was one of music’s biggest stages, freed up for vendetta.

At least one person who was part of the halftime show had a different idea of how to use the performance to advance an agenda. Toward the end of the set, he pulled out a banner combining the flags of Palestine and Sudan that featured a heart and a fist. Was this part of the performance, another level of commentary woven into a show already packed with it?

In footage captured from inside the stadium but not broadcast, that individual was chased off the main stage just a few seconds after whipping out the flag. He ran around the field for a spell before he was tackled by a coterie of security guards in suits and carried off the field. That revolution, at least, would not be televised.