Kendrick and SZA: Like seeing Prince and Madonna together in their prime

Telegraph

5 days ago

Imagine if Prince and Madonna had toured together in their prime, duetting and interacting over two-and-a-half hours of blockbuster, hi-tech stadium entertainment. In contemporary terms, that is the scale this superstar double bill represents, bringing together Kendrick Lamar, modern pop's most gifted rapper, with SZA, alternative R&B's most sassy and emotive singer-songwriter.
Yet even that Prince-Madonna comparison doesn't really do justice to the almost polar disparity between these two stars. They are so stylistically different, it is more akin to seeing a young Bob Dylan attacking his wordiest epics while Tina Turner shimmies around bringing showbiz heat.
Lamar is fierce, dark, stark and serious, an outrageously gifted wordsmith with an undercurrent of socio-political anger whose dazzlingly supreme rap skills have carried him to the top in a genre built on battling.
He has the intensity and flow of Eminem combined with the depth and righteous charisma of Tupac Shakur, and a certain cerebral artiness that is all his own. His parts of the set were styled in shades of concrete, imposing visions of black, white and grey projected on to giant screens with a Soviet era quality of gloomy brutalism, his grey-uniformed dancers performing rigidly militaristic choreography.
SZA, by contrast, is soft-edged and richly musical, with a fluttery high voice and sensuous persona that only slightly cushion the sharp lyrical stabs of her frequently rather rude songs about the travails of modern dating.
Her biggest hit, Kill Bill, is a deceptively sweet nursery rhyme about murdering her ex, and it appeared to have every woman in Tottenham Stadium singing along in sympathetic delight. Screens burst with the colours and images of nature every time SZA appeared, bringing much-needed relief after Lamar's visual austerity.
Lamar can be easier to admire than to love and benefited hugely from the lightness that SZA brought to his shade. Uncharacteristically, he could even be seen smiling during their frequent, flirty duets – half a dozen songs in a cleverly designed set that underlined their contrasting personalities with bold stage design, while pyrotechnics turned the sky above the stadium black with smoke.
SZA was accompanied by a live band, though they remained hidden behind giant LED screens, a sign of how far actual musicians have fallen down the pecking order in pop performances. Like most rappers, Lamar stuck rigidly to pre-recorded backing tracks which restricted spontaneity. The stadium sound was a challenge – all booming bass, thin drums and echoing vocals: if you didn't already know every lyric, Lamar sometimes came across as a tiny figure snapping rhythmically but unintelligibly in the centre of a huge roaring crowd. But it all went off spectacularly for his biggest hits, including a version of his brutal put-down of superstar rapper Drake, Not Like Us, that was so loud one fears Drake himself might have been able to hear it from Birmingham, the latest stop on his own UK tour.
In an era of overpriced live entertainment, the Grand National tour, as this spectacular is being billed, offers plenty of bang for your buck. Lamar may be the higher-ranking superstar, but SZA brought more in terms of musical variety, character and spontaneity, and could count on the singalong support of her devoted female fans to tip the balance in her favour. I am not saying she stole the show, but she made it all go down so much sweeter than Lamar ever could have managed on his own.
What unlikely team-up can we expect next? After all, as Noel and Liam Gallagher are currently proving, you don't even have to like each other much to share a stage.