Kendrick Lamar Super Bowl halftime show 2025: All the surprise guests and setlist in full
Kendrick Lamar gave a showstopping halftime performance at the 2025 Super Bowl that celebrated hits old and new while featuring a slew of famous faces.
Dressed in a leather sports jacket, jeans and a backward cap, the 37-year-old Grammy-winning rapper took the field on Sunday to deliver a high-energy concert.
Before he took the stage, though, he was introduced by Oscar-nominated actor Samuel L. Jackson dressed as Uncle Sam. The Pulp Fiction actor stayed throughout the show to introduce each segment.
Lamar was later joined by his longtime collaborator and R&B singer SZA to deliver renditions of their songs 'luther' and 'All the Stars.'
Toward the end of the rapper's performance, the cameras panned to his backup dancers, which featured an unexpected cameo from tennis superstar Serena Williams. Williams and Lamar's rap nemesis Drake were rumored to have been romantically linked after they were seen kissing in 2015.
His setlist included a number of the newest hits from his latest GNX album, as well as a couple of his past bops, such as his 2017 track 'HUMBLE.'
Still, he couldn't close out his set without finally giving fans what they wanted: a taste of his chart-topping Drake diss track, 'Not Like Us.'
After teasing it a few times, saying: 'I want to perform their favorite song, but you know they love to sue,' Lamar finally gave in and performed it as his penultimate song; but not without a few changes.
In the original recording, Lamar references Drake's 2021 album, rapping: 'Certified Lover Boy? Certified pedophile.' But during the halftime performance, Lamar omitted the word pedophile as well as the n-word throughout.
Lamar was also joined onstage by his "Not Like Us" producer, DJ Mustard. Fans of the performance included Ben Stiller who shared on X: 'Best Halftime show ever..'
You can find Lamar's set list in full below:
- 'wacced out morals'
- 'Bodies (GNX snippet)'
- 'Squabble Up'
- 'HUMBLE.'
- 'DNA.'
- 'Euphoria'
- 'Man at the Garden'
- 'peekaboo (feat. azchike)'
- 'luther (with SZA)'
- 'All the Stars (with SZA)'
- 'Not Like Us'
- 'tv off (feat. lefty gunplay)'
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Mike Carson made the backdrops for school plays. Mountains, villages, flat and colorful, that sort of thing. He also ran the lights. He was a tech guy in school theater. He played football at Plainfield North High School, but at heart, he was a theater kid. Even now, living in Los Angeles, he heads to the theater whenever he can. As a child, his parents often took him to Chicago theater. That stuck in surprising ways. So much so, you are familiar with Mike Carson's work even if you don't know him by name, or thought of that work as theatrical. Carson, now the creative director at pgLang in Los Angeles, is one of Kendrick Lamar's longtime production designers and creative partners. 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But he also mingles with images reminiscent of 'The Last Supper' and sculptor Augusta Savage, Los Angeles car culture and the great contemporary collagist Lauren Halsey; the tour uses seven of her assemblages of Black archival images, street advertising and neon colors, blowing them up big enough to stretch across Soldier Field and superimposing Lamar into the mix. A few years ago, when Lamar headlined Lollapalooza, he performed against large lo-fi backdrops of Black friends and family, made by the contemporary painter Henry Taylor. Lamar's shows are big on motifs. For this tour, it's a 1987 Buick Grand National GNX, the same one that was the focus of the half-time performance. 'We've been rolling with that car since the Super Bowl,' Carson said, 'only now its retooled from that, where it was basically a clown car.' Car collectors may flinch. 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