Kendrick Lamar and SZA, pop's hottest pair, double up at MetLife Stadium on co-headlining tour: concert review
It's hard to come in on more of a roll than Kendrick Lamar and SZA did when they brought their Grand National Tour to MetLIfe Stadium in East Rutherford, New Jersey on Thursday night.
After all, their slow-jam joint 'Luther' has spent 11 weeks and counting at No. 1, becoming the longest-running chart-topper for both artists.
Both are also touring behind hot albums — his 'GNX' and her 'Lana' reissue of 'SOS' — that were released late last year.
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6 Kendrick Lamar and SZA intersperse their solo material and collaborations during their Grand National Tour.
Cassidy Meyers
And of course, Lamar —fresh off of winning the Record and Song of the Year Grammys for his epic Drake diss track 'Not Like Us' — headlined the Super Bowl, with SZA appearing as his special guest.
You might have expected that Lamar would headline again on this tour, with the 'Kill Bill' singer essentially serving as a opening act for the Pulitzer Prize-winning rapper. But this was a true co-headlining show in which the two performers alternated in separate acts, while also teaming up for some of their most notable collaborations, in a seamless flow of power-flexing.
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But as much as neither of them hardly needs to sit down and be humble, there were no egos. Just two stars sharing the spotlight, shining bright in the night.
Lamar hit the stage first to the 'GNX' opener 'Wacced Out Murals' and quickly turned things up with 'Squabble Up' and the 'To Pimp a Butterfly' banger 'King Kunta,' which was G-funkier than ever.
It was good to hear K-Dot dig into his earlier catalog with tracks that feel like classics now, which were missed during his Super Bowl set.
6 Kendrick Lamar showcased tracks from his latest album 'GNX' on the Grand National Tour.
Greg Noire
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In fact, some of Lamar's best moments came from his 2012 breakthrough 'Good Kid, M.A.A.D City.' 'Backseat Freestyle' got the stadium rocking old-school style, and 'M.A.A.D City' was smoothed out with the quiet-storm soul of Anita Baker's 'Sweet Love.' And the sequence of 'Bitch, Don't Kill My Vibe,' 'Money Trees' and 'Poetic Justice' — minus Drake's verse, of course—was a gangsta throwback for the O.G.'s.
Then there was 'Alright,' Lamar's Black Loves Matter anthem that had the crowd raising their fists in the air, regardless of their race. It was powerful to witness on a stadium magnitude.
Concertgoers might think it would be hard for SZA to keep up with Lamar. She doesn't have one 'Alright' or 'Not Like Us' in her catalog. But the Jersey girl more than held her own in her home state.
6 SZA performed songs from the 'Lana' reissue of her 'SOS' album on the Grand National Tour.
Cassidy Meyers
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Since the last time these two hit the road together — as Top Dawg Entertainment labelmates on 2018's The Championship Tour — SZA has come a long way as a live performer. She leveled up to new heights on her 'SOS' Tour in 2023.
Her singing — which has never sounded better than on Thursday night — and dancing have developed into a cool, confident style that is all her own. She's a vibe.
And the creative-direction upgrade from the 'SOS' Tour carried over here. Like Lamar — who has learned to use dancers and visuals to bigger stage effect without losing the core essence of who he is — SZA has figured out how to be SZA on a grander scale.
6 Kendrick Lamar performed hits such as 'Alright,' 'Humble' and 'Not Like Us' on the Grand National Tour.
Cassidy Meyers
6 Kendrick Lamar and SZA return to MetLife Stadium on Friday night for a second show on the Grand National Tour.
kendricklamar/Instagram
From 'Ctrl' faves 'Love Galore,' 'The Weekend' and 'Broken Clocks' — but no 'Drew Barrymore' — to 'SOS' hits 'I Hate U,' 'Kill Bill' and 'Snooze,' she was in complete control. So much so that she sold the less familiar 'Lana' tracks at the expense of 'Saturn.'
And, while surely no shade to Lamar, she even did her 2023 Drake collab 'Rich Baby Daddy.'
Of course, 'Not Like Us' was the moment everyone was waiting for — and it did not disappoint with dancers stepping in solidarity and colorful collages celebrating black culture. Lamar let the crowd do the rapping on the controversial 'certified pedophile' lyric and the 'A minor' line, and the whole stadium chanted the 'they not like us' mantra in the chorus.
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6 SZA was Kendrick Lamar's special guest when the rapper headlined the Super Bowl halftime show in February.
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But on this tour — which returns to MetLife Stadium on Friday night — some of the best, most special moments were when Lamar and SZA were together. After their first duet on '30 for 30' to introduce SZA, there was an act with the two of them — including 'Doves in the Wind,' 'All the Stars' and 'Love' — that showed just why they are the Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell, the Roberta Flack and Donny Hathaway, the Rick James and Teena Marie of their generation.
'All the Stars,' in particular, lit up the night with cell-phone flashlights as SZA and Lamar were elevated to the skies on their respective platforms during their 'Black Panther' bop. With their combined star power on dazzling display, it was all the feels.
And by the end, when the late R&B legend Luther Vandross crooned 'If This World Were Mine' on the 'Luther' encore, it felt as if the world was theirs.
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Chicago Tribune
an hour ago
- Chicago Tribune
Meet the former Chicago ‘theater kid' who stages Kendrick Lamar
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. If you're headed to Solider Field this week to see 'The Grand National Tour' featuring Lamar and SZA, know this: a lot of what you'll see is Mike Carson's ongoing collaboration with Lamar and Dave Free, childhood friends who cofounded pgLang in 2020 as an arts incubator that, according to its mission statement, speaks in music, podcasts, film, theater, books, TV, visual arts — 'because sometimes we have to use different languages to get the point of our stories across.' Next spring, they have a movie co-starring Lamar, made with Matt Stone and Trey Parker of 'South Park,' about a Black intern who plays a slave in a living history museum. But so far, their best-known production is the Super Bowl halftime show from February, the most watched halftime show in NFL history, a furious, petty, startling satire of American dreams, joys and contradictions. If its stage kind of looked like a PlayStation controller to you — that was the idea. Nothing about a Lamar performance is phoned in. Carson thinks of them as quasi-theatrical musicals. 'The music becomes the script and gives us an intention of how the show will flow the way it does,' he says. 'When we're conceptualizing, you might imagine us just throwing songs onto a board or images up on a board, then going from there, but there's a reason, or a narrative, or something underlying everything on that stage. Myself, I like some tension in there, but everything gets crafted, from the setlist to the color of the lights at one moment to why there are (dancers) on stage another moment. I definitely took that approach from going to plays.' Take the backdrops. Your average stadium concert is going to blow up the performer's image to Godzilla proportions, blending in bits of video and a lot of CGI surrealism — the DNA comes directly from the churning swirls of late 1960s concert psychedelia. With Lamar, not so much. Yes, he's gargantuan on those video screens; it is a stadium. 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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'Doing that kind of thing in arenas is a little easier,' Carson said. 'You can get more abstract, or you can be a little more theatrical. In a stadium, the expectation is for a spectacle and you think in terms of how three corners of a stadium are getting the same thing. But we can be subtle, we can — Kendrick's always willing to push things past a normal show.' One of the tour's indelible images involves Lamar simply sitting on steps, tens of thousands before him. Carson knows pop ambitions. He grew up in the western suburbs of Berkeley and Bellwood, then later moved to the Chicago neighborhood of Pilsen. He attended Columbia College for a time until meeting legendary Chicago fashion designer and Kanye West collaborator Virgil Abloh, who died in 2021. 'I basically dropped out after my first semester sophomore year and began working with Virgil and went on the whole 'Watch the Throne' thing with Kanye and Jay-Z, the album and the tour. I was documenting Kanye and Jay-Z. Virgil took a chance on me. For a few years, that was my college experience.' He remembers Abloh, no matter how any assistants were around him, often doing the work himself. Indeed, you could argue that Abloh's creative spirit is in 'The Grand National Tour,' in the blend of street clothing and stark minimalist staging, and in the way Lamar, Carson and Free make the familiar feel fresh, and how they somehow come off bold without forgetting to remain accessible. 'You want to be always forging a new way of doing this,' Carson said. 'That could mean our version of what concert choreography could look like. Or our version of what stage design can look like. Or Kendrick's interpretation of what a stadium concert could look like right now. How do you get your own distinctive visual language out? And how do you do it at the scale of a football stadium?'
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