The World of Kendrick Lamar, in 6 Key Performances

New York Times

06-02-2025

Kendrick Lamar performs like someone parceling out a secret. On the 2015 single 'King Kunta,' he stage-whispers, 'I swore I wouldn't tell,' and then proceeds to flaunt industry gossip without naming names. Though the Grammy-hoarding, Pulitzer Prize-winning rapper has mastered literary opacity in his music — he's a generous user of perspective shifts and allusion — in videos and in live performances, Lamar's expressive stagings strike like visual poetry.
Lamar has scaled up those performances, becoming more elaborate as his platforms have grown in the 14 years since his recording debut. Dave Free, his primary creative partner and a collaborator on his visual presentations, has in the past attributed the rapper's mutability to what he called the roller coaster effect: 'You give people some type of variation, they can't get used to you. They can't put their finger on you. The more you keep people on their toes, the more interested they stay in you, for a longer period of time.' The zigzagging ride Free described is not unlike the sensory swerve of verse, especially Lamar's quirky couplets. Ahead of his performance at the Super Bowl halftime show on Sunday, and a planned stadium tour this spring, it's worth tracing how Lamar has visually explored intimate themes as his ambitions and career have expanded.
Layering Comedy and Tragedy
'Bitch, Don't Kill My Vibe,' the last single from Lamar's debut album, 'good kid, m.A.A.d. city'(2012), is his most straightforward exploration of a visual lament. 'I know you had to die in a pitiful vain, tell me a watch and a chain / Is way more believable, give me a feasible gain,' he chants in one verse. The song's video, directed by Lamar and Free, is set at a funeral, with the rapper joining a procession of mourners wearing white in a hike up a picturesque hill. Their destination? A party with a preacher played by the comic Mike Epps.
One of Lamar's most prominent motifs is his own haunting, his being spooked by loss and reminded of his own mortality. Elegies are featured throughout his discography. Lamar embodies a shooting victim in the video for 'Poetic Justice':
The video, inspired by the John Singleton-directed film of the same name, evokes the shocking nature of the senseless violence that is imprinted in Lamar's mind. In the clip for Flying Lotus's 'Never Catch Me,' on which Lamar is featured, children jump out of their caskets and dance:
Where the children try to escape their demise, Lamar runs toward his. 'Life and death is no mystery and I wanna taste it,' he raps. The gathering on the hill evokes Samuel Beckett: The lively burial is more like the scene inside a hot-spot, and the parishioners live the high life while contemplating heaven and hell, both exclusive clubs. A few albums later, Lamar would observe on the track 'Duckworth,' that God is 'a true comedian, you gotta love him.' Here, Lamar and Free begin to explore a visual grammar that matches lyrics that layer comedy and tragedy, the baroque and the bereft.
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Metamorphosis Under Duress
Performing 'i,' the self-affirming lead single from his second album 'To Pimp a Butterfly,' Lamar opts for a stark homage. His look — hair half braided in cornrows, half picked out in a wiry afro; black contact lenses …
… references Method Man's 'All I Need' video, in which Meth's blunted Odysseus searches for his love:
On 'Butterfly,' the rapper delves into the growing pains he experienced after the success of 'good kid': the culture shock of returning to his hometown Compton, Calif. to find that the family, friends and community he'd been rapping about on tour had changed, often for the worse, in his absence.
Plagued by survivor's guilt, anxiety and suicidal thoughts, Lamar channels those energies to convey the album's themes of metamorphosis under duress. Returning to the song's refrain, 'I love myself,' Lamar pantomimes a search for self-love, bobbing and weaving at the mic, his whole body coiled with the kinetic energy he unfurls as the segment goes on. He accents the music with offhand ad libs and affected bits of stage patter as sweat, spit and tears fly in an act of utter vulnerability. Lamar holds onto the mic stand like it's a lifeline, marking the song's maxim as the kind of bottom-of-the-well promise a struggling person grasps at. Dedicated to his incarcerated loved ones, 'i' gets at the idea of how crucial community can be to isolated people.
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Reversing the Middle Passage
Lamar was the most nominated artist at the 2016 Grammys, with 11 nods, and in his featured performance that night he wove Pan-African imagery through a medley that morphs across three different sets. Launching into 'The Blacker the Berry,' the rapper appears wearing prison blues, shackled to other men in a cellblock …
… before a black light reveals Lamar and his dancers' prison garb is striped with neon accents:
The set piece references Busta Rhymes's 'Put Your Hands Where My Eyes Could See' video (1997):
Like that clip's director, Hype Williams, known for his use of the fish-eye lens, Lamar is interested in the larger-than-life magnification of Black images. His lyrics compare the tribal fighting between the Zulu and Xhosa to that pitting Compton's Bloods and Crips against each other. As he segues into 'Alright,' Lamar, as a grizzled griot, moves in front of a large fire rapping alongside dancers and drummers until a darkened stage gives way to an illuminated cutout of Africa with the word 'Compton' written across it, as if a map has been mislabeled, or maybe corrected.
Lamar walks over to a third stage for 'Untitled 05,' a meditation on injustice from the perspective of a man jailed inside a private prison, and the TV cameras adjust to his rapid-fire delivery by jerkily switching perspectives to match his flow:
The whole thing is a dizzying throwback to the Black Arts Movement and the L.A. Rebellion, a cinematic project that unfolded at U.C.L.A., not far from where Lamar grew up. One artist who might appreciate that vision is the Ethiopian-born director Haile Gerima, who made a hypnotic, erratically edited film about an incarcerated Black woman that he cut to match his concept of the volatile rhythm of Black life.
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Exploring His God Complex
The visual for 'Humble,' from Lamar's third album 'DAMN,' opens with the rapper in papal attire, the first time he dons religious regalia himself, and a portent of the string of holy imagery that would come to mark much of his iconography.
After the record's phenomenal success — it earned him his first No. 1 hit on Billboard's Hot 100 chart, triple-platinum sales and a Pulitzer Prize — Lamar would further mine ecclesiastical presentation by rocking a diamond-encrusted crown of thorns in videos and shows for his next album, 'Mr. Morale & the Big Steppers.' For 'Humble,' directed by Lamar, Free and Dave Meyers, the video director best known for his work with Missy Elliott, Lamar and his friends sit at a 'last supper' in a scene that gives way to a cornucopia of startling images and haptic camerawork:
In a series of meme-able shots, whether it's his cornrowed head among a sea of hip-hop heads on fire, or a bevy of bald pates, Lamar is the fulcrum:
This blocking highlights his spot as one of rap's head honchos. But like Elliott, Lamar embraces absurd imagery as a way of taking himself less seriously. Here, he begins to process his ego, which he'd go on to fully deconstruct on 'Mr. Morale.'
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Interacting With Alter Egos
In the 'Mr. Morale & the Big Steppers' concert film, shot live in Paris and distributed by Amazon Prime, Lamar adopts a vaudevillian flourish — the rapper manipulates a ventriloquist's doll to perform alongside him. The doll is a tangible version of Mr. Morale, Lamar's righteous stand-in.
The Big Steppers embody diversions that enable Lamar to tap dance around difficult conversations. Other times, it seems Mr. Morale could be trying to grow in his humanity despite the Big Steppers' distractions. It's just one trick of many that Lamar uses to pull off the difficult task of bringing the album's introspective material to an arena stage.
Here, the elements of his stagecraft — the choreography, panoramic sound design — are bigger than ever, even as he uses props to play with scale. A huge translucent box, for example, briefly becomes a Covid-19 test site:
Spotlights and shadow puppetry demonstrate the album's preoccupation with inner turmoil and relationship repair. He plays to the swooping cameras, knowing when they're in for a close-up and, when he has space, to woo and wave them away. Or to give them his back. The effect recalls Michael R. Jackson's 'A Strange Loop,' as a protagonist interacts with representations of his own mind. At one point Lamar asks, 'Is anybody alive right now?' a loaded question that hangs over that pandemic-era project.
The concert is no longer available to stream on Amazon Prime Video.
Dropping Cryptic Easter Eggs
'Not Like Us,' the Drake diss track, has been one of Lamar's biggest career hits and an uncharacteristically straightforward statement: In its video and Lamar's Juneteenth 'Pop Out' concert, the line between his allies and his enemies is abundantly clear. But the video for 'Squabble Up,' a single from his new album 'GNX,' released last November, is Lamar at his most cryptic. Directed by Calmatic, the film director from South Central L.A., a world of action is contained in a single frame: a brightly-lit unfurnished room reminiscent of the one featured in The Roots's 'The Next Movement' (1999):
Both videos leave the fourth wall open to the audience, and to interpretation. 'Squabble Up' is an ode to conflict, but one with no directly targeted punches: Its jabs and barbs are left to the listener to parse. The video is similarly crafted for internet conspiracy theorists and message boards.
Tableaus change every few seconds, with new characters and set pieces streaming in and out, many of which nod to bits of West coast hip-hop culture. A kid on a tricycle wearing a cap backward …
… seems like a reference to the emotionally relentless 1993 drama 'Menace II Society':
That scene, which is also set in South L.A., foreshadows the death of the film's hero — the boy's playful pedaling prefaces a drive-by shooting.
In a different moment, a man appears dressed as Isaac Hayes on the cover of his 'Black Moses' album:
Later, Lamar squats next to a sidewalk candlelight memorial — to whom?
He could be mourning the state of the music industry, which he bemoaned on the September 2024 single 'Watch the Party Die.' He could be paying tribute to Drakeo the Ruler, the ascendant L.A. rapper killed in 2021. Drakeo rarely looked directly at the camera in his videos, preferring the oblique side-eyes and eye-rolls that Lamar adopts here. The effect marks him as both profuse and elusive, offering much but, ultimately, refusing capture.
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