At the 2025 Super Bowl Halftime Show, Kendrick Lamar showed precisely what he does. This year’s event was a high-stakes, high-energy masterclass reinforcing eyeballs in record-breaking totals.
According to Hip Hop All Day, this year’s Super Bowl broke records, drawing a staggering 126 million viewers on Sunday, making it the most-watched broadcast in the game’s history. Indeed, football purists will no doubt cite the exciting action unfolding on the field, but it’s hard to deny the cultural heavyweight Kendrick Lamar represented.
Whether by design or coincidence, two of the biggest stories in music at the end of last year were the ongoing, headline-dominating rap beef between Drake and Lamar and the mere agitation of anticipation surrounding an apparent power move by the latter. And in classic Kendrick fashion, he produced a spectacle.
Beginning with the first beat dropping and continuing, the Pulitzer Prize-winning artist presented a cohesive and narratively focused set highlighting his lyrical skill and paying tribute to his West Coast roots and artistic evolution. His choice to bring out SZA, his former TDE label mate, only added to the moment, solidifying the notion that hip-hop unity and narrative remain dominant.
Lamar’s facility for weaving social commentary with visual artistry and unvarnished performance energy came out in full force. Hip-hop has recently become the prime demographic at the Super Bowl, and Kendrick Lamar’s slyness in 2025 struck a different tingle.
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