On the opening Sunday of the new NFL season, it was announced that Kendrick Lamar will be the headlining performer of the iconic Super Bowl halftime show this year.
The announcement was made via a short video released on the rapper’s social media pages. In the video, Lamar stands at the 50-yard line of a football field, feeding a football passing machine while talking to a player who stands off-screen. Behind him is a giant American flag.
He introduces himself and announces that he’ll be performing at Super Bowl LIX. He then says, “Will you be pulling up? I hope so. You know there’s only one opportunity to win the championship. No round two’s. Let’s get it… I wouldn’t want you to miss it. Meet me in New Orleans… Wear your best dress too, even if you’re watching from home.”
At the end, he addresses the player who stands off-screen once more, saying, “Now we can get to it for real. You gotta make sure you catch it with your hands open like that. We running real routes, you gon’ be messing up.”
There’s a lot to unpack in the minute of content, but first, let’s start with some context. Last fall, Drake dropped his album “For All the Dogs.” The biggest hit from that album was a collaboration with J. Cole on the song “First Person Shooter,” which featured the now infamous lines “Big as the Super Bowl,” and “Love when they argue the hardest MC. Is it K-Dot? Is it Aubrey? Or me? We the big three like we started a league.” For years music fans have labeled Lamar, Cole and Drake the “big three” to distinguish them as the best three rappers of their generation.
It was made clear that Lamar took this as a challenge, as he responded with an electric feature verse on Future and Metro Boomin’s song, “Like That,” on which he completely rejects the idea of the big three, saying “It’s just big me.” He and Drake had been throwing subliminal disses at each other for years, but this was the spark that turned the beef into a worldwide talking point.
After around a month of silence, Drake finally responded with a song of his own, called “Push Ups,” taking shots at artists like Future, Metro Boomin, The Weeknd and Rick Ross, but clearly focusing most of his attention on Lamar.
11 days later, Lamar dropped his first full-length diss track on Drake, called “Euphoria,” followed shortly after by another, called “6:16 In L.A.”
Later that night, Drake released his second diss track, “Family Matters.” However, all of the attention was quickly diverted back to Lamar, when he dropped a third diss track, “Meet the Grahams,” within an hour of “Family Matters.”
By this point, the beef had reached a boiling point. The whole world was anxiously waiting to see who would strike next. The answer came the next day, when Lamar dropped his fourth diss track, “Not Like Us,” which would go on to be the most successful rap song of the year.
Drake tried to follow this up the next day with a third diss track of his own, called “The Heart Part 6,” but by that point, it was clear that the audience had made up their mind on who had won.
Even Drake seemed to realize he’d lost, removing “The Heart Part 6” from his social media shortly after and laying low for the next couple of months. Lamar had a victory lap of sorts over the summer, bringing together the most important West Coast artists to his “Pop Out” show in L.A. on Juneteenth, in which he performed “Not Like Us” six times. He also released a music video for the song on the 4th of July, which was loaded with more visual insults to Drake.
However, Drake recently started releasing music again. A few of the songs even had more sneak disses towards Lamar. He also put a clip on his social media of former Detroit Pistons player, Rasheed Wallace, saying, “Y’all put it on the front page, back page, middle of the page. We will win game two.”
This leads us to Sunday, where Lamar made a statement with his Super Bowl announcement. He wants to make it known who’s really “big as the Super Bowl.” He also made it clear by saying, “No round two’s,” that he’s not interested in exchanging more diss tracks all these months later.
Rappers Nicki Minaj and Birdman, who have famously had close relations with Drake, have been in shambles over the choice for Lamar to perform the halftime show. They’ve been taking aim at Jay-Z, who’s responsible for the Super Bowl halftime performances, claiming that they should’ve selected Lil Wayne to perform instead.
This is also an important moment for the NFL as an organization, as they’ve been accused of being racist in the wake of how they handled the Colin Kaepernick situation a few years back when he started the movement of kneeling during the national anthem to protest against police brutality. Lamar has famously been a figure who stands for social justice and protest for his whole career, so his endorsement of the NFL is not insignificant to their public perception.
Super Bowl LIX will take place on Feb. 9, 2025, in New Orleans. “Will you be pulling up? I hope so.”
