How Kendrick Lamar’s Performances Led Him to the Super Bowl Halftime Show

Music|The World of Kendrick Lamar, in 6 Key Performances

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.

‘Bitch, Don’t Kill My Vibe’ video (2013)

Layering Comedy and Tragedy