Kendrick Lamar’s smash “Not Like Us” has been a whole lot of issues since its launch lower than a 12 months in the past: a Drake-slaying diss monitor, a No. 1 single, a West Coast unity anthem, a Kamala Harris rally singalong, a World Sequence battle music, a bar mitzvah dance flooring party-starter.
On the Grammys over the weekend, it swept all 5 of its nominations, together with music and file of the 12 months, changing into solely the second rap monitor ever to win in every class, whereas additionally taking dwelling trophies for finest rap music, finest rap efficiency and finest music video.
Every week after these victories, “Not Like Us” — with its one billion performs on Spotify and at the very least a whole bunch of hundreds of thousands extra throughout radio, YouTube and social media — could attain its final peak: a efficiency on Sunday for some 100 million individuals, dwell from the Tremendous Bowl halftime stage in New Orleans.
An informal listener — or Tremendous Bowl viewer — could hear an simply digestible crowd-pleaser. A preferred rapper, recognized for knotty introspection, going playful over a spacious, bouncy beat by the producer Mustard, punctuated with sped-up stabs of strings and an all-purpose, simply co-opted chant of a refrain: “They not like us.”
In lots of senses an inescapable, old style hit, “Not Like Us” was instantly absorbed into the cultural bloodstream, the place it has remained ever since, holding sturdy within the Billboard High 40 in its thirty eighth week since launch. However whereas the music’s mega-success can by now be taken with no consideration, it additionally occurs to be extremely weird.
The music’s specifics, and its omnipresence, characterize a major swerve for Lamar, 37, who till just lately was recognized primarily as one of the vital revered M.C.s of all time: a Pulitzer Prize winner with a sterling profession whose 2015 monitor “Alright” was adopted as an anthem of the Black Lives Matter motion.
But on “Not Like Us,” he spends 5 minutes calling Drake, 38, the most well-liked rapper of the final decade, a pedophile, together with a “jabroni,” a “69 god” and a “colonizer.” The only’s cowl artwork is a photograph of Drake’s Toronto dwelling dotted with markers meant to characterize the presence of registered intercourse offenders. (Drake has since sued Common Music Group, the large label behind each rappers, for defamation, arguing that the corporate knew these claims had been false however pushed the music onerous regardless.)
Throughout three more and more intricate verses, Lamar cites obscure members of Drake’s Canadian rap crew by nickname; offers a pocket historical past of Los Angeles slang and Atlanta’s exports (each musical and in any other case); and makes a punny playground taunt of an unlikely hook that even the Grammy viewers of A-listers couldn’t assist however rap together with: “Ain’t you drained? Tryna ring a bell and it’s in all probability A-minoooooooooor.”
Born out of a messy few weeks of back-and-forth with Drake — Lamar’s one-time collaborator and frenemy turned archrival, who made his personal tawdry allegations in raps — “Not Like Us” would have been a unicorn of a success for any artist.
However for Lamar, who has made a profession of questioning and reinforcing his personal high-minded popularity, the music’s singularity in his catalog raises prickly questions on how he would possibly deal with “Not Like Us” transferring ahead — and particularly this weekend, as he prepares to headline the halftime present, the form of legacy-cementing second solely a handful of musicians can hope to realize.
Will the diss, which has featured in promos for the Apple-sponsored efficiency, be the centerpiece of the present, leaning additional into mass mockery of Drake? Or will Lamar decrease its function — and even elide it completely — both out of an abundance of authorized precaution, a concession to the occasion’s company companions, or an aversion to sharing the stage, even spiritually, together with his enemy?
Extra typically, what’s going to Lamar’s dealing with of “Not Like Us” on the Tremendous Bowl imply for the remainder of its musical life span, which might simply finish in it changing into the defining, hottest and most awarded music of the celebrated rapper’s profession?
To lifelong rap followers, even contemplating these questions borders on the baffling — akin to imagining previous vitriolic, subterranean classics like Ice Dice’s “No Vaseline,” Tupac’s “Hit ’Em Up” or Nas’s “Ether” as inescapable, mainstream hits.
“It’s by far the largest diss file of all time,” mentioned Charlamagne Tha God, the radio and tv host finest recognized for his syndicated morning present, “The Breakfast Membership.” “There’s not even a debate about that. It’s larger than ‘Hit ’Em Up’ ever was, extra culturally related than ‘Ether’ ever was — it led to an unprecedented lawsuit from the person who it was focused at.”
“There’s a distinction between hit information and anthems,” he added. “You’ll be able to take into consideration a whole lot of hit information, however what number of cultural anthems are there that transcend race, the style of music, area, something? Not many. ‘Not Like Us’ is a cultural anthem. Paradoxically, it’s going to finish up on Kidz Bop.”
It’s not that Lamar hasn’t had an enormous music earlier than. Tracks like “Humble” and “All of the Stars,” with SZA, who’s scheduled to seem on the Tremendous Bowl as a particular visitor forward of a joint tour, are each in style and recognizable, every topping two billion performs on Spotify.
However it’s price recalling the place Lamar appeared headed earlier than he and Drake goaded each other into battle: deeper inward.
An underground mixtape artist till his lauded major-label debut, “good child, m.A.A.d metropolis,” revitalized L.A. gangster rap in 2012, Lamar favored complexity on the jazzy, looking out follow-up, “To Pimp a Butterfly,” in 2015, earlier than balancing storytelling and business hitmaking on “Rattling.,” which went on to win the Pulitzer for music in 2018.
His 2022 launch, “Mr. Morale & the Huge Steppers,” nonetheless, was an idea album about remedy, trauma and therapeutic that earned Lamar the bottom gross sales and streams of his mainstream profession. When not on tour, he tended to lie low, ducking most any highlight.
Final March, when he resurfaced with a boisterous, focused visitor verse on “Like That,” by Future and Metro Boomin, Lamar was hinting at one thing completely different. (He had famously poked the proverbial hip-hop bear again in 2013, with a verse on Huge Sean’s “Management,” wherein Lamar referred to as out rappers by title, together with Drake, as lackluster competitors.)
However it wasn’t till the guts of his back-and-forth with Drake, wherein Lamar launched 4 diss tracks in 5 days — culminating within the knockout blow of “Not Like Us” — that the rapper flipped his public persona and popularity as a considerably reluctant hitmaker.
Elliott Wilson, the journalist and podcaster who beforehand edited XXL Journal, referred to as it one thing of a “profession reset — he constructed mystique, however now he simply appears like extra ‘man of the individuals.’”
Lamar had beforehand tended to shrug off such a mantle. When “Alright,” from “To Pimp a Butterfly,” grew to become a protest chant, he by no means leaned into the eye, opting to stroll silently and camouflaged in just a few protests with out commenting on his music’s significance. On “Household Ties,” in 2021, he rapped: “I been duckin’ the social gimmicks / I been duckin’ the in a single day activists, yeah / I’m not a trending subject, I’m a prophet.”
He has been extra wanting to stir up “Not Like Us.” At his “Pop Out” live performance in Los Angeles on Juneteenth, Lamar carried out the music 5 occasions in a row, flanked by a coalition of California rappers, athletes, entertainers and others who would possibly in any other case be rivals.
“He breathed new life into the West Coast,” mentioned E-40, the veteran Bay Space rapper who, together with the late L.A. artist Drakeo the Ruler, gives an apparent touchstone for the hyper-regional sound of “Not Like Us.”
“I don’t recall a music that captured the younger, previous and in between like that in a few years,” he mentioned. “It hit the golf equipment so robust and so they don’t even have a look at prefer it’s about Drake.”
Within the context of final 12 months’s battle, the music’s tribal messaging is a knotty touch upon Blackness, regionalism and authenticity from the Compton-born Lamar, addressing a foe who’s biracial, Canadian and Jewish (in addition to a former baby actor). However out on this planet, its “us vs. them” ethos has been extra broadly interpreted.
Asi Vidal, an occasion D.J. based mostly in Los Angeles, mentioned in an interview that “Not Like Us” was among the many most requested bar mitzvah songs final season — assured to whip up a mosh pit of 13-year-old boys who would shout together with each lyric, as with “Fein” by Travis Scott and Playboi Carti or Sheck Wes’s fashionable jock-jam “Mo Bamba.”
Then, Vidal mentioned, “just a few songs after, they’d nonetheless request songs by Drake.”
Lamar, in his first public feedback after the music’s launch, mentioned in a dialog with SZA for Harper’s Bazaar that “Not Like Us” was about “the kind of man I characterize,” one who “has morals, he has values, he believes in one thing, he stands on one thing. He’s not pandering.”
He added, “I don’t imagine I’m an offended particular person. However I do imagine in love and battle, and I imagine they each have to exist.”
These themes — and the West Coast bounce of “Not Like Us” — carried over onto “GNX,” the album Lamar launched in November, which has spawned hits like “Squabble Up” and “TV Off” that share the pugnaciousness of their religious predecessor with out the Drake-centric particulars.
Might they stand in for “Not Like Us” on the Tremendous Bowl, possibly after a style of the diss monitor’s identifiable beat and unobjectionable refrain? Medleys, in any case, are frequent within the 15-minute slot.
“Kendrick actually wins if he ignores Drake through the Tremendous Bowl,” mentioned Too Brief, one other West Coast rap legend. “If he has to deal with Drake, I feel it’s too heavy on his thoughts.”
Charlamagne agreed. “The fact of the scenario is, he received the battle. ‘The 48 Legal guidelines of Energy’ teaches you to not go previous the mark you aimed for in victory,” he mentioned. “Once you win the Grammy, that’s spiking the soccer. You already bought the Tremendous Bowl — that’s spiking the soccer. I feel there’s a level the place you gotta put it to mattress.”
Notably, in his Grammy acceptance speeches, Lamar shunned even alluding to his music’s topic.
Nonetheless, Tremendous Bowl performances have typically succeeded with simply the correct amount of headline-hungry controversy. In a world after Janet Jackson’s “wardrobe malfunction,” M.I.A.’s center finger and Eminem’s pointed kneeling — throughout a 2022 halftime efficiency for which Lamar made a cameo — each offered some frisson with minimal freak outs.
Might a fastidiously executed pedophile joke land with the widest potential viewers solely 20 years after a naked breast triggered a world scandal?
“On the finish of the day, take out the entire loopy accusations in it, it’s only a very infectious hit file and we love hit information,” Wilson mentioned.
And no matter how Lamar performs it, there could also be no getting back from the artist he has turn out to be on the again of “Not Like Us.”
“I feel it’s a brand new path, and he’s loving it,” Wilson added. “I don’t suppose he goes again to this creative cave — at the very least for the subsequent 12 months.”