Less than a year after setting off a rap beef of epic proportions, Kendrick Lamar used the Apple Music Super Bowl 2025 halftime show to settle the score by concluding with “Not Like Us,” the Drake diss track that turned into a pop hit.
“Say Drake, I hear you like ‘em young,” he said, going into the verse that led Drake to sue Lamar’s record label, Universal Music Group. The crowd erupted into a cheer when he sang “tryna strike a chord, and it’s probably A Minor,” the same line that garnered the biggest response during his Grammys 2025 performance last Sunday. During the song, the camera cut away to fellow Compton native Serena Williams doing the C walk.
On stage atop a Buick GNX, a reference to the title of Lamar’s most recent album, he played its first two songs “Wacced Out Murals” and “Squabble Up.” Before launching into “Not Like Us,” he teased it in a back and forth with a few of his dancers. “Hey ladies, I wanna play your favorite song,” he said. “But you know they love to sue.” About halfway through the show, he was joined by SZA, and together they performed “Luther” and their Grammy-winning Black Panther collaboration, “All The Stars.”
An overtone of patriotism anchored the set, which was made to resemble a video game controller. Lamar was flanked by dancers wearing red, white, and blue, and the show was narrated by Samuel L. Jackson in costume as Uncle Sam. “Mr. Lamar, do you really know how to play the game? Then tighten up!” he said, before the opening moments of “HUMBLE.” from Lamar’s 2018 album DAMN.
The inclusion of the lines dissing Drake on the nation’s biggest stage is a sign that the feud isn’t going anywhere. For about a decade, Lamar and Drake were considered rivals for the title of “best commercially successful millennial rapper,” but their personal relationship was seemingly fine. All that changed in March 2024, when Lamar used a guest verse on “Like That” by Future and Metro Boomin to dismiss Drake and J. Cole as his competition. It’s not the “big three,” he said, “it’s just big me,” a response to Drake’s track “First Person Shooter,” on which Cole raps, “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. / But right now, I feel like Muhammad Ali.”
Lamar’s verse set off a tit-for-tat that continued through the spring, eventually giving way to disses about their personal lives with increasingly controversial and specific allegations. On May 4, Lamar all but ended the battle when he released “Not Like Us,” which takes aim at Drake in a package so catchy it raced to the top of the Billboard Hot 100. Last weekend, Lamar took home the coveted Grammy Awards for song and record of the year, entering the track into the history books.
Lamar was announced as the halftime performer back in September, and the beef between the rapper and his rival was a focus as the night drew closer. But over the last few days, politics started to intervene. On Tuesday, a spokesman for the Secret Service announced that President Donald Trump planned to attend the game. On the same day, the NFL announced that it planned to remove the slogan of its “End Racism” campaign from the end zone, replacing it with “Choose Love.” Though Lamar is generally a politically outspoken artist, he avoided any more overt political comments in his set.
