Super Bowl LIX pregame music was easier to love than Kendrick Lamar’s halftime show

Fully appreciating Kendrick Lamar’s Super Bowl LIX halftime show required an intimate knowledge of his mindset and music, and the willingness to dig deeper.

Fully appreciating the New Orleans-centric pregame show required nothing more than ears.

Rap mogul Jay-Z’s Roc Nation has curated the Super Bowl pregame and halftime music since 2020, when the NFL acted on the need to freshen up the entertainment that frames the game.

Lamar, the latest product of the Roc Nation/NFL alliance, self-edited his lyrics Sunday at the Caesars Supedome. Everyone onstage was modestly attired.

But as the first rapper to headline a Super Bowl halftime show on his own (singer and collaborator SZA joined in briefly), he was bound to be polarizing.

And he was.

The Pulitzer Prize-winner from Compton, California, is not about club-shaking beats and mass-appeal hooks. He’s a storyteller. At the Super Bowl, he told stories within stories – but mostly to his own audience.

‘Squid Game’ and Drake

Enlisting Samuel L. Jackson as the show’s “Uncle Sam” narrator set the tone. Dancers costumed in red, white or blue formed a symbolic, ever-changing American flag. The set’s streetlamps, The Athletic noted, came with their own inner-city symbolism of danger after dark.

The Buick Grand National parked onstage obviously referenced a similar muscle car, the Buick GNX; “GNX” is the title of Lamar’s 2024 album.

But anyone unfamiliar with Lamar’s beef with rival rapper Drake – or who has never seen Netflix’s hit dystopian South Korean drama series “Squid Game” – missed much of the show’s subtext.

The circle, triangle, square and x shapes of the individual stages on the Caesars Superdome field recalled a Sony PlayStation console. They also evoked masks worn in “Squid Game,” in which poor contestants compete in games of life or death.

Jackson’s narration set up the “Great American game” – another “Squid Game” reference, or simply a narrative device to frame the whole show as a video game.

The “Game Over” message that flashed in the stands may have referenced the same things – or Lamar declaring himself the winner in the Drake feud.

Lamar’s diss track “Not Like Us,” one of 2024’s omnipresent songs, trolls Drake and his crew as pedophiles. It won Grammys for record and song of the year.

When Lamar arrived at “Not Like Us” in the Superdome, he left out the word “pedophile” but kept the wordplay about “tryna strike a chord but it’s probably A-minor.” An A-minor chord versus “a minor” – get it?

Was the lower-case “a” Lamar wore around his neck a reference to the “a minor” line? Or did it refer to the similar “a” in the logo of Lamar’s production company, pgLang?

Tennis superstar Serena Williams was once an object of Drake’s obsession. Lamar inviting Williams to “Crip-walk” – a dance step popularized in Compton that she previously performed at the 2012 Olympics – at halftime was likely another dig at Drake.

All of which shows that Lamar and his team put a lot of thought into a halftime show that was vibe-y, clever and bold.

It also excluded a lot of viewers.

At the 2023 Super Bowl in Los Angeles, Dr. Dre, Snoop Dogg, Eminem, Lamar and singer Mary J. Blige banged out one uptempo hit after another. Their Super Bowl-sized show offered enough in terms of star wattage and melodic hooks to keep even casual hip-hop engaged.

Lamar’s Super Bowl LIX presentation was destined to appeal to a much narrower audience.

NOLA in the house

By contrast, the pregame show was all about New Orleans energy and joy, which is much easier to appreciate.

The NFL took heat for not booking a New Orleans artist, specifically Lil Wayne, for halftime. Wayne ended up getting some Super Bowl airtime anyway by starring in a cheeky commercial with the tagline “we’re all a little sensitive.”

But to its credit, the Super Bowl went all-in on New Orleans during pregame and honored the victims of the Jan. 1 attack.

New Orleans native Ledisi – who will return to perform her Nina Simone tribute at the 2025 New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival – showcased all the power and beauty of her voice during a potent “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” backed by a New Orleans high school choir in yellow robes.

Troy “Trombone Shorty” Andrews came up with a swinging arrangement of “America the Beautiful.” It was framed by sousaphone and acoustic guitar and illuminated by his trombone and his pal Lauren Daigle’s sumptuous, sunny voice. Their version managed to be both respectful to the song and true to the spirit of Super Bowl LIX’s host city.

So, too, Jon Batiste’s national anthem, rendered on a piano that his wife, Suleika, painted with pastel silhouettes of butterflies. At the outset, Batiste triggered a sample of the “Triggerman beat,” a beat that is the bedrock of many New Orleans hip-hop and bounce recordings.

Late one night during Super Bowl week, Fox broadcasters Tom Brady, Michael Strahan and Terry Bradshaw joined Saints owner Gayle Benson and former Saints and current Broncos coach Sean Payton to film a video on Bourbon Street that opened the pregame show. They resolutely walked down Bourbon to a piano where Lady Gaga sang “Hold My Hand,” her ballad from the “Top Gun: Maverick” soundtrack.

After the video, the telecast cut to the Superdome. Piano prodigy turned movie and TV star Harry Connick Jr. welcomed viewers to his hometown, then handed off to New Orleans urban radio legend “Wild” Wayne Benjamin Jr.

Wild Wayne introduced a who’s who of New Orleans music and culture: much-celebrated Grammy-winning jazz trumpeter and composer Terence Blanchard. The Soul Rebels and the Original Pinettes brass bands. Southern University’s Human Jukebox marching band. Mardi Gras Indians. Percy “Master P” Miller, inserted into the mix for no apparent reason other than he’s Master P. Big Freedia.

The camera circled back to Connick, who was joined by New Orleans jazz lifers Leroy Jones on trumpet and Freddie Lonzo on trombone for “Go to the Mardi Gras” atop a “NOLA Strong” logo.

It was New Orleans writ large for a global audience.

And it felt more like a Super Bowl halftime show than the actual halftime show did.