Kendrick Lamar takes shots at Drake during Super Bowl announcement
There was no chance Kendrick Lamar was going to celebrate his confirmation as the headline act of the Super Bowl’s halftime show without taking a shot at his favoured target and arch-nemesis, Drake.
The beef between the two has been dominating the hip-hop discourse for months, and Lamar securing one of the most coveted performances in the pop culture consciousness has got to be a bitter pill to swallow for his rival, especially when he referenced the game in a recent track.
In Drake’s ‘First Person Shooter’, he compared himself as being as big as the Super Bowl all by himself, and the irony hasn’t been lost on anyone who’s been closely following the constant back-and-forth between the two popular artists.
As part of the official announcement, Lamar said the NFL “got the right one” to take to the field during halftime of the biggest game in American football, and it’s easy to infer that his self-confidence doubles as yet another shot being fired in Drake’s direction.
In the video that accompanied the big reveal, Lamar is seen participating in a practice session, where he shares the news and once again finds the time to take a subtle dig at Drake. “Will you be pulling up? I hope so! You know it’s only one opportunity to win a championship; no round twos,” he asked. “I wouldn’t want you to miss it. Meet me in New Orleans; February 9, 2025. Wear your best dressed, too, even if you’re watching from home.”
The “round twos” line has been interpreted as a dig at Drake, who hinted that he was preparing to instigate the next round of his headline-grabbing war of words with Lamar, when he shared a clip of former basketball star Rasheed Wallace from 2004, when he guaranteed his Detroit Pistons team would win the Eastern Conference Finals.
“Y’all can put it on the front page, back page, middle page, wherever, headliners, column one or two; we will win game two,” Wallace confidently proclaimed, which did admittedly come true. However, Lamar earning the Super Bowl spot at the height of their feud not long after Drake called himself bigger than the game means it isn’t difficult to read between the lines and assume his verbiage was very carefully and deliberately chosen.
Adding further fuel to the fire, the Grammys take place a week before the Super Bowl on February 2, where Lamar is expected to win big, particularly for Drake diss track ‘Not Like Us’.