Samuel L. Jackson’s Uncle Sam had just praised Kendrick Lamar for giving America something “nice and calm” at the 2025 Super Bowl halftime show. Then Lamar launched into “Not Like Us,” his diss track aimed at Drake.
Jackson played the authority figure throughout Lamar’s roughly 13-minute performance at the Caesars Superdome in New Orleans on February 9, 2025. After SZA joined Lamar for “Luther” and “All the Stars,” Jackson delivered his approval: “That’s what America wants! Nice and calm. You’re almost there, don’t mess this…”
Lamar had already teased the song with a reference to Drake’s defamation lawsuit: “I wanna play their favorite song, but you know they love to sue.” When he performed it, Serena Williams joined the show with a Crip Walk. Lamar kept most of the track’s barbs while censoring its most explicit line.
The confrontation with Uncle Sam ran through a show framed as “the Great American Game.” During “HUMBLE,” dancers dressed in red, white, and blue formed a divided American flag. Lamar invoked reparations with “Forty acres and a mule / This is bigger than the music.”
That staging gives the performance its resonance as an Election Day image: an American authority figure setting the terms for a Black performer, and that performer choosing what to say on a national stage.
Lamar was the first solo rapper to headline the Super Bowl halftime show. He finished his set with “TV Off.”