Kendrick Lamar Performs Drake Diss Track “Not Like Us” at Super Bowl 2025 — With Slight Lyric Change
After a sweep of his categories during last week’s Grammy Awards, Kendrick Lamar brought his 2024 anthem “Not Like Us” to the 2025 Super Bowl halftime show.
The GNX rapper performed “squabble up,” “Humble,” “DNA,” “euphoria,” “man at the garden” and “peakboo” before teasing that he wants to “play their favorite song but you know they love to sue” — a reference to the Drake diss track “Not Like Us” and the current lawsuits surrounding the song. He decided against it, instead slowing it down, going into “luther” and “All the Stars” with Grammy Award-winning singer SZA.
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Fans have been speculating whether or not Lamar would perform the diss track during the NFL’s biggest stage. The 37-year-old rapper wasn’t too forthcoming about performance specifics ahead of the game at a pre-Super Bowl press conference on Thursday, but he did tell fans to expect a performance with “storytelling.” The Compton native had Samuel L. Jackson introduce the performance and brought out his producer Mustard to perform. It was previously confirmed that SZA would be joining in during the performance.
Finally, Lamar went into the chart-topping “Not Like Us.” The critically acclaimed song, released amid an ongoing feud with rapper Drake, is one of several diss tracks the rapper released against the Certified Lover Boy artist, including “euphoria,” which he also performed.
Sticking to the song’s original lyrics in the moment, Lamar called out Drake by name. He noticeably skipped over the use of “pedophiles” in the song but had the entire stadium screaming at full volume “Tryna strike a chord and it’s probably A minor.” Tennis superstar Serena Williams was also shown dancing in the performance. “I did not crip walk like that at Wimbledon,” the sports icon said in a video posted to X. “I would’ve been fined. It was all love.”
“Not Like Us” was one of 2024’s biggest hits, spending two weeks atop the Billboard Hot 100 and 20 weeks at No. 1 on the Hot Rap Songs chart. The song won all five of the Grammy Awards it was nominated for, including song and record of the year, transcending a simple diss track and becoming an international and cultural anthem. As The Hollywood Reporter’s Janeé Bolden put it, the recent achievement is “latest FAFO moment for the track’s intended target.” The song also recently crossed over a billion streams on Spotify and was inducted into the streamer’s Billions Club.
“Not Like Us” is at the center of a defamation suit from Drake against Universal Music Group, the parent record label to which he and Lamar are both signed. The new lawsuit claimed UMG “approved, published and launched a campaign to create a viral hit out of a rap track” that was “intended to convey the specific, unmistakable and false factual allegation that Drake is a criminal pedophile, and to suggest that the public should resort to vigilante justice in response.”
In November, Drake’s Frozen Moments company filed a petition in a New York court alleging that UMG “launched a campaign to manipulate and saturate the streaming services and airwaves with a song, ‘Not Like Us,’ in order to make that song go viral, including by using ‘bots’ and pay-to-play agreements.” Both Spotify and UMG refuted the claims, with the record label saying the allegations were “offensive and untrue.”
“UMG and Spotify have never had any arrangement in which UMG charged Spotify licensing rates 30 percent lower than its usual licensing rates for ‘Not Like Us’ in exchange for Spotify affirmatively recommending [‘Not Like Us’], including ‘to users who are searching for other songs and artists,’” the streamer said in a statement following the petition.
Lamar made his Super Bowl debut during the 2022 halftime show when he joined rap legend Dr. Dre and other titans of the rap and R&B world, including Eminem, Snoop Dogg and Mary J. Blige.
The Philadelphia Eagles defeated the Kansas City Chiefs 40-22 to win Super Bowl LIX.
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