The Subtle Drake Diss You Might Have Missed at Kendrick’s Super Bowl Performance
There may be more to the 2018 ‘Black Panther’ track “All the Stars” than we first thought.
It’s remarkable how many ways Kendrick has found to pound Drake’s face into the dirt since last March, and his headline slot at the Super Bowl LIX halftime show proved his bag of tricks is far from empty. There was Samuel L. Jackson, Black Hollywood’s narrator extraordinaire, making a cameo as Uncle Sam, goading Kendrick into playing “America’s game” with satirical respectability politics. There was the “Not Like Us” bomb, set off with a fourth-wall-shredding stare into the camera and the entirety of Caesars Superdome in New Orleans yelling “A-minooooooor!” There was Serena Williams, Compton’s tennis champion and former Drake flame, crip-walking on her ex’s grave. There was the chain with the lowercase “a” pendant, which doubles as both the logo for his PGLang creative house and another slick “A minor” reference. Every angle seemed to be covered—but the one that snuck up on me involved his redefinition of an otherwise middling soundtrack single.
I’ll admit that when the Kendrick-helmed Black Panther: The Album dropped back in 2018, “All the Stars” was one of the few songs I tended to skip. I know any album even loosely affiliated with billion-dollar companies like Marvel and Disney needs to make some plays for the cheap seats, but outside of Kendrick and SZA’s performances, that song is just cloying. But wedged near the end of the halftime set, right after the gossamer holy fire of “Luther” and right before the evisceration of “Not Like Us,” Kendrick’s opening verse on “All the Stars” hit a bit different than before. Is this song also about Drake?!
A surface-level read shows that it, like most other tracks from the Black Panther soundtrack, runs parallel to the story of T’Challa, the prince asserting his role as the new king of Wakanda and in opposition to his insurrectionist cousin Kilmonger. But hearing the verse in the context of the halftime performance—and of a rap cold war that was brewing for at least a decade—the barbs suddenly felt more pointed and targeted: “Tell me what you gon’ do to me/Confrontation ain’t nothin’ new to me/You can bring a bullet, bring a sword, bring a morgue/But you can’t bring the truth to me.” You can hear the disgust in his voice when he says “I hate those that feel entitled,” but also the sneering pride in five simple words that come a few bars later: “I don’t even like you.” The fact that SZA, another former Drake paramour, joined him to belt out her hook was another silver stake in the vampire’s coffin.
This is an unprecedented place for rap beef. Kendrick winning five Grammys for a diss track one week and then performing it on the biggest stage in America the next goes beyond Jay-Z putting Prodigy on the Summer Jam screen, or 50 Cent unearthing Rick Ross’ past as a corrections officer. It even eclipses Drake’s own systematic shakedown of Meek Mill. To be honest, I’m ready for all this hoopla to end so hip-hop can move on to something, anything, else. But I’m not naive enough to deny the inevitable. It’s impressive how far Kendrick’s gone to disgrace and dethrone rap’s long-running prom king and, with the recontextualization of “All the Stars,” gobsmacking to be reminded of how deep the animosity runs.
