Ahead of Kendrick Lamar's headline performance at the Super Bowl half-time show in New Orleans, we explore the rapper's journey from the unforgiving streets of Compton to pop culture ubiquity.

"I'm not sure why I'm infatuated with death?" ponders a fiery and fed-up Kendrick Lamar on fan-favourite song Sing About Me, I'm Dying of Thirst. Sounding like he's on his knees pleading to the man in the sky, the always-probing rapper finally answers his own question: "Maybe it's because I'm a dreamer and sleep is the cousin of death!"

The song considers how an inner-city experience within a racially-divided US tends to be based around constantly grappling with feelings of impending doom: a toxic cycle that's difficult to break free of. Filled with chest-deep empathy; a combination of hyper-animated lyrical perspectives (including a hopeless young man lost in gang activity as well as a sexually-abused girl damaged due to the foster care system); and an underlining morose wit, these raw, confessional lyrics signify why the Compton, Los Angeles rapper is regarded as one of hip-hop's greatest ever songwriters.

The esteemed North Carolina rap producer 9th Wonder – who composed arguably the 20-time-Grammy-winning MC's most experimental song with the three-act psychodrama of DUCKWORTH – told me back in 2023: "Kendrick Lamar is more like a documentarian than an MC. Kendrick chooses to rap about everything and everyone across the social strata. People might call it 'woke' or 'deep', but I think of it as straight-up reporting. Some rappers leave out a certain section of people in their lyrics, right? Well, Kendrick tries to rap from everyone's perspective."

The Pulitzer Prize-winning artist – who will perform as the half-time headliner for this Sunday's Super Bowl at the New Orleans Superdome, with R&B star SZA confirmed as a guest – is that rare artist capable of making you see through the eyes of a troubled soul searching for salvation (How Much A Dollar Cost? reimagines God as a homeless man on Skid Row; Auntie Diaries considers the struggles of a transgender relative).

He can also consistently create loose, trunk-rattling hood anthems (see Money Trees) that convert highly chantable regional slang terms into trending words. For example, aside from a brilliant DJ Mustard beat that sonically feels like a tank blasting out quaking g-funk basslines while riding out to war, it's fair to say Lamar's urgent 2024 single tv off also went viral due to the hilarious yet highly-meme-able way the lead artist screamed out the word: "Mustarrrrrrrrrddddddddddd!"

Such was the success of this moment that Heinz are releasing a limited run of condiments, essentially turning Lamar's battle cry ad-lib into a slogan to sell mustard for hot dogs. This illustrates how the artist has always been able to consistently juggle rapping about social injustice – even making a song with an earworm refrain ("We're gonna be alright!") that became an anthem for the global Black Lives Matter protest movement – with approval from corporate and mainstream America.

Lamar can stand up for women's rights on Glastonbury's Pyramid Stage one minute, then insinuate that rap rival Drake had relationships with underage women (something the Canadian artist denies) on a vicious but ubiquitous diss song, which followed a protracted feud between the two rappers, the next. Last weekend, Not Like Us won the 2025 Grammy for song of the year; meanwhile Drake has taken legal action against record label Universal Music over the track.

Lamar adopts different guises much like his hero Tupac Shakur, playing both preacher and soldier – giving weight to both Martin Luther King's pacifism (LOVE), but also Malcolm X's "by any means necessary" approach to politics (The Blacker The Berry). It is ultimately this duality and versatility that makes the artist the perfect choice for this Sunday's Super Bowl half-time show, says Marcus J Moore, the music journalist and author behind The Butterfly Effect: How Kendrick Lamar Ignited The Soul of Black America. "Sadly, there's still a segment of the [American] population that doesn't consider rap a viable genre........

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