I don’t care about the Super Bowl because I’m neither American nor a sports fan, but you can bet I sat my butt down on the couch to watch Kendrick Lamar’s halftime performance as it happened. As a lifelong enjoyer of hip hop, a Kendrick fan and, above all, a hater who loves to see other haters win, I’ve been waiting for this performance since it was announced.
I’ve already written about the Kendrick-Drake feud on this website, if you can believe it. Leave it to me to find a way to loop gaming into rap beef.
I didn’t even have to try all that hard to find a reason to write about this performance, because Lamar placed it into the palms of our greedy gamer hands. Kendrick’s halftime show was a dizzying affair, chock full of references to, of course, his beef with Drake, but also the state of America, with its freshly inaugurated President in the audience. Weirdly enough, it also made a couple of nods to PlayStation and gaming in general.
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Kendrick Lamar’s PlayStation Easter Egg Was A Huge Surprise
Lamar is known for his lyricism, with songs layered with multiple meanings and heavy themes. The man has a Pulitzer Prize, so it surprised absolutely nobody that his show was full of Easter uncEggs.
Samuel L Jackson played Uncle Sam (or was that Uncle [Tom], Sam?), his dancers were all dressed in colours of the American flag (and formed it, at one point, before pointedly dividing and collapsing it), and he said early in the performance, “The revolution is about to be televised, you picked the right time but the wrong guy.” It could not more obviously have been an act of protest on national television, and an incredibly polished and creative one, at that.
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But among all that was a direct reference to PlayStation. If you didn’t catch it on first watch, I don’t blame you – I didn’t either, since there was so much going on, and my eyes were glued to Lamar. From the very start, we see stages built to match the buttons on a PlayStation controller: the square, triangle, cross, and circle. We also see lights in the crowd spelling out three messages throughout the performance: START HERE, WARNING WRONG WAY, and GAME OVER, all of which are phrases you might see in games.
Samuel L Jackson also references games multiple times. He opens with, “This is the great American game.” He later asks Lamar, “Do you really know how to play the game?” He says bringing your “homeboys with you” is the “old culture cheat code”, then asks the “scorekeeper” to “deduct one life”.
All of this is, in typical Kendrick fashion, easily reinterpreted depending on the context you read them in. Is it all about the rap beef? Is it all a political statement? Does Lamar really like video games? All of the above, probably.
We know it was intentional, too. In an in-depth interview with Wired, the show’s art director Shelley Rodgers revealed that the video game concept came directly from Lamar. In her opinion, the theme was “symbolic, his way to reach young people”, and that it was “showing his journey, traveling through the American dream”.
The motif was fairly subtle on purpose – creative director Mike Carson said that director Dave Free and Lamar wanted to keep things “clean and minimal”, so the team “went with a monochromatic concrete look and allowed the video game motif to come alive through dialogue, lighting, choreography, and music”.
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But Why The Motif At All? And Did PlayStation Know?
I can’t say that I found the show to have a particularly video game-y vibe apart from the dialogue, but I’m not a Pulitzer Prize winner, so maybe I just don’t get it. Maybe Lamar was referencing the hero’s journey that many video game protagonists embark on. Maybe he was referencing fighting games, because he was beating the hell out of Drake’s ego on stage. Maybe he’s saying that life is just a big game and to have fun with it.
It’s probably none of these things. The motivation really is inscrutable to me.
A cynic like me can’t help but wonder if PlayStation knew that its iconic button layout would be used in one of the most highly anticipated Super Bowl performances of all time, and even if it paid for it to be used. Then again, Drake’s OVO label is partnered with Sony, so it could be part of the “you know they love to sue” line aimed at Drake’s lawsuit. And, considering the performance was so blatantly political, I’m not sure any massive game corporation would want to be associated with that, because they’re not exactly known for taking moral stances on anything. Also, PlayStation is a Japanese company, so…
And if you’re particularly gamer-brained, you might even say that Lamar’s decision to use the PlayStation controller over Xbox’s ABXY layout might be a definitive bell-ringer on the console war. I don’t know, if rap’s MVP picked my opp over me on national television, I’d call it a day and tap out. Either way, it looks like Kendrick Lamar might be a gamer. Who would’ve guessed?
PlayStation 5
- Brand
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Sony
- Operating System
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Orbis OS
- Storage
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1 TB NVMe SSD
- VR Support
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Yes, PS VR2
- Resolution
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720p – 8K
- App Store
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PlayStation Store