Love it or hate it, the HOW of putting together the SuperBowl halftime show is a pretty remarkable story:
By
Ashley Wong
Feb. 10, 2025
Would he play it? The question hovered over the Super Bowl even after Kendrick Lamar had kicked off the halftime show.
The rapper knew exactly what his audience wanted to hear, teasing snippets from “Not Like Us,” his most famous diss track from a
nearly yearlong public “beef” with fellow rapper Drake. Audience anticipation crescendoed toward a climactic, thundering performance of the Grammy-winning song, featuring a dancing Serena Williams.
“We wanted this performance to have a cinematic and theatrical element to it,” said Dave Free, Lamar’s creative collaborator and co-founder of creative agency pgLang, in an interview ahead of the show. “We can confidently say that there’s no Super Bowl performance that’s quite like this one.”
A Pulitzer Prize winner, Lamar is the first rapper to headline a Super Bowl halftime show on his own, and his creative team wanted to make a statement with the historic performance. Free said the show was meant to evoke the Black experience in America. Samuel L. Jackson, the legendary actor, introduced the show dressed as Uncle Sam, and dancers dressed in red, white and blue formed an American flag in the middle of the field.
Lamar’s path to the Super Bowl stage began with a call from Jay-Z, Free said. As the NFL’s “live music entertainment strategist,” Jay-Z plays perhaps the biggest role in deciding who performs at the halftime show. In 2022, Lamar was part of a halftime medley with Dr. Dre, Snoop Dogg, Mary J. Blige and Eminem, performing hits like “Alright.” Free said he wasn’t sure Lamar would be asked to perform at the game again so soon, but “it felt like the right time for us.”
At least 1,000 people spent hundreds of hours working on the show, Free said, from crew members and production designers to people like choreographer Charm La’Donna, who oversaw 110 dancers, and head of wardrobe Karizza Sanchez. For inspiration, Free and Lamar watched every single Super Bowl halftime performance, drawing particular cues from Beyoncé, Prince and Michael Jackson’s headline shows.
Choreographer Charm La’Donna oversaw 110 dancers for the performance. Photo: Greg Noire
“The feel of it is Black America,” Free said of Lamar’s show. “What does Black America look like, and how to control that narrative of what it means to be Black in America versus what the world’s perspective of that is.”
That message threaded through details like wardrobe and choreography. Sanchez said Lamar wanted nods to Los Angeles and street culture, and less uniformity for background players.
“Everything has to be choreographed, even the unseen moments, with camera,” choreographer La’Donna said. “The performance is televised, but is also for the people in the audience, so every moment matters and it has to be right.”
Dancers rehearsing the flag formation for Lamar’s song “Humble.” Photo: Mike Carson
The Super Bowl halftime show is no ordinary live show: Production designers had to consider factors such as protecting the stadium grass from sets and making sure the air quality wouldn’t be adversely affected by special effects. To keep the weight of the sets light, designers used aluminum and steel frames.
“Our stages and scenic elements are all pushed into the stadium and onto the field by almost 500 stage hands,” said Bruce Rodgers, a production designer. Lamar’s performance marks Rodgers’s 19th Super Bowl halftime show, his first being 2007 when Prince headlined.
Every part of the set had to be assembled within eight minutes, Rodgers said. Any more than that, and the crew would be eating into precious airtime.
An hour before the first half of the game drew to an end, the stage hands, pushing carts filled with equipment weighing about 3,000 pounds, lined up outside the stadium. At the 2 minute warning, the crew began to haul the crates through the tunnels.
Designers were tasked not only with creating a dazzling display on the field, but also a show that could be taken in through dozens of strategic camera angles. Those watching at home may not see everything at once if the camera is close up on Lamar, Carson said, but on the flip side, those watching from high-up seats in the stadium may not catch the more intimate details.
“You’re kind of serving two masters, because it’s 60,000 people there that have paid top dollar and are expecting a spectacle and an experience,” Carson said. “On the flip side, you have millions of people that are watching at home, so you’re creating almost two shows.”
Free said the team wanted to feature songs that would make viewers curious to learn more about Lamar as an artist. “It wasn’t about playing the hits,” Free said.
Except for one, of course. “I want to perform their favorite song, but you know they love to sue,” Lamar quipped during his set. In January, Drake filed a lawsuit against
Universal Music Group, his and Lamar’s parent music label, calling “Not Like Us” defamatory.
When he finally launched into “Not Like Us,” he led the crowd in a singalong of its most famous verse: “Tryna strike a chord and it’s probably A-minor.”
The finale sent the stadium into darkness, revealing the phrase “GAME OVER” written against the crowd in lights. There was still half a game to go, but in his own battle, Lamar had crowned himself the winner.
