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?!
