Concert review: Kendrick Lamar dazzles at Grand National tour opener in Melbourne
This motormouthed US rapper’s Grand National tour places the emphasis on the adjective: his first stadium headline tour is an undeniably grand undertaking and a formidable spectacle. | REVIEW
On his debut single, American artist Kendrick Lamar rapped, “I’m standing on a field full of landmines / Doin’ the moonwalk, hoping I blow up in time.”
At AAMI Park in Melbourne on Wednesday night, Lamar’s ascension continued as he became the newest member of an exclusive club of hip-hop artists to have headlined Australian stadiums.
With this feat, performed before about 30,000 fans, he follows in the footsteps of fellow US rappers Eminem – who first played stadiums here in 2011, then again in 2014 and 2019 – and Travis Scott, who played some of the biggest Australian concert venues available on his tour last year.
The above-quoted rhyme appeared mid-verse in HiiiPower, a track that closed his 2011 debut album Section. 80, which captured a talented young performer on the rise fretting that he was running out of time.
It was an unusually nervy mid-song admission, and therefore a memorable one, for Lamar has rarely come across as a man in a hurry.
Instead, his artistry has gradually found larger audiences with each successive release, while across the past 14 years he has generally carried himself with an air of calm, calculated confidence befitting his role as one of the genre’s biggest stars.
Early in his career, Eminem earned headlines by shocking middle America – and the wider world – with his fondness for cartoonish, explicit rap, before becoming one of the genre’s most enduring live draws, backed on stage by a live band and backing singers.
More recently, Travis Scott’s confrontational, aggressive approach to hip-hop often incites his young audience to “rage” to his music, resulting in heaving mosh pits and the black stain of a devastating crowd crush event in 2021, wherein 10 of his fans died at his Astroworld festival in Houston, Texas.
Born and raised in the Los Angeles suburb of Compton, Lamar’s songwriting style is unlike either of the stadium-fillers who came before him: introspective to his core, he veers between displaying unerring self-belief – in the typical style of hip-hop braggadocio – and a dark undertow of self-doubt and uncertainty, all cloaked in a deep social awareness.
As an artist, his sonic fingerprint has always been somewhat bipolar; he’s capable of penning giant hooks backed by booming beats, as well as songs so intimate and vulnerable that listening feels like voyeuristic diary-snooping.
All of which makes him a most unusual kingpin for a culture that recently marked its 50th anniversary and tends to celebrate the biggest egos capable of dishing out the harshest disses of one’s opponents.
Now 37, Lamar’s five previous Australian visits document his ascent to stardom.
He’s gone from playing clubs in 2012 to supporting Eminem’s stadium run in 2014, then headlining major festivals – Byron Bay Bluesfest in 2016 and Splendour in the Grass in 2018 – before a four-city arena run in 2022.
For more than a decade, then, Australia has been a happy hunting ground and a fertile touring market for Lamar, even though his biggest breakout moment in our part of the world – topping Triple J’s Hottest 100 music poll in 2018 with his song Humble – came and went without so much as a nod of acknowledgment from the man himself.
That decision was of a piece with his long-held choice to rarely give interviews or offer public commentary, instead opting to let his music speak for itself.
Buttressed by regional shows headlining the Spilt Milk festival, this tour, dubbed Grand National, is ostensibly in support of his sixth album – 2024’s GNX – which was described by The Australian’s critic Sosefina Fuamoli as “a landmark statement for Lamar that fans and newcomers will remember as a standout release in a catalogue full of them”.
GNX topped charts here and abroad, as have several of his previous LPs, including 2017’s Damn, for which Lamar received the Pulitzer Prize for Music, and became the first non-classical or jazz artist to do so.
But it was a non-album single which became a major cultural moment in May last year, and helped Lamar vault from being a confirmed arena-filler into the rare air of stadiums.
Titled Not Like Us, the track was a culmination of a tit-for-tat series of aural missives traded between Lamar and Drake, the Canadian hip-hop artist born Aubrey Graham.
Scathing and scarring in form, tone and lyrical content, Not Like Us became the kill-shot that effectively ended a public feud.
Drake got his comeuppance and Lamar got the spoils: he won five more Grammy Awards in February – including the first-ever instance of a hip-hop track being named both song and record of the year – followed by a performance at the Super Bowl halftime show in New Orleans, where Lamar had the last laugh by rapping Not Like Us for an enormous global televised audience while essentially dancing on Drake’s proverbial grave.
Even in the moment, there was a vaguely tiresome schoolyard feel to this chapter: two wealthy men in their mid-30s taking insult-laden and highly personal pot shots at one another in their home studios, then hastily publishing those raw, unpolished works onto streaming services so that their respective fan armies – composed of hundreds of millions of listeners worldwide – could dissect their lyrics with scholarly zeal.
In a similar fashion to how Australian politics has its ‘Canberra bubble’, this was a musical equivalent for highly online hip-hop heads.
If you weren’t invested in this rap beef, it probably looked and sounded ridiculous, just as the inner workings of our politics can sometimes appear to outsiders, too.
Long ago, Lamar imagined standing on a field full of landmines, doing the moonwalk, hoping he’d blow up in time. Now that he’s blown up to become a stadium-sized performer, he revels in pulling focus like few other artists working today while controlling every aspect of the look, sound and feel of the show, given that this tour is co-presented by pgLang, his creative agency co-founded with longtime collaborator Dave Free.
With the music-making going gangbusters – he’s never been more popular, hence the venue upgrades for this tour – Lamar has chosen to continue expanding his command of the live environment, which was already impressive: his 2022 arena tour, in support of his fifth album Mr. Morale and the Big Steppers, was breathtakingly ambitious and felt more like a stage musical at times than a concert, given the amount of moving parts and intricate choreography.
While some of his peers are content merely rhyming into a microphone while prowling a stage, Lamar has long since realised that the best live shows demand more than just clever, quick wordplay delivered impeccably.
For him, it’s not enough to be one of the most gifted hip-hop writers of all time: he’s also seeking greatness as a stage performer, and his unrelenting high standards are a gift to his audience, for the scale of the spectacle he now commands is formidable.
The nature of this Grand National tour places the emphasis on the adjective: this is an undeniably grand and adventurous undertaking, and there can be no doubt that his ascent has been well-earned and well-deserved.
Lamar’s comfort on the big stage was remarkable and compelling across 90 minutes, backed by 10 dancers, with a range of different looks and stage elements on show.
The sound was bone-shakingly loud in the bass frequencies, while as an impressively fulsome pyrotechnics display was used with gusto throughout, with frequent flame bursts and overhead fireworks dazzling the eye.
The three big screens preferred to frame Lamar – wearing glasses, a loose-fitting light outfit, pants worn low and a black undershirt – in monochrome, which made the occasional bursts of colour all the more effective.
Though much of this 47-date world tour has been performed alongside fellow US artist SZA, the Melbourne show marked only the fifth time that Lamar had played it solo, following recent South American gigs. Every aspect of the production was well-drilled, such that no seams were visible; it was the sort of night where the scores of unseen technical crew members should take a bow, too.
Musically, Lamar’s 29-song set ventured as far back as 2012’s Good Kid, Maad City, with one of the best moments being a rearranged take on his track Maad City.
“Brace yourself, I’ll take you on a trip down memory lane,” he raps at its beginning, before cycling through a series of childhood memories, some of them traumatic and affecting. Yet on stage, Lamar now performs it slower while backed by women dancing like showgirls, lending a strange vaudevillian air to proceedings. The effect is of a man reclaiming those dark boyhood visions for himself, all in the name of entertainment.
At this latter skill, Lamar is an undoubted master. He was unhurried in his movements, and performed without a great deal of physical exertion – except for his motor-mouth, of course – yet he easily retained our attention through the sheer power of his presence.
His extreme verbosity was such that he probably rapped something akin to the length of a medium-sized novel across his 90 minutes on stage. It’s a marathon effort just to remember that many words, let alone spit them out in rhyming couplets while hitting his marks.
The show made great use of onstage camera operators, as well as a single static lens positioned at the end of a catwalk jutting out into the crowd, which ensured that this charismatic artist was seen clearly from the uppermost rows of AAMI Park.
Much of GNX got an airing, and most of those songs were played on full – unlike his older material, which was generally given a verse and a chorus before it was cut short. The tender moments, such as Luther and Love, worked just as well as the all-out bangers, including King Kunta, Humble and Alright, which had the floor crowd heaving as one.
But the biggest moment of the night was surely the one that captured so much of the hip-hop community’s attention last year: Not Like Us, whose insistent string sample, compact beat and many meme-worthy lyrics saw it elevated in the live environment well beyond the recorded version.
During this song – which seems to have quickly become his signature tune – Lamar’s crew detonated more pyrotechnics than in any other, lending an emphatic visual emphasis to the song that trumped Drake and boosted this singular artist into stadiums.
Rather than an encore break, at song’s end Lamar opted to stand still and silent for more than a minute, under dim stage lights, while the crowd roared its approval.
While he stood like a statue, his face impassive, a good chunk of the crowd pushed up against the barrier of the rear general admission section chanted for him to play it again. But he didn’t, and nor did he do the moonwalk, because by that point in the night – having thrilled a crowd of 30,000 admirers – he didn’t need to.
Kendrick Lamar’s Grand National tour continues in Melbourne (Thursday, December 4) and Sydney (December 10 + 11), as well as Spilt Milk festival shows in Ballarat (Saturday), Perth (Sunday), Canberra (December 13) and Gold Coast (December 14).
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