Sunday Music: Kendrick, Live

I have almost bought tickets to see Kendrick Lamar at least 2 other times. I wimped out on both occasions. For the Good Kid tour I told myself I wasn’t young enough, not to mention, I didn’t have enough money or enough friends who would’ve cared as much as I did to see it. Then, I did the same thing for the Damn tour, for the same not-enough reasons. So after watching The Paris Concert on Amazon 18 times or more, when the Grand National tour dates were announced I immediately told my wife, “I set an alert on my phone and pre-registered. We are going. I don’t care what it costs, we have enough, and we’re not missing this.”

Regrets require you fight against a good reason. Why fight it? Within reason, of course, why fight what you want to do?

We caught the show in Philly about 2 weeks ago. Stadium tours. They’re a weird thing. My wife had never been to one before. I had only been to one true football stadium sized show - I’m just, not crazy about concerts put on at that scale. I don’t totally get the appeal.

However, I’m fascinated by the spectacle of it all too. I caught the Rolling Stones on the Bridges to Babylon tour at Giants Stadium in the late 90s. They killed it. Foo Fighters opened. It was a production worthy of sharing it with 50,000+ of your closest fan-friends.

It’s just that - stadiums are so BIG. There’s no intimacy. It becomes a “watch the crowd” event as much as it’s a “go see the band” event, if not more about the setting.

Kendrick has kept seeing bigger and bigger stages as his career’s advanced. Long gone are the small shows or even the small venue performances. I mean, he did the Super Bowl Halftime Show this year. The only rung on the ladder above that is playing the stadium without the game, right?

Well, he’s made it. And I’m here asking - what’s next? Because, candidly, I’m a little worried, for the first time, about what his next steps can look like.

“Enough” is a funny concept. Across the board. Fulfillment and flourishing sound simple, but they’re experientially existential.

Watching Kendrick from the first level, right of center off the stage so we were looking down on GA without looking too far down on the stage (hey, my wife is short, these are important considerations), my brain kept noticing how he thinks of enough.

The fire works were there. The fireball explosions too, the ones where you can feel the heat radiating off the stage from 100 yards back, so you wonder if the front row people have eyebrows still. There were sweeping spotlights and bass at volumes you could topple small buildings with. As far as spectacles go, it was aplenty. Every time I looked at my wife I could tell she thought it was enough. Every time I looked left or right or out onto the crowd I could tell they thought it was enough.

When it was just him in the backseat of the car, trying to impress his friends, he was borrowing context, borrowing braggadociousness, and - just trying to impress his friends.

Tours and albums followed. Self-reflections were plentiful. A slight martyr/savior-complex developed or at least evolved. And now we’re here, with him, 12 years later(!), looking at our boy who’s climbed out of the back seat and found himself in his dream car’s driver seat:

In the song, all he wants is a specific car, but even that’s not enough.

In real life, all he’s got is a Super Bowl Halftime Show, a personal record best national stadium tour, multiple hit singles and… is it enough? He keeps saying it’s not enough. But, what is it and what is?

I know, I know - on the human level he’s got a wife and kids and family and all that too. But. Does the kid who just want to make his friends go “oooooo” in the back seat at some clever wordplay know where to draw the “enough” line?

I’m stuck thinking about how tricky playbook gets after this tour for Kendrick.

Beyonce and Taylor Swift seemed to have cracked the code. They’re artistically expressing themselves. They’re elevating others. They’re still giving people all sorts of reasons to show up for new songs as much as old classics. They’ve got that Rolling Stones relevance cranking. Jay-Z has a variation on it going too (but, artistically, Lemonade beats 4:44, right?). I think we’re safe from Kendrick going Kanye, but please, just not that.

Where does he go from there?

I spend a lot of time asking myself, “How are you complicit in creating the things you say you don’t want?” I spend a lot of time asking myself the, slightly more pleasant, inverse too, of “What are you doing to get and enjoy the things you say you want?” If I have a hard time doing it over writing and date nights, what’s he going for after the year he’s about to come down off of?

“I have enough” doesn’t sell more records. It sells - OK, it sells Andre 3000 with a flute levels. There’s that path too. But that’s not “They Not Like Us” numbers, that’s a statement of “It’s time to do something else artistically.”

I worry about whether or not Kendrick knows what enough is so he can use that as a north star for his next steps. I worry about that because, I’m projecting, and I’m worried about that for me. That’s it. Some role modeling, I guess. Can somebody, or a few other people, show me how they got it right so I can pull it off on my teeny tiny scale?

It’s scary out here. And I don’t even see dead people. Just the living ones, just my reflection, and just the steps on the ground in front of mixed up with the dreams I have in my head.

So we watch. So we listen. So we buy tickets and reflect after the fact on stuff like this.

Only he has the answer. But, I hope he knows what enough is. He’s got and given a lot, and we could use a role model who gets this right, if that’s even or ever possible on that grand of a scale. I’m still a fan first. But I’m a fan of seeing people get it right, and I’m not envious of the moves he has to navigate next.