Kendrick Lamar — who, as we at the Scene have pointed out, has the right combination of cultural relevance and supreme talent to put him at the very top of the hip-hop game — has played Middle Tennessee a handful of times. The Spin has seen Lamar deftly mesmerize crowds at small clubs and Bonnaroo alike, not to mention his opening set at Bridgestone Arena during Kanye West’s notorious Yeezus Tour. But we hadn’t yet seen the Compton-born 30-year-old headline Bridgestone, and so as we headed to our neighborhood enormodome to catch one of the rapper’s very last stops on his 36-date DAMN. Tour, we wondered just what he was going to do with a platform like this. In his early days, Lamar won crowds over with his raw charisma and talent. Touring behind 2015’s To Pimp a Butterfly, it was all about the musicianship of his band and Lamar’s knack for weaving his flows in and out of arrangements. So what this time?
In a word, production. From choreographed fireballs to martial-arts-themed video segments, LED screens and plumes of smoke, Kendrick didn’t so much lean on the production elements of his show Wednesday night as lean into them. With a big record like this year’s DAMN. comes a big budget, and thankfully, Lamar managed to use that budget to craft a captivating-but-not-distracting array of sensory stimuli that swirled around him while he handled the most important part: He played a powerhouse set of some of the most powerful hip-hop in the business.
By the time we got our tickets, filed through the metal detectors and made it to our seats, we discovered that we’d missed the first opener, D.R.A.M. Bummer — we really enjoyed his set at this year’s Bonnaroo. But YG’s set was more than enough to get the already-full-and-buzzing arena hyped. Songs like “You Broke” were entertaining enough, but there were a couple elements of YG’s performance in particular that had the crowd fully wilding out: First, he brought out two pole dancers, who managed to pull some genuinely athletic moves on a pair of twin poles before YG sent them on their way with a note about how he respects their 9-to-5 hustle. But most notably, he closed his set with a performance of what the Los Angeles Times called “the most prophetic, wrathful and unifying protest song of 2016” — “FDT,” aka “Fuck Donald Trump.” The performance even featured a red-hatted Trump impersonator doing bits about being a homophobic, xenophobic Nazi before being booed and run off stage. Fun stuff.
That unifying moment left the crowd jittering with anticipation, eyes fixed on the massive DAMN. Tour curtain hanging at the front of the stage. At 9:22 p.m., the curtain was snatched and the first of several “Legend of Kung Fu Kenny” video vignettes played on the screen at the back of the stage. The videos — most of which had an Enter the Dragon aesthetic, with clips of Lamar training with a sensei and battling various opponents — played intermittently throughout the show. For the most part, they were entertaining, and we'd guess they were there to serve as diversions while various production elements were prepared over the course of the evening. At the conclusion of the first clip, there were bursts of smoke and flashes of light, and suddenly Lamar appeared, crouching center stage, clad in all yellow like a pre-battle Beatrix Kiddo.
After a long, tense pause, Lamar exploded into “DNA.” with columns of fire rolling at his back, and we were off to the races from there. During “ELEMENT.,” a katana-wielding ninja flipped and kicked around the stage, but it wasn’t until To Pimp a Butterfly’s “King Kunta” — which was met with massive applause — that we managed to catch a glimpse of Lamar’s band. They were tucked away in a side-stage pit, allowing the rapper to prowl the entire space like a caged beast as red-tinted clips of King Kong played on screen behind him.
“I wanna make sure we don’t forget where we came from,” said Lamar somewhere around midset. “I see I do got some day-one motherfucking fans in the building.” Indeed, the rapper listed off all four of his studio LPs, each to thunderous applause, before dipping back into his catalog for songs like “Swimming Pools (Drank)” and “Backseat Freestyle” and, appropriately enough, segueing into “LOYALTY.”
There was a bit more on-screen distraction as security personnel discreetly — or as discreetly as possible, anyway — escorted Lamar through the crowd to a mid-arena platform stage. From there he performed “LUST.” as the LED-ensconced platform slowly rose. When it finally plateaued, he delivered the crowd-favorite “Money Trees.” After some more martial-arts vamping, Kendrick reappeared onstage, now dressed in all red, suspended on his side by wires as he rapped “PRIDE.” while an acrobat performed, situated parallel beneath him. In the obligatory crowd-participation segment of the show, he pitted one side of the arena against the other in a deafening scream-off before closing his set with two performances of this year’s hit single “HUMBLE.” During the first performance, Lamar and band stopped playing a few lines in, allowing the entire arena to rap bar after bar, unaccompanied, as the MC stood silent center stage, the mic at his side. He dropped back into the top of the song after that, performing the full thing with his band before descending into the belly of the stage through a trap door.
For all of Wednesday night's flashes of smoke and light and flame, for all of the fancy tricks and flips and clips, never once did The Spin feel as though Lamar was upstaged by his production, and that's the sign of an artist who knows his abilities as well as he knows his audience. Now, let's see where he takes us next.
In The Spin — the Scene's live review column — staffers and freelance contributors review concerts under a collective byline.
