Most artists go on a massive tour to kick off the promotion or celebrate the success of a new album. It’s kind of like an NBA player gearing up for the playoffs. But Kendrick Lamar is not like most artists (pun intended). He’s already won his championships so at this point he’s just putting shots up. I mean, after you’ve dominated the most high-profile rap beef ever, won five Grammys (22 in total), and garnered 133 million viewers of your Super Bowl halftime performance, a tour is light work.
Lamar’s “Grand National Tour” made its 16th stop at Detroit Ford field Tuesday, where the Compton native shared equal billing with St. Louis songstress SZA, who has penned two 5x Platinum albums and owns five Grammy Awards of her own.
DJ Mustard, a frequent collaborator and producer with Lamar, kicked up the night with a 35-minute set mixed with hip-hop and pop classics. By 8:18 p.m., the lights dimmed and a Black Buick Grand National — the namesake of Lamar’s 2024 album GNX — elevated to the top of the stage. Lamar stepped out wearing a camo jacket, green pants, and a long diamond-encrusted gold chain that blinged off the stage lights and jumped right into “wacced out murals” and “squabble up” from GNX and ended the act with “30 for 30,” his collaboration with SZA, who came on stage wearing throwback yellow FUBU football jersey and a pair of baggy yellow North Face jogging pants.
The 52-song setlist of the night was divided into seven acts, as both Lamar and SZA performed two of the acts individually and three concurrently. The pair’s on-stage musical camaraderie and kinship felt authentic right off the bat, and that’s something that shouldn’t be taken for granted. Tours that feature both a hip-hop and a R&B artist performing simultaneously aren’t guaranteed to work, no matter how many hit songs they have. While Beyoncé and Jay-Z are the gold standard, there have been plenty of tours that haven’t lived up to expectations because of this.
Much like Lamar’s Super Bowl performance, he walked and rapped and did subtle movements with his hands that were far from dancing. He’s an emcee’s emcee, and everyone knows his focus is spitting his bars.
SZA was the opposite. She went right into three songs from her Ctrl album, “Love Galore,” “Broken Clocks,” and “The Weekend.” SZA was the perfect ying to Lamar’s yang as she did not stand still all night, gliding, hopping, crawling, jogging all across the circular stage, and even doing the splits. Sometimes she danced in sync with the choreography of her dancers, and other times she was doing her own version of a pirouette. She didn’t initiate a lot of small talk with the crowd and she never pointed the mic to the crowd, either. It was as if she was in her own beautiful bubble and would have probably given that exact same performance had the Ford Field been completely empty.
Lamar didn’t overly engage in small talk in every act, save for re-introducing himself over an Anita Baker instrumental; the crowd loved the nod to Detroit’s musical legacy. He went on to perform all the songs the crowd wanted to hear: “Humble,” “m.A.A.d city,” “man at the garden,” and he blew the roof with his record-breaking diss track “Not Like Us.”
The production had all the pyrokinetics, smoke, cold sparks, and laser lights. SZA had a constant running nature theme throughout the night in which she sang sitting on top of a giant ant, had the Grand National covered in foliage, and performed “Crybaby” hoisted up to the top of the arena with butterfly wings on. Her most impressive moment of the night was her performance of “Low,” in which she belted her notes lying flat on her back toward the song’s end.
The duo closed out the night with a highly anticipated “luther” and “gloria” (which the crowd didn’t seem to know that well). Overall, the “Grand National Tour” highlighted two entertainers in their prime with likely many more seasons of music in their future.