His Grand National tour, co-headlined with SZA, was a thrilling and momentous capstone to one of rap’s great beefs.
The protest was off to a weak start. Six or seven people had congregated outside gate 5 of the Rogers Arena for the “OVO Takeover Show,” a response to the co-headlining performance from Kendrick Lamar and SZA due to take place in roughly an hour. It would be Lamar’s first performance in Toronto since locking horns with Drake last summer, and protest organizers sought to “remind them who runs the 6ix.” The thousands of people milling around the arena pay no attention — there are just as many people lining up for a picture with a Spider Man impersonator. Around the corner, the line for the show’s merch stand extends for nearly a quarter of a block.
In another universe, maybe things look different. In December 2024, Kendrick announced the Grand National tour, a globetrotting series of dates with co-headliner SZA named for his surprise album released the preceding month. That was months after “Not Like Us” decisively ended the Drake feud and sent the Canadian rapper into a crisis: Suddenly, he was a guy who joined detestable streamers to flog a crypto-based gambling app and who, occasionally, dropped music. In this universe, his hits feel used up, the last warm sip of a flat beer that used to be ice cold and bubbling.
With two Toronto dates at the city’s biggest venue, Lamar promised Canada a victory lap unseen in modern hip-hop history. Beyond Drake, Canada has never been a site of watershed moments in rap, and the temptation to witness one is too much to resist, even if it’s coming at The Boy’s expense.
I stand around observing the protest for about 30 minutes. It’s hard to tell who’s a part of the protest and who’s just waiting for friends near the same bronze statue — the only things close to signage are one guy in a Canadian tuxedo blasting “Girls Love Girls” from a tiny Bluetooth speaker, and the ostensible ringleader, dressed in a For All The Dogs letterman, speaking to a steady stream of TV cameras.
The protest’s official Instagram promised “free pizza and hoodies” in its initial announcement, but the doors to the Rogers Centre are open and there’s no food or merch yet (there is an IG post asking for donations to cover a $11,000 bill for “expenses”). Four cops on bicycles stand six feet away glaring intently, just a taste of the absurdly elevated police presence outside. Somebody walks past me shaking his head, and sneers, “Hoes not like us.” I retreat into the venue in case I’m mistaken for a supporter.
As I take my seat, I think of watching Beyoncé at the Renaissance tour in 2023. The preshow was enrapturing, Pride color barcodes on all of the backdrop’s massive screens; “Falling Rizlas,” a song by the genius electronic wizard Actress, played on repeat. Kendrick and SZA’s show does not have the same level of sophistication: for roughly half an hour the screens display a massive, rotating logo for Cash App, the tour’s sponsor (the app is not available in Canada).
Being bombarded by an ad darkens my mood, and it’s not lifted much by DJ Mustard’s opening set, a selection of snippets of bangers from across hip-hop history. His set, a far cry from Beyoncé’s tailored and dynamic selection of DJs for her tour, has the same functional approach of what you’d expect from one on a Carnival Cruise: If the music gets you excited enough to down your drinks faster, he’s done his job. Near the end, after an aborted attempt at getting the crowd to swag surf, he plays fun.’s millennial stomp-clap pop anthem “We Are Young.” It gets the biggest reaction of his whole set, and I wonder if my section is particularly white compared to the rest of the arena.
The Grand National tour’s opening was a blind spot, but the rest of the show was dazzling enough to almost blot it out. For nearly two and a half hours, Kendrick and SZA brought their brilliant catalogues to life through stagecraft and verve, refusing to let the significance of the show’s location carry it.
The main performance began with the first of several short, avant-garde-gesturing shorts starring Kendrick and SZA. The first clip featured stark thermal camera imagery, a snarling Buick GNX (the namesake of Lamar’s 2024 album) and a mock deposition starring Lamar. It sets up a performance about war, integrating the militant, defiant image Lamar has been cultivating over the last year.
The shorts across the concert frame SZA’s war as internal, reckoning with romantic strife, self-image, and if she’d still be the acclaimed and beloved artist she is if her phone’s blocklist wasn’t so stacked. This is the seed of the genius of the co-headlining tour, where each artist will perform a handful of songs before switching off to the other, with the occasional duet. Their energies compliment each other and are occasionally traded between artists to keep the momentum supercharged for the show’s duration.
The opening video ends, and the sound of militant horns fills the arena. Things kick off with “wacced out murals,” a GNX song about Lamar’s resolve even in the face of threats and disrespect in his hometown. “Yesterday somebody wacced out my mural,” Lamar raps offstage in a bitter monotone as the lyrics are carved in a Chicano font onscreen. He enters in the titular car, raised from beneath the stage. As he performs songs like “King Kunta,” “squabble up,” and “TV Off,” his show’s thesis becomes clear: He hasn’t arrived in Toronto. We’re guests in Los Angeles.
After five songs, SZA joins Kendrick onstage for “30 For 30,” their duet and the first song of her set. It’s SZA’s first time in Toronto since 2023, when her second concert of that year was rescheduled then cancelled, and she seems committed to make up for it. Her entire performance is, by a hair, the finest of the evening, stacked with genuine feats: her voice, siren-like and passionate even in the face of the occasional technical difficulty, but also the show’s granola-textured sci-fi meets Cirque du Soleil design. There are costumed praying mantises on stilts, dancers dressed as bugs from the planet Funkadelic, and visuals that are faithful recreations of the trails and colors that define a mushroom trip. Things get a bit white-knuckled during “Saturn” when SZA, dressed in butterfly wings and a flowing fairy godmother gown, ascends to the heavens via a harness, floating over a sea of stars disguised as camera phone lights.
Of course, not everything was glitter and grass. Lamar performed three of his most direct Drake diss tracks, “Euphoria,” “Not Like Us,” and his verse on Future and Metro Boomin’s “Like That,” the moment that ignited everything. “Euphoria,” the best song from the beef, is also the one dripping with disdain not just for Drake, but for his pedigree. Hear Lamar’s fury that a “Canadian n****” would disrespect Tupac, or his mocking appropriation of Toronto slang, made visceral by the frequent pyro blasts. The entire arena rapped every word. By the time the word “CRODIE” flashed in all caps on the screens, the humiliation ritual was complete and historical.
By comparison, the other two tracks felt more sedate. The backdrop of “Not Like Us,” a celebration of Black diasporic culture designed by Lauren Halsey, didn’t feel entirely L.A.-centric — one could see identical imagery during a brief walk down Toronto’s Little Jamaica. It was an olive branch to the Toronto audience, one that made its pleas for him to run it back feel less masochistic and more like a communion (Lamar’s acknowledgement of Canada’s support throughout his career also helped.)
Lamar’s show, from the cinematography to the choreography, was an extension of his Super Bowl performance: spectacular, but still familiar. He did not outwardly acknowledge the show’s significance beyond calling the date “a special one” in one of the few brief moments of banter. Anyone hoping for a new diss or surprise guest to fuel the beef was left disappointed. What helped things feel more organic were the moments when Kendrick revisited his older catalog and twisted it: the interpolation of Anita Baker’s “Sweet Love” transformed the paranoid and aggressive “m.A.A.d City” into something resembling a love song. It was an intoxicating alchemy, and one of the show’s most inspired moments.
Lamar and SZA were content to be as reliable and undeniable as the machine the tour is named after. To (almost literally) crush the buildings like Snoop did to New York, you need ruthless efficiency and a couple superpowers, and the Grand National tour affirmed them both as generational talents. But where did that leave Toronto and its residents now filing out into the street, most dressed in tour merch?
Outside, someone held a sign reading, “Drake won the rap beef. Change my mind.” Underneath the placard, two young white men argued into a lav mic. It was too crowded for me to clock a camera, but they were both talking in the elevated, theatrical blaccent of modern streamers. At that moment, Drake was huddled in his own stream with Kai Cenat. More than ever I wonder if it’s part of one of the masterplans he’s spent a career executing, or an escape hatch.