Kendrick Lamar and SZA’s Grand National Tour Smashes Into San Francisco

Kendrick Lamar performed his highly-lauded lyrics and SZA showed-off her sultry singing Thursday night as scores of people packed San Francisco’s Oracle Park for the latest stop on the duo’s Grand National Tour. And while the talent of the two superstars brought fans to the stadium, the extensive details of the choreography and stage design brought the nearly three-hour show to life.

During her sets, SZA performed amid lush green nature and intensely magnified images of insects. It was as if the films Honey, I Shrunk the Kids, A Bugs Life and FernGully combined to accompany her angelic vocals that told stories of navigating toxic relationships and learning to appreciate oneself.

During Lamar’s sets the stage looked more like a John Singleton flick. The stadium’s giant screens showed the artist in shades of black, white and granite while a faux street light, a parked muscle car and dancers in workman’s attire brought the culture of inner-city Southern California to the Bay Area. At one point, home video from early ’90s Los Angeles played in the background as Lamar rapped boastful rhymes and reflective bars about social issues.

When the co-headlining artists appeared together to perform their smash hit “All The Stars” from the Black Panther soundtrack, the audience provided the visuals as thousands of fans illuminated the Giants’ home field by holding their cellphones into the night sky.

The performance was the latest stop in the biggest co-headlining tour of the year, which kicked off after the duo’s performance at Super Bowl LIX during the most-viewed Super Bowl halftime show in history.

In the months prior, a running beef between Lamar and famed Canadian rapper Drake resulted in a series of diss songs exchanged between the two megastars that reached an apex with Lamar’s song “Not Like Us.” It would become the longest-running No. 1 song on the Hot R&B/Hip-Hop chart in Billboard history, dethroned only this week by Lamar and SZA’s song “luther.”

Under a sliver of a new moon on the chilly San Francisco evening, the two took turns performing three or four songs each, running through hits in their respective catalogs. An ever-changing stage set yielded some surprising sights; at one point during SZA’s performance, the multiple-Grammy award-winning singer and songwriter sung her heart out while straddling an oversized ant.

At another point during Kendrick’s set, the Pulitzer Prize-winning writer rapped the entirety of “man at the garden” while perched on the back of a parked black Buick Grand National in a squat similar to the poses people hit in old prison pictures.

As SZA performed “Garden (Say It Like Dat),” dancers dressed in full praying mantis costumes stood on stilts and twirled in the background. While Kendrick recited his hit song “Humble,” he looked toward his background dancers — a handful of Black women with immaculately laid cornrows and skin the color of coffee — during the line “show me somethin’ natural like afro on Richard Pryor.”

Last year was a landmark one for Lamar and his pgLang entertainment company, particularly due to Lamar’s widely streamed Juneteenth event The Pop Out: Ken & Friends and the November release of his sixth studio album, GNX.

SZA, Lamar’s former labelmate at Top Dawg Entertainment, also had a monumental year. The December 2024 release of Lana, an expanded deluxe version of her 2022 album SOS, marked a new era for the singer and songwriter. An award-winning artist who’s appeared everywhere from Sesame Street to Saturday Night Live to Coachella, SZA has launched into the stratosphere.

As the breeze blew in from the Bay, both artists gave shoutouts to “San Fran” throughout the evening.

Before the two stars even hit the stage, DJ Mustard warmed the crowd up with a set that transitioned from Big Sean and E-40’s multi-platinum 2014 track “I Don’t Fuck With You” to the Bay Area anthems “Tell Me When to Go” and “Feelin’ Myself.”

Kendrick’s widespread fame does unfortunately come with some distasteful pitfalls. During his performance of the diss track “Euphoria,” the mixed-race crowd — missing the point — rapped along word-for-word as the Compton MC said, “We don’t wanna hear you say nigga no more.”

He followed by asking “Is the Bay Area in this muthafucka tonight?”

Kendrick later noted the region’s longstanding support for his career, echoing his constant praise of E-40, the appearance of turf dancers in his music videos and Super Bowl performance and the choice to film the video for his 2015 hit “Alright” on Treasure Island — in addition to a notable early performance at The New Parish in Oakland in 2011.

Delving further into his affinity for his California cousins to the North, during Kendrick’s performance of “dodger blue,” the stage took on the appearance of the interior of a classic car, complete with a pair of oversized black fuzzy dice dangling from the rafters. Between them, a 12-foot black pine tree-shaped air freshener read “MAC DRE” in big, bold letters.

The NorCal-SoCal connection was underscored by Kendrick’s reverence for Tupac Shakur, who lived in both the Bay Area and Los Angeles. On Thursday night, it was clear that the Bay wasn’t going to let anyone disrespect Pac, as Kendrick mentioned in “Not Like Us.”

Turning away from the stage and looking into the sea of people, a rare site emerged: fans in Dodgers hats and Giants caps alike, coexisting on a baseball field, all of them nodding along to one of the most popular songs of the day.