Is Kendrick Lamar the new Bob Dylan?
Was '25 New Orleans the new '65 Newport?
As "The Complete Unknown" plays in theaters, introducing a new generation to the revolutionary singer-poet, Kendrick tells the Super Bowl audience: "The revolution 'bout to be televised."
If Dylan was the archetypal protest singer, Kendrick strikes the same chord — down to a simulated live protest so raw, Fox cut the feed.
Both won Pulitzers for their lyrics — dense, layered, cryptic yet cutting, laced with wordplay, symbolism, and trenchant double meanings. Both demand exegetic close readings and probe the same themes: race, civil rights, America’s fault lines.
Neither follows protocol to play nice; they adapt tradition to say something.
They speak — to the times; to the tensions beneath America’s skin — in a similar vein: both ironic and prophetic. “Voices of their generation.”
Now streaming: TikToks dissecting Kendrick’s show; each image, each verse.
Other videos? Mocking the backlash:
“What is this? What’s he even saying? This isn’t music.”
This — from the same Boomers who once sang every word to “The Times They Are A-Changin’” to the bafflement of their own parents.
Flashback to ‘65. Dylan’s “Dont Look Back” [sic] tour.
In the D.A. Pennebaker rock doc, a TIME reporter — The Establishment™ — presses the poet to explain himself.
Dylan smirks: “Are you going to hear [the concert]? It’s going to happen fast. And you're not going to get it all. And you might even hear the wrong words..."
Cue to millions of American households post-halftime, wondering what just hit them, shaking their heads at the electronic “noise” of hip-hop.
Kendrick saw it coming.
Samuel L. Jackson, as Uncle Sam, warns him: “No, no, no… Too loud, too reckless, too ghetto. Mr. Lamar, do you really know how to play the game? Then tighten up."
(Cue Pete Seeger and Newport folkies, pleading with Dylan to ditch the electric and play “real music”; to play along.)
(Kendrick, ventriloquizing America: “Turn his TV off!”; the ‘65 crowd: “Pull the plug!”)
But Kendrick doesn’t play the game.
Or rather, he plays at the juncture between pleasing the crowd and defying it.
Kendrick’s Uncle Sam breathes easy with a silky pop duet with SZA (“Yeah, that's what I'm talkin' about. That's what America wants, nice and calm.”)
Dylan returns to the Newport stage with “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue”; softly melodic, acoustic.)
Both flirt with mainstream success — but never at the cost of artistic integrity.
And “Not Like Us”?
It’s Dylan’s “Ballad of a Thin Man” — disestablishment diss-track — reborn.
Both angry, funereal, cryptic; and as Internet sleuths have pointed out, both sampling the same Ray Charles melody (“I Believe to My Soul”).
Fans even speculated Kendrick might bring out Dylan — or at least Chalamet as Dylan, fresh off their Super Bowl promo.
Would’ve been poetic.
But unnecessary.
The lineage is already there.
The same spirit “inside [their] DNA.”