Kendrick Lamar celebrated the 10th anniversary of Section.80 during a deft, tightly coordinated set at the Day N Vegas festival on Friday. The performance marked Lamar’s lone scheduled show of 2021, and his first U.S. concert in two years.
Released in 2011, Section.80 was Lamar’s easy-going yet audacious debut album, which swings from brassy boom bap to R&B in 6/8 time to funky ventures into southern hip-hop. The rapper became a hit-maker and cultural phenomenon on his follow-up, Good Kid, M.A.A.D City, in 2012; he’s racked up pretty much every accolade available, from platinum plaques to Pulitzers, in the years since. But he wasn’t always a juggernaut — casting back to Section.80 was a chance for a star to revisit his roots as a scrappy up-and-comer.
And a chance for Lamar to inject some variety into his set by performing songs he’s rarely revisited in the last five years: “F*ck Your Ethnicity,” a quarrelsome, jump-in-place number; “Hol’ Up,” snappy but simmering; “A.D.H.D.”, a tale of substance abuse that ends up surprisingly celebratory in the hands of a festival crowd; “HiiPower,” Lamar’s first official single, a head-nod track in which the rapper invokes the lineage of Dr. Martin Luther King and Malcolm X.
