“It’s been a long time since I seen y’all. We got a lot of catching up to do but we’re gonna start from the beginning,” Kendrick proclaimed early in his set. This was in the midst of what more or less felt like Act I of Kendrick’s set, where he blitzed through all the heavy-hitters from Good Kid, m.A.A.d. City. After only tentatively starting to include new material in this year’s sets, he still doesn’t seem to know how or to want to blend the old bangers with stuff from To Pimp A Butterfly, which was grouped together at the end of the set. None of that really matters. A Kendrick set is an unstoppable force. The man has presence that rivals Kanye’s on the same stage last summer. He played the hits because all he has is hits. The early section of the set was take-no-prisoners style: “Backseat Freestyle,” “Swimming Pools (Drank),” his run-through of “Fuckin’ Problems” for good measure, and that’s before we got to “m.A.A.d. City” twice in a row. The latter might have been the feverish peak of the set: there is a very specific, overwhelming power this song seems to have on thousands of people grouped together, and the second time it dropped — with Kendrick now near-screaming the verses — had everyone reaching into reserves of energy they probably didn’t know they had left at this point. As the set wore on, Kendrick mercifully added in a few breathers, like a mellowed version of “These Walls.” That meant by the time “King Kunta” came around, all hell was ready to break loose again. When Kendrick wasn’t playing new songs, this seemed like the biggest loss: to know he had a song like this and to imagine the missed opportunity of not hearing it towards the end of a headlining set at Bonnaroo. Well, he did play it, and it’s exactly as great in this setting as anyone would’ve imagined. Pity any musician who has to operate in the vicinity of a Kendrick live set. He embarrasses almost everyone else.