Kendrick Lamar was slated to headline on Saturday night up against the festival-ready Black Keys. For some inconceivable reason, Lamar didn’t end up performing on the Lands End Main Stage, but rather, the second-biggest Twin Peaks stage which was positioned in a valley-like meadow and of course was so packed with bodies in the 30 minutes before Lamar started that no one could move and the atmosphere was tense. Outside Lands was an overall tame affair, but pack tens of thousands of people into a basin-like field at the end of a long day, and everyone’s going to feel a bit too close for comfort. I made it to a mercifully vacant area in time for the astral intro of Good Kid, M.A.A.D. City’s “Money Trees.” Lamar mostly played songs off of that seminal album, and fans of To Pimp A Butterfly might’ve felt slighted by the setlist, but so many of those tracks are erratic and near-impossible to sing along to, and Lamar really wanted his show to feel like a sing-along. He busted out A$AP Rocky’s “Fuckin’ Problems” and performed his inspiration-on-high 2Pac’s “Hail Mary” midway through the show. He could undoubtedly hear every single word of “Swimming Pools (Drank)” screamed back at him, and the same happened when he dropped into lesser-known, non-singles like “The Art Of Peer Pressure” and “ADHD” off  of Section.80. 

There were two perfect moments during Lamar’s set. The first arrived when he asked everyone in the crowd to turn on their cellphone lights during the hook of “Sing About Me, I’m Dying Of Thirst.” The crowd was completely illuminated, and Lamar said some cheesy shit like, “See these lights? Each of these lights represents one of you,” as that opening line played on loop: “When the lights shut off/ And it’s my turn to settle down/ My main concern/ Promise that you will sing about me.” It was saccharine and earnest and so, so cool to see a packed, once-restless audience “settle down” and just listen to Lamar talk about how important it is to look out at a collection of strangers at a show and see it as a community, rather than a bunch of adversaries trying their best to shove to the front. The second perfect moment arrived during the closing song, “Alright,” which is the battle cry of TPAB, a defiant and optimistic song about having absolutely nothing left to lose. As Lamar performed the song, he looked out at the audience and shouted out a dude in a wheelchair who was crowd surfing toward the stage. Lamar asked the audience to make sure the guy made it up to the stage by the end of the song, and they did, because Lamar stalled the outro as long as possible to make sure that it happened. Everyone in that audience on Saturday night was eager to prove to Lamar that we’re as spirited and good-hearted as he wants us to be. I left starry-eyed; resigning to his positivity was all anyone should’ve needed after a long day.