Kendrick Lamar's Intimate Brooklyn Show Was the Perfect Ending to 2016

There hasn't been a lot of joy in 2016. But Kendrick Lamar played a surprise show for 500 people in Brooklyn Friday night. He announced it cryptically on his Facebook page that morning and tickets sold out instantly. There's no way to describe the performance as anything other than a celebration — he exuded a level of joy rare to see not only from a global super star like Kendrick but from anyone these days.

Certain music is best experienced in massive arenas to tens of thousands of people; some artists come alive in that setting. Kendrick Lamar is not one of them. His music, like jazz, is contemplative and soulful. He has the ability to describe a lived experience that is at once deeply personal and universal, able to tap into the soul of anyone who happens to be a thinking, feeling, alive human being.

So sponsors American Express choosing the 500-capacity Music Hall of Williamsburg was the perfect for Kendrick, a fact made all the more clear by just how much he was enjoying himself. The venue was small enough that it felt like he was trying to make eye contact with each person in the crowd, probably because he was. He was in his own world but invited everyone else there to come along with him, moving around the small stage with a level of ease and excitement that almost had him skipping.

"I said when the lights shut off, and it's my turn to settle down… my main concern," Kendrick raps. "Promise that you will sing about me. Promise that you will sing about me." He didn't have to ask twice. Kendrick's fans have an obsessive attachment to his lyrics. Almost everyone in the crowd sang along with him, seemingly hypnotized. Kendrick looked pleasantly surprised as the crowd showed him that they knew every word coming out of his mouth. Several times throughout his set, Kendrick would stop rapping and wait for the audience to fill the lyrics of an entire verse. They obliged.

"Y'all are the OGs," Kendrick said, smiling. "What should I do next?"

This wasn't the type of audience that was going to request "Bitch Don't Kill My Vibe." People shouted out their most obscure requests and Kendrick went along with it, playing songs from Section.80, his first mixtape from 2011.

Out of all the excitement in the crowd, the happiest person in the room Friday night was undoubtedly Kendrick himself.

"Ya'll, this feels good," he mused. "It's been awhile since I've played such a small venue like this."

About halfway through his set, it stopped being a concert and turned into to a collaborative musical experience. All of a sudden, the anointed king of freestyling decided to lead a cipher.

Freestyling with Kendrick Lamar is what I imagine it would be like if LeBron James handed you a basketball and asked if you wanted to play pick up. Kendrick began inviting people from the crowd onstage and any restraint the audience was still holding onto disappeared at that moment. Kendrick scanned around all the individual screaming clusters of fans, occasionally high-fiving them or chatting with them about who to bring up.

One of the people that raised his hand was Kemba, a bashful young rapper from the Bronx. The band went silent as Kemba walked onstage, shook Kendrick's hand and proceeded to perform an acapella verse that sounded straight out of To Pimp A Butterfly:

I'll prolly be a Malcolm, Martin marked for my Penmanship
Tell the parks department park a bronze mold of my lyrics.
Twisted images of torture forced the loss of my innocence.
But now I can begin again. This is my christening.

Kendrick sat back and watched smiling. Momentarily, he was a member of the audience too; just another fan.

When I called Kemba the next day, he was clearly still processing what the fuck just happened. He was still kind of speechless, he explained. He said he wrote the verse a while ago but obviously didn't expect to be performing it for Kendrick Lamar. "As soon as I got up onstage that's what came out of my mouth and I couldn't really help it," he told me.

In her review of Good Kid m.A.A.d City, Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah compared Kendrick to Tupac. Kendrick, she wrote, channels the violence, anxieties and pain of the reality of being a black American male in the same way Tupac did — the original good kid in a mad city. The sadness in Kendrick and Tupac's overlap, of course, is that the subject matter remains just as relevant today as it was two decades ago.

The brilliance, she wrote, of both Kendrick and Tupac is that they understand "there is no making sense of this nonsense. It is a blues: near-tragic, near-comic, and it can make one anxious, oppositional, or emotional."  But their music can also be a celebration, demonstrated by Kendrick's performance Friday. His unabashed display of joy was a powerful coda to a decidedly un-joyful 2016. The energy, playfulness and sheer pleasure bouncing back and forth between him and his fans seemed to prove Kendrick was right all along — things are going to be alright.

All photos by Bryan Bedder/Getty Images for American Express.

Olivia Becker is a staff reporter at Vice News. Follow her on Twitter.