logo
Meet the former Chicago ‘theater kid' who stages Kendrick Lamar

Meet the former Chicago ‘theater kid' who stages Kendrick Lamar

Chicago Tribune06-06-2025
Mike Carson made the backdrops for school plays.
Mountains, villages, flat and colorful, that sort of thing. He also ran the lights. He was a tech guy in school theater. He played football at Plainfield North High School, but at heart, he was a theater kid. Even now, living in Los Angeles, he heads to the theater whenever he can. As a child, his parents often took him to Chicago theater. That stuck in surprising ways. So much so, you are familiar with Mike Carson's work even if you don't know him by name, or thought of that work as theatrical.
Carson, now the creative director at pgLang in Los Angeles, is one of Kendrick Lamar's longtime production designers and creative partners. If you're headed to Solider Field this week to see 'The Grand National Tour' featuring Lamar and SZA, know this: a lot of what you'll see is Mike Carson's ongoing collaboration with Lamar and Dave Free, childhood friends who cofounded pgLang in 2020 as an arts incubator that, according to its mission statement, speaks in music, podcasts, film, theater, books, TV, visual arts — 'because sometimes we have to use different languages to get the point of our stories across.' Next spring, they have a movie co-starring Lamar, made with Matt Stone and Trey Parker of 'South Park,' about a Black intern who plays a slave in a living history museum.
But so far, their best-known production is the Super Bowl halftime show from February, the most watched halftime show in NFL history, a furious, petty, startling satire of American dreams, joys and contradictions. If its stage kind of looked like a PlayStation controller to you — that was the idea.
Nothing about a Lamar performance is phoned in.
Carson thinks of them as quasi-theatrical musicals. 'The music becomes the script and gives us an intention of how the show will flow the way it does,' he says. 'When we're conceptualizing, you might imagine us just throwing songs onto a board or images up on a board, then going from there, but there's a reason, or a narrative, or something underlying everything on that stage. Myself, I like some tension in there, but everything gets crafted, from the setlist to the color of the lights at one moment to why there are (dancers) on stage another moment. I definitely took that approach from going to plays.'
Take the backdrops.
Your average stadium concert is going to blow up the performer's image to Godzilla proportions, blending in bits of video and a lot of CGI surrealism — the DNA comes directly from the churning swirls of late 1960s concert psychedelia. With Lamar, not so much. Yes, he's gargantuan on those video screens; it is a stadium. But he also mingles with images reminiscent of 'The Last Supper' and sculptor Augusta Savage, Los Angeles car culture and the great contemporary collagist Lauren Halsey; the tour uses seven of her assemblages of Black archival images, street advertising and neon colors, blowing them up big enough to stretch across Soldier Field and superimposing Lamar into the mix. A few years ago, when Lamar headlined Lollapalooza, he performed against large lo-fi backdrops of Black friends and family, made by the contemporary painter Henry Taylor.
Lamar's shows are big on motifs.
For this tour, it's a 1987 Buick Grand National GNX, the same one that was the focus of the half-time performance. 'We've been rolling with that car since the Super Bowl,' Carson said, 'only now its retooled from that, where it was basically a clown car.' Car collectors may flinch. The GNX, counted as one of the last American muscle cars, was so limited edition that only 547 were manufactured by General Motors; each of the top 500 Buick dealers in the nation received just one or two to sell. After a countrywide search, Carson and Co. landed one — then gutted it for the Super Bowl, allowing an improbable number of dancers to appear to stream out of it. The Grand National Tour opens with laser-drawn interpretations of Latino-inspired car window fonts, backed by a swooning serenade from Mexican American mariachi Deyra Barrera. Then the GNX rises out of the stage with Lamar in the driver's seat.
Lamar's previous 'Big Steppers' tour was even more outwardly theatrical: It opened with Lamar at a piano, playing to a puppet of Lamar. Dancers moved mechanically, separated out exactly. At one point in the show, when Lamar bent over, his shadow was cast huge against a backdrop, except on the backdrop, a row of arrows appeared to be stuck in his back.
'Doing that kind of thing in arenas is a little easier,' Carson said. 'You can get more abstract, or you can be a little more theatrical. In a stadium, the expectation is for a spectacle and you think in terms of how three corners of a stadium are getting the same thing. But we can be subtle, we can — Kendrick's always willing to push things past a normal show.' One of the tour's indelible images involves Lamar simply sitting on steps, tens of thousands before him.
Carson knows pop ambitions.
He grew up in the western suburbs of Berkeley and Bellwood, then later moved to the Chicago neighborhood of Pilsen. He attended Columbia College for a time until meeting legendary Chicago fashion designer and Kanye West collaborator Virgil Abloh, who died in 2021. 'I basically dropped out after my first semester sophomore year and began working with Virgil and went on the whole 'Watch the Throne' thing with Kanye and Jay-Z, the album and the tour. I was documenting Kanye and Jay-Z. Virgil took a chance on me. For a few years, that was my college experience.'
He remembers Abloh, no matter how any assistants were around him, often doing the work himself. Indeed, you could argue that Abloh's creative spirit is in 'The Grand National Tour,' in the blend of street clothing and stark minimalist staging, and in the way Lamar, Carson and Free make the familiar feel fresh, and how they somehow come off bold without forgetting to remain accessible.
'You want to be always forging a new way of doing this,' Carson said. 'That could mean our version of what concert choreography could look like. Or our version of what stage design can look like. Or Kendrick's interpretation of what a stadium concert could look like right now. How do you get your own distinctive visual language out? And how do you do it at the scale of a football stadium?'
Orange background

Try Our AI Features

Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:

Comments

No comments yet...

Related Articles

‘Not just an urban story.' New docuseries explores how ‘Miami Kingpins' rose to national acclaim
‘Not just an urban story.' New docuseries explores how ‘Miami Kingpins' rose to national acclaim

Miami Herald

time30 minutes ago

  • Miami Herald

‘Not just an urban story.' New docuseries explores how ‘Miami Kingpins' rose to national acclaim

In the early 80s, Burt Simmons had a choice. On one hand, the American Senior High graduate could continue a successful wrestling career that had already earned him district honors, a state title and even a scholarship to the University of Ohio. Or, the Liberty City native could dive headfirst into the streets, a pathway that had begun to prove lucrative – at his peak, he claimed to have '$100,000 days' – but always ended in one of two places: a penitentiary or coffin. 'I turned down the wrong road,' Simmons, known world over as 'Convertible Burt,' told the Miami Herald, calling himself and others 'products of our environment.' 'That was the trend back then. Miami was built off of that drug money. We were just part of the process.' The consequences of Simmons' decision undergirds the recently released docuseries 'Miami Kingpins.' Produced by Slip-N-Slide Records CEO Ted Lucas, the three-part anthology shows how the trappings of the inner city created three antiheroes in Convertible Bert, Nathaniel 'Bo Dilley' James and James 'Bossman' Sawyer who climbed to the top of the drug game, leaving a legacy that extends into both hip-hop and Miami culture. 'This is not just an urban story,' Lucas said of 'Miami Kingpins' which can be purchased and streamed via Amazon Prime. 'We really showed you an overall view. If you grew up in Miami in the 70s, 80s and 90s, these are things that we were able to see through our eyeballs.' It's no secret that Miami used to be the drug capital of the world. From the infamous 'Paradise Lost' Time Magazine cover to films like 'Scarface' to the Cocaine Cowboys era that turned South Florida into the set of a tropical Western, the examples are endless. What's often missed in these stories, however, is melanin. 'If you look at the top echelon of crime in the city, the folks who are really at the very top are white,' historian Marvin Dunn said in the docuseries. 'But they need people right below them to implement their dirt, to implement their strategy of getting drugs distributed and Black people have satisfied that role and it's very profitable.' Think about the confluence of events that transformed Miami's urban enclaves in the early 80s. The McDuffie Riots. The poverty. The influx of crack cocaine. 'It was the perfect time for the community to lose itself,' Dunn added. 'They saw how well the Cubans and Colombians were doing dealing with drugs so that was a draw for people.' As much as the historical context was important, the docuseries doesn't hide the flashiness, either. These guys made real money during the 80s, even going as far as building their own sub-economy that afforded somebody like Simmons the opportunity to buy a Rolls Royce or party with Mike Tyson in Las Vegas or become a fashion icon. And while many could see the story as glorification, the filmmakers see the project as an educational tool. 'I asked Burt and I asked Bossman 'Would you do it again?'' Lucas said. 'And they told me 'Ted, I spent more time in prison than I spent out in society. It's not worth it.' That story needs to be told before somebody else goes and gets 31 years and six months.' The glorification piece was why former Miami Herald journalist Peter Bailey hesitated to take on the story in the first place. He didn't want to seemingly praise what was objectively a dark part in not just Black Miami but American history. Something, however, changed when he thought about the unique perspective that the project highlights. 'This series is a moment of reckoning that puts weight of morality on America,' said Bailey who not only directed by narrated the project. 'How do we have American citizens living in the wealthiest country in the world forced to sell poison to own community to survive?' Added Bailey: 'Both addict and dealer are bold in desperation. In a state of survival, morality gets thrown out the door. So from an educational standpoint, America and the judicial system, we want to educate them and see how this can inspire some kind of reform.' Therein lies one of the main through lines of the series: how much one's environment can shape their upbringing. In the case of Simmons, James and Sawyer, it clear had disastrous consequences. But for Lucas, who grew up passing by Sawyer's luxurious estate, it showed him a life outside of what his parents wanted. He viewed Sawyer and others as catalyst for him founding Slip-N-Slide Records, the label that launched the careers of Trina, Trick Daddy and Rick Ross, in 1994. 'Bo Dilley had the biggest house in Carol City,' Lucas said. 'The biggest house. When you ride by that house and there's a car in the picture window and the picture window is almost as big as your house. You see a white security guard standing in front of his house. Nobody had a white security guard standing in front of they house in Carol City. It inspired me. Like I could do more than just get a job, be there for 30 years and wait for that pension.' Ross, whose 2006 breakthrough record 'Hustlin'' includes a boast that he touched work like the infamous Convertible Burt, felt similarly. 'The music I began to make tapped into that lifestyle,' Ross said in the docuseries. That lifestyle didn't come without pain. Simmons spent nearly 24 years behind bars in some of the worst federal penitentiaries in the country. He didn't get a chance to really raise his four children. And people – addicts and dealers alike – suffered greatly. As he reflects, Simmons wonders what could've been if he would've chosen wrestling. He's not shy on confidence – 'it would've led into some type of greatness because I'm just a great individual,' Simmons quipped – yet acknowledges how the mistakes he made has allowed him to speak life into others. That, more than anything, is his life's mission now. 'That means the world to me because they were able to take what we did and turned it to a positive,' Simmons said of Lucas and Ross. The whole point of this docuseries, he continued, was 'to change the narrative of people using crime to get money. I wanted to show them it's a way to get money and earn it by doing right. You don't have to do the stuff that we went through.'

Why is Trinity Rodman at Wimbledon? USWNT star in relationship with Ben Shelton
Why is Trinity Rodman at Wimbledon? USWNT star in relationship with Ben Shelton

USA Today

timean hour ago

  • USA Today

Why is Trinity Rodman at Wimbledon? USWNT star in relationship with Ben Shelton

American Ben Shelton secured a top in the final 16 at Wimbledon on Sunday, June 5 — and he made some headlines in the process. Shelton, 22, became the youngest American man to make the final 16 at three majors in one season, dating back to Andy Roddick achieving the same feat in 2004. He has also won each of his three matches so far by straight sets. REQUIRED READING: Ben Shelton, Trinity Rodman make relationship Instagram official The Florida native also shouted out his friends and family after his third-round win, which included another sports star in United States women's soccer star Trinity Rodman. Now, the No. 10-ranked player in the world is looking for his first grand slam victory, with his furthest finish being the semifinals at the U.S. Open in 2023 and Australian Open in 2025. Here's what to know of Shelton and Rodman's relationship, and why the U.S. soccer star is at Wimbledon cheering on Shelton: Why is Trinity Rodman at Wimbledon? Rodman, a forward for the Washington Spirit of the NWSL, has been at each of Shelton's Wimbledon matches. The two make quite the sports power couple. The dynamic athletes went public with their relationship on March 18 after Shelton posted pictures to Instagram. Shelton even shouted out Rodman after his third-round win on July 5 over Marton Fucsovics. "It's not just been me here, I have a great team. My parents are here, my girlfriend's here," Shelton said as the ESPN broadcast panned to Shelton's parents and Rodman in the stands. Shelton also spoke with USA TODAY in April on his relationship with Rodman. "She's great," he said. "I think we're both very happy. And yeah, it's been cool getting to know her and spend time with her." Who is Trinity Rodman? Rodman is a 23-year-old soccer player who's one of the best scorers for the U.S. Women's National Team. Rodman, the daughter of Basketball Hall of Famer Dennis Rodman, scored three goals at the 2024 Paris Olympics to help lead the United States to a gold medal. She was also the youngest person ever drafted to the NWSL (18 years old) after going No. 2 overall to the Washington Spirit in 2021. The Guardian ranked Rodman the No. 5 player in the world in 2024, with fellow American forward Sophia Wilson at No. 3 on the list. Rodman's signature moment of her young USWNT career came in the knockout round against Japan, when she sent the U.S. to the semifinals of the 2024 Paris Olympics after scoring an extra-time goal to win 1-0. Rodman was initially enrolled to play soccer at Washington State but opted to forgo her college career to play professionally in the NWSL. Her brother, DJ Rodman, played basketball at Washington State and USC.

Cardi B deletes all photos of Stefon Diggs, sparks split rumors one month after going Instagram-official
Cardi B deletes all photos of Stefon Diggs, sparks split rumors one month after going Instagram-official

New York Post

timean hour ago

  • New York Post

Cardi B deletes all photos of Stefon Diggs, sparks split rumors one month after going Instagram-official

Have Cardi B and Stefon Diggs gone their separate ways? Just one month after making their romance Instagram-official, the Grammy-winning rapper has wiped all traces of the NFL star from her social media. Over the weekend, the 'Bodak Yellow' rapper, 32, deleted all photos of her with the New England Patriots wide receiver — prompting breakup rumors to swirl. 4 Cardi B has wiped all traces of Stefon Diggs from her social media just one month after making their romance Instagram-official. Instagram/iamcardib Diggs has made several appearances on the rapper's Instagram in recent weeks, with his debut being a loved-up post of the duo on a yacht during their Memorial Day celebration in Miami, Fla. The pair had also recently returned from a romantic getaway to France, during which Diggs rented out the Château de Farcheville castle for her. In videos shared on her Instagram Story on June 24, Cardi B gushed over the athlete's romantic gesture. 'Why this man got us staying in a castle? I'm talking about a real castle,' she said in the clip. 4 Over the weekend, the rapper, 32, deleted all photos of her with the New England Patriots wide receiver on social media. NBAE via Getty Images But all photos of Diggs have since been wiped from the 'WAP' rapper's profile, as fans flocked to social media to fuel speculation that the pair have called it quits. On Sunday, the rapper — who is currently in Paris — shared a cryptic post on her Instagram Story in which she told fans she was 'sooo tired' — without addressing fan speculation. 'Have they broken up already??' one person asked, while another wrote, 'Bro didn't renew the 30 day trial.' 4 Cardi B attends the Schiaparelli Haute Couture Fall/Winter 2025/2026 show as part of Paris Fashion Week on July 07, 2025. Getty Images Another penned, 'Damn they over already? That was quick,' as a fourth added, 'Cardi where Diggs at?' However, other fans believe that the 'Up' rapper may have simply archived her photos to make way for the promotion of her upcoming album 'Am I the Drama?' set to be released on Sept. 19. Despite the 'Thru Your Phone' rapper's social media cleanup, the pair still follow each other on the platform. The pair first sparked romance rumors in February after being spotted getting hot and heavy on the dance floor in NYC together. Days later, the duo spent Valentine's Day together. In May, Cardi B and Diggs made their first public appearance at an NBA playoff game between the Boston Celtics and the New York Knicks at Madison Square Garden. 4 The rapper's romance with the NFL star came hot on the heels of her messy divorce from Migos alum Offset. Instagram/@iamcardib The pair's romance came hot on the heels of her messy divorce from Migos alum Offset, with whom she shares three young children. She claimed that Offset has only seen their youngest child, 8-month-old Blossom, a handful of times since the baby's arrival in September.

DOWNLOAD THE APP

Get Started Now: Download the App

Ready to dive into a world of global content with local flavor? Download Daily8 app today from your preferred app store and start exploring.
app-storeplay-store