The 2010s File Feature
The Greatest
The Greatest: Sia and Kendrick Lamar's Anthem of Endurance on the Billboard Hot 100 "The Greatest," the collaboration between Australian singer-songwriter Si…
01 The Story
The Greatest: Sia and Kendrick Lamar's Anthem of Endurance on the Billboard Hot 100
"The Greatest," the collaboration between Australian singer-songwriter Sia and Compton rapper Kendrick Lamar, emerged in September 2016 as one of the year's most emotionally complex and commercially substantial popular music events. Released on September 23, 2016, the song accompanied the short film The Greatest, a visually striking piece directed by Daniel Pearl that featured choreography by Sia's frequent collaborator Ryan Heffington and dancer Maddie Ziegler, who had appeared in numerous Sia visual projects since the breakout success of the "Chandelier" video in 2014. The track's combination of Sia's anthemic vocal style, Kendrick Lamar's incisive lyrical contribution, and a production aesthetic that blended electronic pop with gospel-inflected orchestration created a song that spoke simultaneously to personal endurance and collective grief.
The Orlando Context
The song was written in direct response to the Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando, Florida, which occurred on June 12, 2016, and resulted in 49 deaths, making it the deadliest mass shooting in American history at that point. The Pulse nightclub was a specifically LGBTQ+ space, and the attack was widely understood as a hate crime targeting queer and Latinx communities. Sia and her creative collaborators responded by creating a song and accompanying visual that celebrated resilience, survival, and the human capacity to endure devastating loss.
The decision to address the tragedy through artistic creation rather than direct commentary was characteristic of Sia's broader artistic approach. Rather than writing a song that named the event explicitly, Sia and her team created a piece that captured the emotional register of grief and determination that followed the attack, a universalizing strategy that allowed the song to speak to the specific tragedy while also resonating with anyone who had experienced loss, persecution, or the need to find strength in devastating circumstances. The casting of the short film with LGBTQ+ youth dancers reinforced the song's solidarity with the communities most directly affected.
Kendrick Lamar's Contribution
Kendrick Lamar's participation in the project added a dimension that expanded the song's thematic reach and its commercial appeal. By September 2016, Lamar was at the peak of a creative period that had produced To Pimp a Butterfly in 2015 and would culminate in DAMN. in 2017, the album that would make him the first rapper to win the Pulitzer Prize for Music. His verse on "The Greatest" addressed the specific experience of being Black in America, connecting the tragedy of the Pulse shooting to the broader pattern of violence against marginalized communities and insisting that the only response to such violence was continued assertion of life, culture, and identity.
The verse was characteristically dense in imagery and cultural reference, drawing on Lamar's established practice of using specific detail and historical consciousness to illuminate larger patterns. His contribution elevated "The Greatest" from an emotional response to a specific tragedy into a statement about the structural conditions that produce such tragedies and the forms of resistance that communities have historically used to survive them. The combination of Sia's melodic craft and Lamar's lyrical weight created a track with unusual emotional and intellectual range for a mainstream pop-adjacent release.
Chart Performance
The song debuted on the Billboard Hot 100 at number 52 on September 24, 2016 and began a steady ascent that reflected growing radio support alongside strong streaming performance. The track climbed to number 24 in its second week before settling into a mid-chart pattern typical of adult contemporary and pop crossover tracks with strong radio performance but moderate streaming numbers relative to pure hip-hop or dance-pop releases.
Its peak came on December 10, 2016, when the song reached number 18 on the Hot 100. This peak, achieved nearly three months after the song's debut, was driven by sustained radio airplay and consistent streaming numbers rather than a viral moment or specific promotional event, a pattern more associated with adult contemporary radio hits than with streaming-driven rap and pop singles. The song spent a total of 23 weeks on the Hot 100, a remarkable tenure that reflected its sustained emotional resonance with radio audiences through the fall and into the winter of 2016.
Critical Reception
Critical response to "The Greatest" was consistently strong. Reviewers praised the song's emotional intelligence, the chemistry between Sia and Lamar as collaborative partners, and the visual treatment that accompanied its release. The combination of Sia's anthemic hooks and Lamar's intellectual rigor produced a track that satisfied both pop audiences seeking emotional release and music critics looking for substantive engagement with serious themes.
The song was nominated for a Grammy Award for Best Pop Duo/Group Performance, reflecting the Recording Academy's recognition of its commercial and artistic achievement. It performed especially well on adult contemporary radio formats, where its melodic accessibility and emotional weight aligned with the preferences of that audience demographic. The song also charted in numerous international markets, reaching the top twenty in Australia, the United Kingdom, and several European countries.
Sia's Broader Commercial Context
"The Greatest" arrived during what had been the most commercially successful period of Sia's career as a recording artist under her own name. Her 2014 album 1000 Forms of Fear had reached number one in Australia and the United Kingdom and produced "Chandelier," which peaked at number 8 on the Hot 100 and became one of the decade's most critically acclaimed pop singles. "The Greatest" extended the commercial and critical momentum of that period while marking a significant thematic departure from the inward-focused psychological portraits of her earlier 2010s work into more explicitly political and communal territory. The collaboration with Lamar signaled an ambition to engage with the largest social questions of the moment, not merely the private emotional experiences she had made her artistic signature.
02 Song Meaning
Endurance as Identity: The Themes of "The Greatest"
"The Greatest" is a song about survival understood not as mere biological continuation but as an act of defiance that carries political and cultural meaning. Written in response to the Pulse nightclub shooting of June 2016, the track uses the language of endurance and self-assertion to process collective grief and articulate a form of resistance that is available to communities that have experienced targeted violence. The collaboration between Sia and Kendrick Lamar brings together two distinct artistic traditions, melodic pop songwriting focused on internal emotional experience and politically conscious rap addressing structural social conditions, and the synthesis produces a statement that operates on multiple thematic levels simultaneously.
The Assertion of Greatness as Resistance
The title and central assertion of the song carries deliberate rhetorical weight. To claim greatness in the aftermath of tragedy that was designed to diminish, terrorize, and erase is to refuse the intended effect of the violence. The song's core argument is that survival itself is a form of greatness, that continuing to exist, to love, to create, and to celebrate identity in the face of hatred directed at that identity constitutes an achievement worthy of recognition and celebration.
This argument has deep roots in LGBTQ+ cultural history. Communities that have faced sustained persecution, from the Stonewall era through the AIDS crisis through ongoing violence against trans individuals, have consistently developed cultural traditions that celebrate survival and collective resilience as forms of resistance. Sia's song participates in and extends that tradition, drawing the post-Pulse moment into the longer arc of queer community endurance and insisting that the appropriate response to hatred is not diminishment but amplification of the life and culture being targeted.
Sia's Melodic Craft in Service of Communal Grief
Sia's songwriting approach on "The Greatest" demonstrates her capacity to create melodic containers for large emotional content without reducing that content to simplistic uplift. The song's chorus is built on an ascending melodic line that carries the feeling of emotional breakthrough, of something that has been compressed and constrained finally being released into open air. This musical architecture mirrors the thematic content: the movement from grief and pain toward assertion and celebration requires an emotional journey, not a simple cut from one state to another.
The production reinforces this journey structure through dynamics, beginning in a more restrained register and building toward a larger, more orchestrated expression of the central emotion. The gospel-influenced elements in the arrangement connect the song to a tradition of communal musical processing of grief and injustice, a tradition with deep roots in both African American musical history and LGBTQ+ cultural history, where gospel's combination of pain and transcendence has long resonated with communities navigating systemic marginalization.
Kendrick Lamar's Verse: Historical Consciousness and Specific Detail
Lamar's contribution to the track operates differently from Sia's melodic processing of grief. His verse is dense with cultural and historical reference, connecting the specific tragedy of Pulse to a longer pattern of violence against Black and brown communities in America and insisting that this pattern has always been met with cultural resistance and continued assertion of life. The verse refuses to treat the Pulse shooting as an isolated event and instead situates it within an ongoing historical struggle, a move that expands the song's emotional scope without diluting its specificity.
The verse's references to Mohammed Ali, specifically the phrase "we gon' be alright" that had become associated with Lamar's own song from To Pimp a Butterfly, drew connections between different communities and different historical moments of facing hatred with determined endurance. This intertextual dimension gave the song a richness that rewarded attentive listeners while remaining emotionally accessible to those who engaged with the track primarily through its melodic and vocal elements.
Choreography and Visual Meaning
The short film that accompanied the song was itself a significant artistic statement. Directed by Daniel Pearl with choreography by Ryan Heffington, the film featured a group of young dancers, many of them LGBTQ+ identified, performing in a style that drew on voguing and other forms of queer dance culture alongside more formally trained contemporary movement. The presence of Maddie Ziegler, who had become closely identified with Sia's visual work, alongside these community dancers created a visual dialogue between Sia's established artistic world and the specific communities the song was addressing.
The choreography itself conveyed the song's thematic content through movement: grief expressed through falling and fragmentation, followed by assertion expressed through rising, expanding, and community formation. The visual language of queer dance culture, with its roots in Harlem ballroom and its history as a form of community building and identity affirmation for communities facing persecution, gave the film a specificity and cultural depth that amplified the song's themes far beyond what the audio recording alone could convey. Together, the track and its visual treatment constituted a complete artistic statement about the relationship between cultural expression, community identity, and survival in the face of targeted violence.
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