Queen of Queens: The Soundtrack Behind the Legend

Serena Williams built the greatest tennis career in history fueled by a lifelong, eclectic love of music — from N.W.A. to New Edition to Green Day — that revealed a woman always larger than the sport that made her famous.

Serena Williams

Tracklist

Straight Outta Compton — N.W.A.
Cool It Now — New Edition
Disappearing Boy — Green Day
Flashdance...What a Feeling - Radio Edit — Irene Cara
Making Love Out of Nothing at All — Air Supply
I Believe — Bon Jovi
The One — Mary J. Blige, Drake
Straight Outta Compton — N.W.A.
Disappearing Boy — Green Day
I Will Survive — Gloria Gaynor
Mama Said Knock You Out — LL COOL J
Roar — Katy Perry
Sorry — Beyoncé
Blank Space — Taylor Swift
Majesty (with Labrinth & feat. Eminem) — Nicki Minaj, Labrinth, Eminem
Beauty and the Beast — Angela Lansbury, Disney
Back That Azz Up — JUVENILE, Lil Wayne, Mannie Fresh
Pony — Ginuwine
Can You Stand The Rain — New Edition
Mama Said Knock You Out — LL COOL J
Bodak Yellow — Cardi B
Stronger (What Doesn't Kill You) — Kelly Clarkson
Not Like Us — Kendrick Lamar
In Common — Alicia Keys
I Believe — Bon Jovi

Transcript

Straight Outta Compton (1981-1994)

The courts at East Compton Park had no nets some mornings. The asphalt was cracked in long, jagged seams that sent a tennis ball skipping sideways if you didn't read the surface right. Richard Williams didn't care. He had a shopping cart full of old balls, a hand-drawn seventy-eight-page plan for his daughters' future, and the unshakable belief that two Black girls from one of the most dangerous neighborhoods in America could dominate the whitest sport on Earth. By the late 1980s, those practice sessions had become a fixture of the neighborhood—Venus and Serena drilling forehands while the world around them throbbed with bass. Car stereos rolled past on South Willowbrook Avenue pumping New Edition's "Cool It Now" and whatever else was climbing the R&B charts, the slick harmonies bleeding into the clatter of racket on ball.

Compton in 1988 was a place the rest of America was just learning to see. The city's unemployment rate was brutal, gang violence had become a nightly fact, and the LAPD's aggressive policing tactics had turned entire blocks into pressure cookers. But the neighborhood also had a pulse that was about to rewrite American culture. In a small studio not far from those cracked courts, five young men were finishing an album that would detonate like a flashbang across the music industry.

N.W.A.'s "Straight Outta Compton" dropped in August 1988, and it did not ask permission. The title track opened with Ice Cube's snarling declaration of origin—"Straight outta Compton, crazy motherfucker named Ice Cube"—and it turned a zip code into a war cry. The FBI sent a letter. Radio stations refused to play it. And yet the album went platinum without a single charting single, carried entirely by word of mouth and the cassette tapes that passed hand to hand through neighborhoods exactly like the one where Serena Williams, then six years old, was learning to hold a racket. The song was more than music in Compton; it was geography made audible, a defiant announcement that this place and its people existed on their own terms. Serena absorbed that defiance. Years later, she would make the connection explicit: at the 2009 US Open, she chose "Straight Outta Compton" as her walkout song, the track's opening sirens filling Arthur Ashe Stadium as she strode toward the baseline. By all accounts, the choice was not casual nostalgia—it was a declaration of roots, a reminder to herself and twenty-three thousand spectators that she had come from a place most of them could not imagine.

Richard Williams understood the stakes of that environment better than anyone. He had moved the family to Compton deliberately, he later said, because he wanted his daughters to be tough. But toughness had a cost. Gunshots interrupted practice. Gang members watched from the bleachers, sometimes offering protection, sometimes not. In his 2014 memoir "Black and White: The Way I See It," Richard described shielding his girls from stray bullets on more than one occasion. The music that surrounded them—gangsta rap's unflinching narration of Black life under siege—was not background noise. It was the soundtrack to the daily negotiation between ambition and survival.

And then there was the other sound that crept into young Serena's world: the buzzing, distorted chords of early punk rock. Green Day released their debut album in 1990, when Serena was eight, and buried on it was a track called "Disappearing Boy"—a fast, anxious burst about feeling invisible. It is, on its face, an unlikely favorite for a future Grand Slam champion. But according to reports, whenever Serena attends a Green Day concert, she reportedly requests that deep cut. Her devotion to the band is well-documented. As she told interviewers with characteristic bluntness: "I'm a bit of a stalker. I don't know how many I've been to, maybe too much. It's got to the point where I know the run of the show. I always know when the last song is coming, the encore." That obsession had to start somewhere, and the timing points squarely to this era—a girl on the verge of adolescence, finding something in punk's raw energy that matched the intensity her father was drilling into her every afternoon.

By 1991, the drilling was about to change venues. Richard had seen enough. He had pushed his daughters as far as Compton's public courts could take them, and he had found a coach in Florida willing to bet on their talent. Rick Macci, who ran an elite tennis academy in West Palm Beach, agreed to train both girls after watching a young Venus play. The family packed up and left California. Serena was nine. She left behind the cracked asphalt, the shopping-cart ball hopper, the sound of sirens mixing with sub-bass—all of it. But Compton never left her. It lived in the walkout song she would choose decades later, in the punk records she would chase across continents, in the way she carried herself onto every court she ever played: straight outta Compton, with nothing to prove and everything to win.

The Prodigy Turns Pro (1995-1999)

The air inside Arthur Ashe Stadium on the evening of September 11, 1999, carried the particular electricity that only New York can manufacture—seventy thousand decisions converging on a single rectangle of hardcourt where a seventeen-year-old from Compton was about to change the sport forever. Serena Williams had already stunned the draw, cutting through a field of established names to reach the final. Across the net stood Martina Hingis, the world number one, the Swiss prodigy who had owned the top ranking for most of the decade's back half. But Serena, in her beaded braids and white Nike dress, moved like someone who had already seen the ending.

The Williams family's relocation from Compton to West Palm Beach, Florida, in 1995 had been a deliberate act of reinvention. Richard Williams pulled his daughters from the junior circuit, trained them himself, and shielded them from a tennis establishment that didn't know what to make of two Black girls from a neighborhood synonymous with gangsta rap. By the time Serena turned professional at fourteen, she was already an outsider twice over—too young for the tour, too different for the country club set. The mid-nineties tennis world hummed with polite applause and sponsor-safe pop. You couldn't escape the soft-rock anthems drifting from locker room speakers and hotel lobbies—earnest power ballads that soundtracked the era's quieter moments. Meanwhile, the arena rock of bands like Bon Jovi provided the backdrop for a generation raised on MTV and stadium tours, the kind of sweeping, fist-pumping music that filled the spaces between points at outdoor tournaments.

But the song that mattered most to Serena Williams on court was neither hip-hop nor rock. It was a 1983 movie anthem sung by Irene Cara. In a 2015 interview with Sky Sports, Williams revealed that she routinely sang "Flashdance... What a Feeling" inside her head during matches to stay calm and focused. "Usually I'm singing a song in my head," she explained, noting that when she stopped singing, her game suffered. Sky Sports reported that even at thirty-three, Williams "still struggles to overcome fears and insecurity when on court, coping with the problem by singing Irene Cara's 'Flashdance…What A Feeling.'" The BBC later confirmed the ritual, reporting that "before every match, Serena Williams reportedly listens to Flashdance…What a Feeling by Irene Cara, a song that helps her to gather her strength and prepare her mind before the trials ahead."

Think about what that means for a seventeen-year-old walking onto the biggest stage in American tennis. The song's central lyric—"Take your passion and make it happen"—is almost absurdly literal for the daughter of a man who wrote a seventy-eight-page plan for his unborn daughters' tennis careers. But the deeper pull of the Flashdance theme is its insistence that fear and exhilaration are the same feeling, that the body knows what to do if the mind will just get out of the way. On that September night in Flushing Meadows, whatever internal soundtrack was running through Serena's mind, her body delivered. She broke Hingis early in the first set, powered through 6-3, then weathered a tighter second set before closing it out 7-6 in a tiebreak that left the stadium roaring. At seventeen years and 355 days old, she was a Grand Slam champion.

The victory was seismic not just for what it was but for what it signaled. The Williams sisters had been dismissed, doubted, and condescended to since the moment they appeared on the national radar. Richard's bold predictions had been treated as delusion. Now Serena stood at the net, arms raised, the youngest US Open women's champion since Pam Shriver reached the final as a teenager two decades earlier. Venus, watching from the stands, had been expected to be the first sister to break through. Instead, Serena had slipped past everyone's predictions, including, perhaps, her own.

In the years that followed, the Flashdance ritual would become a quiet constant—a private mechanism for managing the pressure that only compounded with each title. But on that night in 1999, the mechanism was still new, still raw, still the secret weapon of a teenager who had taught herself to turn terror into triumph. She didn't yet know how many times she would need it. She only knew it worked.

The Serena Slam (2002-2004)

Paris in early June carries a particular electricity — the clay at Roland Garros bakes in the late-spring sun, and the crowd murmurs in a language Serena Williams didn't speak but didn't need to. On June 7, 2003, she dismantled Justine Henin-Hardenne in the French Open final to complete something no one had done quite this way: hold all four Grand Slam trophies at once. Not in a calendar year, but across a ruthless streak that began at the 2002 French Open and ran through Wimbledon, the US Open, and now back to Paris. The press called it the Serena Slam. She was twenty-one years old, and she owned every major title in women's tennis simultaneously.

The dominance was staggering, but what made it unmistakable was the attitude she carried into every arena. By this era, Serena had begun pioneering the use of personalized walkout songs in professional tennis — a ritual borrowed from boxing and hip-hop culture that felt radical in a sport still governed by country-club decorum. As verified by New York Magazine, her first instinct for the US Open had been to walk out to N.W.A.'s "Straight Outta Compton," a defiant Compton identity statement that officials found too provocative. The song was her origin story compressed into four minutes of fury, and when tournament organizers pushed back, she didn't retreat — she pivoted.

The replacement she chose was just as deliberate. As New York Magazine confirmed, Serena selected "The One" by Mary J. Blige featuring Drake as her official US Open walkout song. Where N.W.A. was a declaration of where she came from, "The One" was a declaration of what she had become. Mary J. Blige — the Queen of Hip-Hop Soul, a fellow Black woman who had clawed her way through adversity to reign over her genre — was a mirror Serena could recognize. The song's pulsing confidence, its insistence on singular greatness, matched the psychological warfare of walking onto Arthur Ashe Stadium knowing you held every major trophy on the planet. Officials could police the edges of her self-expression, but they couldn't dilute the message. She would find another song that said the same thing: I am the one.

That choice mattered because Serena understood, even then, that music was not decoration — it was armor. The walkout song was the last thing she heard before the crowd noise swallowed everything, the final calibration of her mental state. "The One" carried the weight of R&B royalty and the cool certainty of someone who had already proven the doubters wrong. Every time the opening notes hit the stadium speakers, they announced not just a player but a force that had reshaped the sport's power structure. The Serena Slam wasn't just about winning four titles; it was about the psychological dominance that made opponents feel beaten before the first serve.

Away from the courts, Serena's musical world during this era was broader and more surprising than the hip-hop and R&B that defined her public image. She had developed a documented affinity for Green Day — the Berkeley punk band that seemed, on paper, like an unexpected fit for a Black tennis champion from Compton. Her enthusiasm for the band was evident enough that she became known to follow their work closely, catching shows whenever her schedule allowed. She later told interviewers with characteristic bluntness about her fandom: "I'm a bit of a stalker," she joked. "I don't know how many I've been to, maybe too much. It's got to the point where I know the run of the show. I always know when the last song is coming, the encore." The connection ran deep enough that when Billie Joe Armstrong called her to present Green Day at the Pre-Grammy Gala, she posted on Instagram: "When @billiejoearmstrong calls you to present their band, you jump on a plane and do it." Green Day's raw energy — tracks like "Disappearing Boy" buzzing with restless punk aggression — fed something in Serena that the polished world of professional tennis couldn't.

By the end of 2003, the recognition was global and official. She was named the Laureus World Sportswoman of the Year — the first of four times she would claim the honor — cementing her status as not merely the best tennis player but the dominant force in women's sport, period. The girl from Compton who had once trained on cracked public courts now stood at the absolute summit, holding every trophy, choosing her own soundtrack, and daring the world to keep up. The walkout song would change over the years, but the message never did.

Surviving the Fall (2003-2011)

After injuries, personal losses, and ranking collapses, Serena stages a comeback that stuns the tennis world, winning Wimbledon and the US Open.

Queen of Queens (2012-2016)

The warehouse in New Orleans smelled like sweat and old wood. Cameras rolled under moody lighting as a group of women—dancers, poets, artists—moved through choreography that was part protest, part prayer. It was early 2016, and Beyoncé Knowles-Carter was assembling her visual album Lemonade in secret, pulling together the fiercest women she knew to populate its frames. Among them, wearing a leotard and moving with the coiled authority of someone who had spent three decades training her body as a weapon, was Serena Williams.

By the time Serena walked onto that set, she had already spent the better part of four years reasserting herself as the most dominant force in tennis history. After the wilderness years of injury and grief, the early 2010s became her coronation. She won Wimbledon and the US Open in 2012, the French Open and the US Open again in 2013, and then, in 2015, she went on a tear so complete that Sports Illustrated named her Sportsperson of the Year that December—the first woman to receive the honor since Mary Decker in 1983. The recognition was overdue and undeniable. She had won three of four Grand Slams that season, held the number-one ranking for the entire year, and carried herself with a ferocity that made opponents look like they were playing a different sport. Taylor Swift's "Blank Space," a pop confection about power and control, circulated among discussions of Serena's musical taste during this period, fitting neatly alongside the harder-edged hip-hop she had always favored. But what was happening to Serena transcended playlists. Forbes confirmed her as the world's highest-paid female athlete in 2016, with $29 million in earnings—a figure that reflected not just prize money but a cultural footprint that had outgrown tennis entirely.

So when the call came from Beyoncé's camp, it made a certain kind of sense. As Serena later explained to The New York Times: "I have known the director since I was like nine years old. I know Beyoncé pretty well, so they were like, we would love for you to be in this particular song. It's about strength and it's about courage and that's what we see you as." The song was "Sorry," the defiant, dancehall-inflected track from Lemonade that dropped on HBO on April 23, 2016, and immediately detonated across the culture. In the video, Serena doesn't just cameo—she commands. She twerks in a chair. She stares down the camera with the same look she gives opponents before an ace. She inhabits the song's message of unapologetic self-possession so completely that it becomes impossible to separate the athlete from the art. Serena would later call it her favorite Beyoncé song, and the feeling was clearly mutual: their friendship, forged over years of mutual admiration, had found its most visible expression.

What made the "Sorry" moment so potent was its timing. This was not a retired legend doing a nostalgia lap. This was the reigning number-one tennis player on Earth, at the peak of her powers, stepping into a music video and holding the screen against one of the greatest performers alive. The image of Serena in that warehouse—muscular, unapologetic, radiant—became one of the defining visual artifacts of 2016, shared millions of times, analyzed in think pieces, and cited in conversations about what it means for a Black woman to own her body and her narrative in public.

Serena's cultural life during these years was not confined to Beyoncé's orbit. She remained, as always, a woman of eclectic and sometimes surprising musical devotion. Her love of Green Day continued unabated; she had given Billie Joe Armstrong and his family a private tour of Wimbledon back in 2012, and she kept showing up at their European concerts with the zeal of a superfan. "I'm a bit of a stalker," she joked in one interview. "I don't know how many I've been to, maybe too much. It's got to the point where I know the run of the show. I always know when the last song is coming, the encore." The image is almost surreal: the most decorated tennis player of her generation, standing in a crowd at a punk rock show, mouthing every word.

But it was the Beyoncé collaboration that crystallized what these years meant. When Serena later appeared in a 2018 Beats by Dre commercial titled "Queen of Queens," set to Nicki Minaj's thundering "Majesty" featuring Eminem and Labrinth, she chose the song herself—a track built around the premise that royalty is earned, not given. The commercial was a coronation in miniature, but the throne had already been secured two years earlier, in a New Orleans warehouse, moving to Beyoncé's beat, daring the world to look away.

Beauty and the Beast (2017-2017)

The Contemporary Arts Center in New Orleans had been transformed. On the evening of November 16, 2017, its industrial bones were draped in something out of a storybook — an enchanted forest of cascading florals, candlelit archways, and, most improbably, a full-sized carousel installed inside the reception hall. Serena Williams was getting married, and she was doing it her way: part Disney fairy tale, part Compton house party, all spectacle. The guest list read like a who's who of American celebrity — Kim Kardashian, Kelly Rowland, Eva Longoria, Ciara — but the evening's defining energy came from the woman in the Alexander McQueen gown and the eclectic playlist she had personally curated to soundtrack the biggest night of her life.

Serena and Alexis Ohanian's love story had unfolded with the improbability of a rom-com. They met at a hotel in Rome in 2015 when he sat at a table near hers and she tried to shoo him away by warning of rats. He stayed. By December 2016, he proposed at the same hotel, and by September 2017, Serena had given birth to their daughter, Olympia. The wedding, delayed from its original date so Serena could recover from the emergency C-section and pulmonary embolism that nearly killed her, arrived two months later with all the cathartic joy of a woman who had survived something far more harrowing than anyone outside her inner circle yet fully understood. The theme she chose — Beauty and the Beast — was not merely decorative. It was a declaration: that tenderness and ferocity could coexist, that a love story could be both delicate and defiant.

When the couple took the floor for their first dance, the song that filled the room was "Tale as Old as Time," Angela Lansbury's gossamer ballad from the 1991 Disney classic. As BET and Vogue both confirmed in their coverage of the wedding, this was the couple's chosen first dance — the centerpiece of an evening built around the Beauty and the Beast mythology. The choice was pitch-perfect for the theme, but it also carried a deeper resonance for a woman who had spent her career defying the tennis establishment's narrow definitions of grace and femininity. Serena had always been cast as the beast in someone else's story — too powerful, too muscular, too loud, too Black for a sport draped in country-club gentility. Here, under a canopy of white roses, she reclaimed the narrative entirely. The beast was beautiful, always had been, and the tale was hers to tell. Alexis, the quiet tech entrepreneur who had built Reddit into a cultural force, swayed beside her — the gentle counterpart who never once asked her to be smaller.

But a Serena Williams wedding was never going to stay in the ballroom register for long. As BET documented in its detailed breakdown of the evening's playlist, "The couple took their first dance to 'Tale as Old as Time,' backed it up to 'Back That Azz Up' and no Beauty and the Beast-themed wedding can complete without 'Be Our Guest,' but some of the other songs may shock you — including posing for pics on the carousel to Ginuwine's 'Pony.'" That indoor carousel became the evening's most viral image: guests climbing aboard painted horses while Ginuwine's slinky 1996 hit slithered through the speakers, with Beyoncé herself among those riding. The juxtaposition was pure Serena — Disney princess one moment, 90s R&B queen the next, never pretending the two impulses were contradictory.

The reception's emotional high point, however, belonged to New Edition. ET Online reported that Serena had personally requested the group to perform a live set at the reception. When Bobby Brown, Ronnie DeVoe, and the rest of the crew launched into "Can You Stand the Rain," the room understood: this was not just a wedding playlist but an autobiography in song. The choice to feature New Edition — a group whose music belonged to the cultural landscape of her youth — carried particular weight. Having them perform live, decades later, at her wedding in New Orleans was Serena closing a circle, the girl from the courts on East Compton Boulevard now the woman who could summon artists from her past to sing at her fairy tale.

Meanwhile, video from the reception captured Venus Williams dancing uninhibitedly to Juvenile's "Back That Azz Up," a moment BET gleefully documented. It was a reminder that for all the evening's storybook elegance, the Williams sisters remained rooted in the bounce and brass of the culture that raised them. The night stretched long, the carousel kept spinning, and somewhere between the Disney ballads and the 90s slow jams, Serena Williams became Serena Williams Ohanian — not a reinvention, but an expansion, the same fierce competitor now holding a new title she had chosen for herself.

Knock You Out: Motherhood and the Final Push (2017-2022)

On September 8, 2018, the late-summer air inside Arthur Ashe Stadium carried the tension of history unfinished. Serena Williams walked onto the court for the US Open final against Naomi Osaka, chasing her twenty-fourth Grand Slam singles title — the one that would tie Margaret Court's all-time record. She was thirty-six years old. She was a mother. Barely a year earlier, on September 1, 2017, she had given birth to her daughter, Alexis Olympia Ohanian Jr., after a harrowing delivery that included an emergency C-section and life-threatening blood clots. The fact that she was standing in a Grand Slam final at all was its own kind of knockout punch. What made the moment even more staggering was the detail that had emerged months after her twenty-third title at the 2017 Australian Open: she had won that entire tournament while eight weeks pregnant, dismantling every opponent in Melbourne without knowing she was carrying Olympia. The body that had dominated tennis for two decades had been building a life even as it competed at the highest level of sport.

The comeback was not seamless. It was grueling, stitched together by early losses, a body relearning its own center of gravity, and the invisible weight of postpartum recovery that Serena would later speak about publicly. But she kept showing up. Between 2018 and 2019, she reached four Grand Slam finals — Wimbledon 2018, the US Open 2018, Wimbledon 2019, and the US Open 2019 — each time falling short of number twenty-four, each time refusing to frame the loss as the end. Off the court, her personality remained defiantly joyful. At a 2019 karaoke outing in Palm Beach, Page Six and Metro documented Serena belting out Cardi B's "Bodak Yellow," delivering the "I don't dance now, I make money moves" hook with the same ferocity she brought to a second serve. It was a deliberate choice of anthem — a song about a woman who had reinvented herself and refused to be diminished.

Nothing captured the spirit of this era more precisely than the 2018 Chase commercial that became a cultural moment in its own right. In the ad, Serena narrated her return to tennis through the lens of motherhood, her voice reciting the lyrics to LL Cool J's "Mama Said Knock You Out" over footage of her training, holding Olympia, and competing on the sport's biggest stages. As reported by B&T and documented by iSpot.tv, the commercial reframed the 1990 hip-hop classic as something more than a boast — it became a declaration of maternal power. LL Cool J's original track was a defiant response to critics who had counted him out, a snarling promise that the comeback would be louder than the doubters. In Serena's mouth, those words carried an additional dimension: the knockout wasn't just athletic, it was existential. She was a woman who had nearly died in childbirth, who had battled back from pulmonary embolisms, who had been told — implicitly and explicitly — that motherhood was the finish line for a female athlete. The commercial didn't just use the song; it claimed it. "Don't call it a comeback," the lyrics warned, and Serena embodied every syllable.

The broader culture seemed to echo the theme. At the 2018 US Open opening ceremony, Kelly Clarkson performed a medley at Arthur Ashe Stadium that included "Stronger (What Doesn't Kill You)," telling the crowd, "I love opening for Serena Williams" — a line that collapsed the distance between pop spectacle and sporting theater. Meanwhile, by accounts of her public statements, Serena's engagement with music remained eclectic and uncontainable. As she told Green Day Authority in a separate interview about her devotion to the punk-rock band: "I'm a bit of a stalker," she joked. "I don't know how many I've been to, maybe too much. It's got to the point where I know the run of the show. I always know when the last song is coming, the encore." That obsessive attention — to setlists, to patterns, to the architecture of performance — mirrored the way she studied opponents, dissected her own game, and mapped the long arc of her career.

By 2022, the arc was bending toward its conclusion. On August 9, Serena published an essay in Vogue announcing what she called her "evolution" away from professional tennis, a word chosen with surgical precision — not retirement, not goodbye, but transformation. Twenty-three Grand Slam singles titles. Four Olympic gold medals. A daughter who had watched her mother compete in a catsuit and a tutu. The essay was reflective, honest about the grief of leaving, and resolute about what came next. Serena Williams had spent five years proving that motherhood was not a subtraction from greatness but an addition to it, and the song she had chosen to narrate that proof — "Mama Said Knock You Out" — still echoed like a promise kept.

Not Like Us: The Icon Unleashed (2022-2025)

The Caesars Superdome in New Orleans shook with 70,000 voices on the night of February 9, 2025. Kendrick Lamar was midway through his Super Bowl LIX halftime performance, the bass rattling the retractable roof, when the opening bars of "Not Like Us" dropped—the Drake diss track that had already become the most culturally dominant record of the previous year. And then, from the wings, Serena Williams appeared. Not in a luxury box. Not waving from the sideline. On stage, Crip walking in front of a hundred million viewers, her body moving to a song that literally names her. TIME Magazine confirmed the surprise cameo, and the internet erupted: the greatest female athlete of all time, retired from the sport that made her a legend, had chosen this moment—this song, this stage, this city—to remind the world she was still not like anyone else.

The cameo was pure Serena, but it was also the culmination of a post-tennis identity she had been building since announcing her "evolution away from tennis" in the summer of 2022. Freed from the grueling WTA calendar, she threw herself into the cultural spaces that had always orbited her career. She hosted the 2024 ESPY Awards with the easy charisma of someone who had spent decades commanding arenas. She invested in companies, launched media ventures, and raised her daughters. But music—always the connective tissue of her public and private lives—remained the through line.

Her Apple Music "Off the Court" playlist, a personal curation that surfaced during this era, offered a window into the woman beyond the racket. Alicia Keys's "In Common" sat on that playlist, its warm, groove-driven meditation on finding connection despite differences mirroring the duality Serena had always embodied: Compton kid and global icon, fierce competitor and devoted mother, punk-rock fan and hip-hop head. The playlist was not a PR exercise; it was a self-portrait in song.

And the rock fandom was no casual affectation. In early 2023, Serena jumped on a plane to present Green Day at the Recording Academy's Pre-Grammy Gala, posting on Instagram: "When @billiejoearmstrong calls you to present their band, you jump on a plane and do it." As she told Green Day Authority, "I'm a bit of a stalker. I don't know how many I've been to, maybe too much. It's got to the point where I know the run of the show. I always know when the last song is coming, the encore." This was not a celebrity making a polite appearance. This was a superfan who happened to be the most decorated tennis player in the Open Era. In a 2021 W Magazine feature, she had named Bon Jovi as a go-to karaoke pick—"I Believe" among her favorites—a detail that surprised no one who had watched her embrace music at post-tournament celebrations for two decades.

But the Super Bowl moment transcended fandom. Kendrick Lamar's "Not Like Us" is, at its core, a record about authenticity—about the unbridgeable gap between those who are the real thing and those who merely perform proximity to it. The lyric namechecking Serena was not random; it was an acknowledgment that she belongs to a category of one. When she Crip walked across that stage in New Orleans—the same city where she had married Alexis Ohanian in 2017, the same city where she had danced to "Back That Azz Up" at her own reception—she was closing a geographic and emotional circle. Compton to New Orleans to the world and back again.

By 2025, Serena Williams did not need tennis to justify her presence in any room. She had spent a lifetime building a soundtrack that told the story better than any trophy case could—from the music that had orbited her career to the ones she had chosen to celebrate publicly, to the one that Kendrick Lamar wrote with her name in the lyric. On that February night in the Superdome, the bass hit, the crowd roared, and Serena danced. Not like anyone before her. Not like anyone after.