Kendrick Lamar’s Super Bowl Halftime Show Exposed the Limitations of Subversive Messaging During the ‘Great American Game’
“The revolution ‘bout to be televised, you picked the right time but the wrong guy,” proclaimed Kendrick Lamar atop the hood of a black GNX at the onset of his Super Bowl LIX halftime show performance on Sunday night (Feb. 9).
Lamar’s referencing (and revising) of Gil-Scott Heron’s landmark 1971 recording “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised” and his misgivings at being propped up as a leader in this century’s fight for justice cast his halftime performance squarely in the “I am not your savior” light of 2022’s Grammy-winning Mr. Morale & the Big Steppers. But his performance also tested the limits of how much we should praise and applaud subtly subversive imagery during an increasingly fascistic period that calls for more drastic measures, let alone bigger and bolder statements. His rousing, technically impressive performance also raised the question of how much revolution Kendrick could possibly hope to represent, spark, or speak for while being platformed on a stage meant first and foremost to serve the pre-existing establishment.
Three short years after performing cuts from his first two major label studio albums at the Dr. Dre-curated 2022 Super Bowl halftime show, Lamar was named the first solo rapper to ever headline the show. Entering the Superdome as rap’s undisputed king following last year’s explosive and historic battle with Drake, Lamar also boasted five of the 30 biggest songs in America on that week’s Hot 100. His GNX album remained parked in the uppermost reaches of the Billboard 200, and his forthcoming SZA-assisted Grand National joint tour will take him to stadiums across North America (and now the U.K. and Europe) for the very first time. And, of course, there’s also the matter of the prior Sunday’s Grammys (Feb. 2), which found Lamar sweeping all five categories he was nominated in for “Not Like Us,” including record and song of the year – his first General Field wins, and just the second time a hip-hop song has triumphed in either category.
With 13,000 voting members of the Record Academy crowning a vicious diss track the best-written and produced song of the year, Lamar entered new territory for a rapper. With the self-deconstructing Mr. Morale in his rearview and the Super Bowl on the horizon, Lamar would bring his career-long battle between his politics, his celebrity and his personhood to his biggest stage yet – the final boss level of the video game that would unfold throughout his performance, if you’re willing to extend him that much credit.
In the first 30 seconds of his set, Lamar established his “great American game” metaphor in several different ways. As the camera captured a wide shot of the audience light displays in the stadium, the field lit up in the square-triangle-X-circle button combo of a standard PlayStation controller. The visual helped him move from set to set intentionally – only the two SZA collaborations are performed on the button stages – while also driving home the fact that we’re all getting played by America, some of us in multiple ways at the same time.
But no matter how big e-sports and video games get, this is the Super Bowl — and we’re on a football field, a setting that has an unsettling yet unmistakable connection to the slave plantation. “The power relationship that had been established on the plantation has not changed,” journalist William C. Rhoden writes of professional sports in his illuminating book Forty Million Dollar Slaves: The Rise, Fall, and Redemption of the Black Athlete. “Even if the circumstances around it have.” In a 2018 episode of The Shop, LeBron James called NFL team owners “old white men” who have a “slave mentality” towards players. Three years later, in his 2021 Colin in Black and White Netflix series, former San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick likened the NFL draft to slavery. From the slave plantation to mass incarceration, one of America’s favorite pastimes – or games, if you will – is figuring out how to exploit and control Black labor. Later in Kendrick’s show, the set morphed into a prison yard, again underscoring that history.
Here’s the thing: nearly a decade after Ava DuVernay’s prison-industrial complex-explaining 13th documentary and half a decade after summer 2020 protests following the murder of George Floyd seemed to signal a cultural tipping point, the imagery of scores of Black male dancers forming an American flag – albeit one split down the middle, with Kendrick as something of a neoliberal aisle-crossing Moses figure in the center – feels more tired and trite than poignant. If that’s too harsh a reading, perhaps you could say that Lamar is levying his braggadocio against both the NFL and America. He’s telling these institutions to “be humble,” while explicitly centering the Black men who provide them their strength, notoriety and wealth.
If the great American game has always been the ruthless exploitation of Black people, then the great Black American game is finding ways to continue to exist and thrive in America despite all the contradictions that brings. This is the tension that complicates Lamar’s halftime performance and, ultimately, makes it one of the most compelling ones in the tradition’s history. Can subversive images of Black Americana and calls for “revolution” hold any water when they’re broadcast on the country’s most commercialized and capitalistic stage?
In a nod to the Uncle Sam character of 2015’s To Pimp a Butterfly and the Dolomedes character in Spike Lee’s Chi-Raq (2015), Lamar tapped America’s favorite Black uncle to narrate the show. Oscar-nominated acting legend Samuel L. Jackson – dressed as Uncle Sam, the centuries-old personification of America — played a nervous elder preoccupied with the false promise of respectability politics, serving as narrator and helping the set transition between its two modes: GNX-induced myopia and classic crowd-pleasers like “Humble” and “DNA.” Together, Lamar and Jackson blended Uncle Sam with Uncle Tom, a term originating from Harriet Beecher Stowe’s 1852 novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin that refers to Black Americans who willingly betray their community in favor of bowing to white Americans.
But before Lamar and Jackson extrapolate that discography tension for a larger commentary on being Black in America, Lamar momentarily sidesteps the game metaphor in the set design, opting to begin rapping an extended snippet of an unreleased GNX track.
Once Lamar descended from the car’s hood to begin “Squabble Up” — his most recent GNX Hot 100 chart-topper – he finally introduced the meatiest part of his “great American game” metaphor, navigating life while being Black in America. For Lamar, after spending most of his catalog exploring that tension in the context of his childhood and personal life, the Super Bowl was a chance to play with those contradictions in the context of his position as one of the preeminent artists and performers of our time. Guided and deterred by Uncle Sam Jackson’s pleas for hits like “Humble” and more palatable fare like “All the Stars,” Lamar’s setlist wove through his most universal anthems and chilly L.A.-heralding GNX deep cuts like “Peekaboo,” which featured some of the most impressive camerawork of the night. The theatrical approach was a fresh one for the Super Bowl halftime show — and a choice that saved the set from crumbling under the weight of its own subtlety.
After all, Uncle Sam Jackson dangled the point in front of 133.5 million viewers when he said: “Too loud! Too reckless! Too ghetto! Mr. Lamar, do you really know how to play the game? Then tighten up!”
By the time he got to “Man at the Garden,” Lamar’s backup dancers were dressed in red, white or blue monochromatic fits to assist his attempts at subverting the iconography of the American flag. During “Garden,” the group of men that surround Lamar don light wash jeans, white sweats, and no beanies – letting their afros, locs, and beaded braids shine alongside their golden grills. This is Black Americana through Lamar’s lens and it’s the most beautiful part of the show; the brotherhood and joy in this scene feel almost antithetical to how the world has been socialized to perceive Black male features and fashion. It’s not necessarily revolutionary, but it would be petty to not acknowledge the power of seeing this image of Black American men on a field that makes money off the battering of their bodies as a slew of white owners hold near-total control of the capital they generate.
Then again, what’s the value of this image if it’s being broadcast during an NFL-sanctioned performance? If the institution that’s allegedly being critiqued is willfully allowing that “critique” to air around the world, doesn’t it mean that they’re in on it? Or that they’ve deemed the critique too harmless of a threat to waste resources trying to thwart? The answer is clearly, “Yes” – as evidenced by the performer who was promptly tackled and detained by security after flashing the Flags of Palestine and Sudan during the performance; he’s now banned from NFL events and venues for life.
Of course, the song on everyone’s mind – including Lamar’s since he pulled two fake-outs set to the track – was “Not Like Us.” Uncle Sam Jackson tried his best to keep things “nice and calm” as “America wants,” but Lamar went for the jugular – because that’s what America really wants. This is the same country that elected a president (who was in attendance Sunday night) with chillingly fascistic tendencies, and the ones that turned “Not Like Us” into a billion-streaming multi-week chart-topper. He’s the first solo rapper to headline the Super Bowl halftime show and he kicked things off rapping unreleased music – clearly, Kendrick was not interested in following the usual headliner rules. And, yes, “Not Like Us” is his biggest pop hit, but it achieved that status while being a mid-battle diss track; K.Dot already reconfigured the pop game with the song’s success. So let the diss track ring.
And with a seismic medley of “Not Like Us” and “TV Off” — which featured a classic hip-hop moment in star producer Mustard’s surprise appearance – Lamar closed his show and declared “game over.” “It’s a cultural divide, Imma get it on the floor/ 40 acres and a mule, this is bigger than the music/ Yeah, they tried to rig the game, but you can’t fake influence,” Kendrick spat before finally launching into Drake-obliterating diss.
If this was just about the music, he would’ve played more hits. If this was just about Drake, he would’ve at least alluded to “Like That.” This was about seizing this historic moment to make as much of a statement as he could within the parameters set by the NFL, Apple Music, and the myriad networks airing the show. 160 years ago, Union General William Sherman proclaimed that plots of land no larger than 40 acres would be allotted to freed families. That promise was eventually reversed by President Andrew Johnson following the Civil War, and almost all of the reallocated land was returned to its pre-war white owners during Reconstruction. That shot to the heart of Black economic power and independence still rings today, and it’s a theme Kendrick explored heavily on Butterfly, hence the reappearance of that album’s Uncle Sam character.
When Lamar raps about the game being rigged and faking influence, he’s talking about shady music industry tactics, the very concept of the American dream, and, of course, Drake himself. And it’s that context – a Black American man who’s one of hip-hop’s most dedicated practitioners knocking out the Canadian actor-turned-rapper who helped change the face of hip-hop for better and for worse – that made the Super Bowl performance of “Not Like Us” such an astounding watch. Kendrick spent the past year telling us that he wanted to “watch the party die” because he feels hip-hop is under siege by people who aren’t part of the culture. On Sunday night, he was itching to get it back in blood on the Super Bowl stage.
After ripping through “TV Off,” Lamar flashed a s–t-eating grin and mimed clicking the power button on a TV remote. Immediately, the camera angle switches back to a wide shot of the stadium with the phrase “game over” written in lights. Kendrick told us he deserved it all, and he won it all. The Super Bowl halftime show game as we’ve come to know it is over, the Drake beef is over, the literal performance is over and the game of respectability politics that have hounded Black Americans for centuries are, in theory, now over.
But does it really work like that? Do any of these messages or images – like the “stars” of the American flag turning into brainwashed troops — really land when they’re being mounted during an event that consciously traded real action and change for the platitudes of musical and artistic representation? Don’t these images also lose their bite when they’re all rolled into a performance that is first and foremost an extended promotional spot for GNX (physical copies of the November release started shipping this weekend), SZA’s extended version of SOS: LANA (released hours before the halftime show) and their co-headlining Grand National Tour?
Maybe this all works if the “revolution” being televised is a Black capitalist rally. We’re aware Kendrick isn’t our savior, but if he’s going to televise self-proclaimed “revolutions,” are we in the wrong for expecting something more? And maybe that’s why he told us to “turn this TV off”; he made it clear from the onset that he was “the wrong guy” for this “revolution.” Lamar himself will not lead us to liberation – and he may never explicitly say anything or create any art that even gestures towards the harsh physical realities of that – but the images and covert messages in his performances (and his own pervasive commercial success) will hopefully spark something inside his younger viewers to begin their own self-liberation journeys in search for a brighter and more just future.
But doesn’t that sound like something we’ve been saying for too long? It’s definitely reminiscent of the conversation around Beyoncé’s 2016 Black Panther-nodding halftime performance. We can applaud Lamar for taking the risk to say anything at all within this moment of his peak commercial dominance, but we also don’t have to act as if it was genuinely revolutionary – because it simply can’t be in its present context. And that’s the conundrum Lamar had to maneuver as a Black performer in a historically white space on Sunday night.
Kendrick Lamar’s exploration of the great American game helped further expose the paradoxes of his own stardom and artistic ethos, but it also allowed him to revolutionize and remodel what can be done at a Super Bowl halftime show – even if none of it will actually set us free or give way to real, material change. He broke, rewrote and played by the rules all at the same time. And that’s the truest Black American game of all, finding a way to exist and thrive in a tsunami of contradictions.
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