America needs an ambassador to know itself. That’s why Kendrick Lamar’s Apple Music Super Bowl Halftime Show performance upset so many viewers. At one point, Lamar’s co-star Samuel L. Jackson warns, “No, no, no! Too loud, too reckless, too ghetto!” So soon after the national “50 Years of Hip-hop” celebrations, rapper Lamar stands as an avant-pop performer whose verbally complex, esoteric tracks and videos are steeped in the lore of Compton, Calif., yet stretch beyond music-industry convention.
The local color in a Lamar music-video broadcasts the seldom seen habits of inner-city natives — thuggish crowds, impoverished storefronts, wild dancing, and desperate bravado, the source of his artistic complaints. Lamar brought it all to the Super Bowl where millionaire black athletes compete like gladiators, covering up tensions back home with opposite images of prowess and success.
It was the strangest halftime show ever because five-foot-five, 37-year-old Kendrick Lamar Duckworth broke the illusion of entertainment.
Crouched atop a Buick GNX, Lamar announced, “The revolution is about to be televised.” Addressing his industry status, Lamar warned, “You picked the right time but the wrong guy,” referring to that 2018 Pulitzer Prize that was meant to usurp and control his art by rubber stamp. But Lamar’s internalized playfulness — including “Not Like Us,” his devastating diss of media darling Drake — defies institutional control. Halftime director Dave Free, creative director Mike Carson, and art-director team Shelley and Bruce Rodgers conceived the show’s large-scale video-game format to depict homeboy Lamar “traveling through the American dream.”
That intro quoting poet Gil Scott-Heron’s famous 1970 “revolution” slogan was a challenge to memories of Super Bowl extravaganzas by pop-culture deities Michael Jackson and Prince. Lamar stays rooted to the street life that Jackson and Prince rose above, and his art is more openly conflicted — expressed in language compressed from 50 years of crack epidemics, gang violence, and then post-Obama frustration. The image of Lamar’s crew pouring out of a fashionable clown car, dancers togged out in red-white-and-blue groups of eight, then increasing to cadres of 78 or more, is startling and unforgettable: Black folks grimacing and going through convulsions convey a social reality at odds with SamJack’s three-ring hustle, “This is the greeaaat American game!”
If you don’t appreciate that irony, Lamar’s style of rhythmed speed-rap and squeezed-skull anxieties (“Everybody must be judged,” he rapped) will be both confusing and unnerving.
Historical Note: Lamar’s confounding message to Super Bowl fans follows the tradition of black cultural ambassadors that began in the 1950s when the State Department commissioned jazz artists to tour Europe as part of the Cold War effort in a program co-sponsored by the Voice of America radio broadcast. Louis Armstrong refused the first tour, citing President Eisenhower’s slow response to the segregation at Little Rock High School in Arkansas; but he later participated in Dave Brubeck’s The Real Ambassadors album, in 1962 (along with Jon Hendricks, Carmen McRae, and others), joining the advancing civil rights movement.
Without such government sponsorship, Lamar’s Super Bowl performance was surprisingly timely. It demonstrated the audacity possible in private-enterprise expression and cast a shameful light on revelations of USAID corruption, coinciding with President Trump’s rethinking of Kennedy Center and NEA patronage. Lamar capitalized on the strength of proven commercial success. “Ah, you brought your homeboys with you! Cultural cheat code,” SamJack explained, using the video-game term for breaking rules and making a game your own (with cameos from SZA and Serena Williams). Consider it Ambassador Lamar’s dispatch from the ghetto.
Beyoncé’s deployment of fake-militant dancing regiments (“Formation” in 2016’s Super Bowl 50) didn’t cause half the commotion that Lamar’s has, but his blend of showmanship and authenticity is inventive, impassioned, and funny, briefly approaching Nicki Minaj’s powerhouse aria in “Monster.” As Lamar struts before his corps of dancers, the camera pans alongside — mesmerized as in the music video for his superb, raucous “King Kunte.” Lamar’s update of a minstrel’s cakewalk, where the performer is also the interlocutor, surpasses Donald Glover’s “This Is America” antics. Casting the profane, craven SamJack as both Uncle Sam/Uncle Tom complicates whatever it is that black American performers choose to stand for. Lamar invokes everything we know (but perhaps wish we didn’t) about media, history, and politics.
The red-white-blue halftime motif showed ambivalent patriotism — Old Glory as a human mosaic; singular bodies amassed like its divided people. (An overhead shot of the supine dance chorus suggested an aerial postwar battlefield.) This led to Lamar’s final song, “Turn the TV Off.” At last, the revolutionary dare of his introduction is polished with a grin.
The seriousness beneath Lamar’s pop-star smile is as complicated and unsettling as when Morrissey turned “Shoplifters of the World” into “Trumpshifters of the World.” Nothing wrong with avant-pop that forces the public to think. Lamar may have achieved a Super Bowl first.
