Kendrick Lamar’s Multilayered Halftime Show Was About Far More Than Just a Rap Beef

Prior to the ascension of Donald Trump, rappers and America’s political right wing were not friends. They enjoyed — and often profited from — a mutual enmity.

For nearly 30 years, from the perch of his eponymous and often top-rated Fox News show, commentator Bill O’Reilly consistently used hip-hop to gin up white conservative fear of Black people by conflating the genre with two things: violent anti-Americanism and wanton misogyny. The culture, however, has shifted noticeably since Trump took over the right, prompting an orgy of MAGA fever that has swept through Washington and the nation in the wake of his second inauguration. Among those riding that wave? A host of rappers, including Snoop Dogg, Rick Ross, Nelly, and Soulja Boy, who, just weeks ago, journeyed to Washington for Trump’s inaugural celebrations.

Which made it all the more notable that when Kendrick Lamar headlined this year’s Super Bowl halftime show in New Orleans, he did so as the first sitting president to attend the NFL’s championship game reportedly left the arena. Hip-hop’s Pulitzer-winning lyricist defined his Americanness on his own terms, and, with trollish glee, continued the execution of a cultural shift articulated on his hit diss track: predators and misogynists are “not like us.” Lamar’s much-anticipated performance came as a wide swath of men have found common ground with Trump and his movement’s adoption of a reactionary, hegemonic masculinity of domination and aggression that disregards women’s equality and agency.

The Super Bowl halftime performance is one of the most widely-viewed and mediated stages upon which Americans parse and negotiate cultural power — who holds it, who’s lost it, who’s up, who’s down. Given its place within the nation’s annual pageant of capitalism, the halftime show is almost guaranteed to leave viewers seeking overt displays of radicalism and subversion bereft.

This was a reality Lamar confronted implicitly from the start of the show, framing his performance with a Greek chorus of one, played by Samuel L. Jackson. Dressed in custom Bode, Jackson played the voice of American capitalism while embodying its most recognizable avatar of patriotic—and often colonialist—propaganda: Uncle Sam.

“Salutations! It’s your Uncle Sam, and this is the great American game,” he announced, as the camera panned out to reveal a set piece shaped like a PlayStation controller. Every element of the show’s art direction, from set design to blocking to costuming, served to illustrate the friction between Lamar’s artistic identity as an inveterate truth teller, and the capitalistic demand for marketable, anodyne content. The game may be rigged, but in the Superdome that night, it was Lamar and the larger ensemble who were pushing the buttons.

What followed was a concise theatrical narrative, employing Lamar’s widely publicized feud with Drake to tickle the senses while expounding on larger themes of censorship and racial capitalism, perhaps most memorably illustrated when the dancers, all of them Black men clad in red, white, and blue, stood in a formation resembling an American flag. Lamar stood at the center of a divided Old Glory, rapping the lyrics to “Humble” after facing admonishment from Uncle Sam for “Squabble Up” as the dancers chain-gang marched into formation.

“Nooooooooo! Too reckless! Too ghetto,” cried Uncle Sam, echoing those who habitually characterize Black critics of American empire as ungrateful, arrogant, and uppity. Lamar cleverly anticipated MAGA objections and, unafraid, incorporated them on his own terms.

“Have you ever brought your enemy down with a poker face,” he rapped, sporting an enormous, disarming grin while directly addressing the camera.

Lamar’s white, right-wing critics, particularly those who amassed their clout as online trolls, were noticeably irked that he appeared to be beating them at their own game. Conspiracy theorist Jack Posobiec raged at the “DEI halftime show” while the Daily Wire’s Matt Walsh, apparently not a fan of subtext, called the show “trash,” huffing that “nobody can even understand what he’s saying.”

And all that took place before Lamar reached the most anticipated number, his performance of “Not Like Us,” a lyrical screed aimed at Drake, the Canadian former child star, and his entourage. (For his part, Drake has denied any impropriety and has sued UMG, the company that owns both their labels, alleging defamation). As Drake has sought to break out of the boundaries set by his own success, he has leaned into the same toxic masculinist impulses he once avoided (at least publicly) in order to cultivate his broad fan base. Lamar lambastes those same impulses — which now predominate the MAGAverse — on “Not Like Us,” the crown jewel of his polemical suite of diss tracks. The song and its music video swept every Grammy category in which it was nominated, netting Lamar another five trophies.

At 37, Lamar is a diminutive, accomplished wordsmith and semiotician. His disdain for Drake is marked by contempt for what he sees as his rival’s vacuity, his years spent racking up hits, cultural cachet, and wealth as a culture vulture who steered hip-hop squarely into easily digestible loverboy pop.

Using its infectious four-note refrain as a tease, Lamar then introduced the show’s female background dancers, briefly easing to the sweetly romantic, unifying motifs of “Luther” and “All The Stars.”

Lamar then oscillated back to the improprieties of “Not Like Us,” flooding the stage with dancers for a deliciously petty coup de grâce. Tennis champion Serena Williams, whose husband, Alexis Ohanian, caught strays in Drake’s lyrics, crip-walked in a triumphant callback to a controversy she weathered in 2012. Williams, now retired and the holder of a record-tying 23 Grand Slam singles titles, was castigated then in the press for doing a celebratory crip walk at Wimbledon after defeating Maria Sharapova in the Olympics. The whole thing became a ridiculous scandal because of white reaction to Williams being her Compton-raised Black self in a place and a sport still defined by rather hoary, WASPy notions of what constitutes civility.

To dismiss Lamar’s performance as the squandering of a global platform in service of nursing a petty grievance is to miss the significance of exactly what Lamar is excoriating, perhaps because he took such obvious delight in it. As the right was beginning to feel confident basking in the spoils of a culture war détente smoothed over by a common hatred of women, the Bard of Hip-Hop orchestrated a subtle, under-appreciated pivot.

Game over, indeed.

Soraya Nadia McDonald is a critic and journalist who was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in criticism and a winner of the George Jean Nathan award for dramatic criticism.

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