Kendrick Lamar wasn’t subtle in saying where he would take his Super Bowl halftime performance.
During his interview this past Friday with Apple Music’s Nadeska and Ebro, Lamar spoke about the power of being present. Even with all the accolades he has received at age 37, he’s still on a journey. At the heart of everything is authenticity, which has always been a driving factor in Kendrick Lamar’s career (especially in 2024). As an artist who predicates himself to being entrenched in the purity of hip-hop culture, that’s precisely what this Super Bowl LIX Halftime Show was about. It was about breath control, new verse, the art of rapping, and resisting falling in line with the expectations of the forum being performed within. Defying expectations is the credo of this performance.
First, there’s the aesthetics. Samuel L. Jackson portrays a Black Uncle Sam welcoming everybody to the “great American” game. It is a league where over 70% of players are Black athletes, but no Black majority owners of a team. Three days before the Super Bowl, the NFL had decided to remove its “End Racism” lettering from the endzones — a continued retreat from (what we now see) as flimsy initiatives enacted by companies after the death of George Floyd in 2020. Let’s say this was the NFL’s “black square.”
NEW ORLEANS, LOUISIANA – FEBRUARY 09: Kendrick Lamar performs onstage during Apple Music Super Bowl LIX Halftime Show at Caesars Superdome on February 09, 2025, in New Orleans, Louisiana. (Photo by Gregory Shamus/Getty Images)
Given the current political climate and efforts to erase and rewrite history, the first solo hip-hop artist’s use of a textbook rap performance as the draw demonstrates stronger defiance. There was the visual art of Black dancers and performers dressed in red, white, and blue, portraying themselves as the American flag. Along with Beyonce’s “Cowboy Carter” project, it’s the tweaking of Americana within the Black image. But that’s not the crux of the rebellion of Lamar’s halftime show performance.
Sure, there might be people who are disappointed he didn’t do something similar to the iconography of his 2016 and 2018 Grammy performances. It’s natural for us to look to artists to be megaphones shouting at injustices in uncertain and turbulent times. Since those award shows, Lamar stated in 2022’s “Mr. Morale and the Big Steppers” that he and other figures are not our saviors. If anything, the inspiration from those prior performances should have translated to real action against the wrongs of the real world. Yet, some may have gotten let down by expectations because we are all searching for a guiding light of resistance. To that thought, perhaps we need to recontextualize what art is meant to do and why we lean on it so much.
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In an industry that demands you shapeshift to its whims and actively tries to dilute the essence of hip-hop, it is a triumph that Lamar has doubled down on his sense of purpose this far in his career. He got to the Super Bowl stage without compromising his integrity and putting on a show in the faces of some who view hip-hop culture as a detriment. Artists are expected to “play the hits” and play up the legacy aspects of their careers rather than chronicle the current moment during the halftime show. “Take us down memory lane as we wait for the second half.” Lamar briefly gave nods to prior well-known songs like “Humble,” “DNA,” and “All The Stars.” However, the songs performed only went back as far as 2017. Much of the time was seeded to uplifting 2024’s “GNX,” including the self-affirmation juggernaut “Man In The Garden,” “squabble up,” and yes, “Not Like Us.”
It is fascinating how we consume music or any pop culture. We are rooted in nostalgia, and comfort leads us to search for a specific moment. Or we digest an album, film, or TV show so fast that our appetites also crave more rather than appreciating the time and effort of what we have. Lamar’s Super Bowl set imported the audience to sit with him on the victory lap he was experiencing. There’s a cleverness within that construction because everything we witnessed Sunday evening is also a history lesson. It included the battle aspect and doubling down on “Not Like Us” and “Euphoria.” The heart of Lamar’s back-and-forth with Drake stems from him trying to recenter what the culture is about other than being a stepping stool to be discarded later. Hip-hop culture drives conversation rather than repeats it. It stands tall in the face of people who don’t care to understand the art form, try to engineer it to be palpable to the masses, or hate it because they would have to admit to their ignorance.
Jackson’s ‘Uncle Sam’s character says “too foul, too reckless, too ghetto” exactly when “squabble up” ends, and he asks if he knows how to “play the game.” Lamar obliges by performing “Humble,” but as the audience thinks they are getting a greatest hits set, he goes right into “Euphoria.” It’s not lost on me that this performance style happened as journalistic publications actively cut back on culture reporting, companies label artistic endeavors as content, and America continues to lose hold of the word even means and who can use it. If this is the accumulation of his 2024 run, we should be happy Kendrick Lamar did it his way.
Photo Credit: Chandan Khanna/AFP via Getty Images
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