On Feb. 19, Kendrick Lamar delivered one of the best Superbowl halftime show performances in recent memory. During the performance of the final song, “tv off,” Lamar brought out Dr Mustard, the song’s producer, for a showstopping finale. At the same time, just a few yards away, a member of the production team was chased down the field and tackled for holding up Palestinian and Sudanese flags. That part was not shown on television.
Despite Lamar’s “interpolation” of the iconic Gill Scott Heron phrase, the revolution was not televised Sunday night, because any meaningful resistance to existing power structures is not permitted to be shown to an audience of 127.7 million people.
The performance itself was incredible, as I’ve come to expect from anything Kendrick Lamar does, with amazing performances from him and especially from SZA. The only major flaw in the performance was the mixing. Whoever their audio engineer was needed to be fired, because most of the time the backing track was far too quiet. I also wished he would have played more songs from his earlier catalog.
What I’m most interested in has been the online response to the halftime show. Of course, there are the people who didn’t enjoy it because they have bad opinions, but I’ve also seen a good amount of discourse over how “radical” the performance was. Ultimately, it wasn’t all that boundary-pushing or politically challenging, but that is okay.
Over the last decade or so, there has been a cycle of discourse revolving around the role of celebrities in politics. The most recent example I can think of is Chappell Roan being criticized for not endorsing Kamala Harris in 2024, but there are plenty of other celebrities and influencers who have caught flack for not “using their platform.”
This is addressing a symptom and not the root problem. The reason that celebrities have become so important in current political discourse is because there are no activists in the public eye like there used to be.
Kendrick Lamar’s music and his halftime show is progressive in its messaging, and I think that is a good thing. The media consumption of a population greatly affects its understanding of the world around them, and so I think it is generally good to have progressive artists making political art.
However, there will never be a piece of art at that level of popularity that makes any meaningful political change. Capitalism does an obscenely efficient job of squeezing profit out of its own critique. That’s why “Squid Game” got a gameshow spinoff and Barnes & Noble sells copies of Marx’s writings.
Lamar’s halftime show was the best version of that performance we could have received. The cameos from Samuel Jackson and Serena Williams were especially interesting, especially after she received so much criticism in the media for doing the same thing back in 2012 at the Olympics. Overall, it was an incredible show, and as a day-one Drake hater, it was gratifying to see him get called a pedophile on the biggest stage in America.