A Few Thoughts on Kendrick Lamar's Halftime Show

[Note: none of the following is meant to take away from maybe the most salient fact of Kendrick Lamar's performance, which is its unapologetic Blackness. Nor am I suggesting that the performance was solely about Donald Trump, although he's an incarnation of the forces Kendrick Lamar works against. This is just me going over some stuff that I've been thinking about for the past couple of days]

The fascism of the current moment continues apace. Trump has made himself the head of the Kennedy Center in order to bring about a so-called GOLDEN AGE of American art and culture. The NEA is laying out new rules for patriotic art. And, lest we forget, Trump started out this whole misadventure of 2025 with an executive order promoting a return to “beautiful” architecture for government buildings. All of these are disastrous examples of an artistically stupid man exerting his own bad taste; Donald J. Trump would not know a beautiful building if it landed on him, as we can only hope will eventually happen.

If I keep banging on about this, it’s because I believe that art is vital. The mechanisms of capitalism and corporate greed have already desiccated the once-vital body of American cultural production. American culture, such as it was, has become increasingly flat and gray in spite of the infusion of exciting new voices from people of color and queer folk. This is because, frankly, capitalism is very very good at sucking up exciting new voices and grinding them into a consistent gray paste. In the face of such a mechanism, public funding and patronage of the arts is essential if we’re to have any sort of a culture at all. I’ve talked about this both here and on the podcast I co-host, so if you want a little more of my ideas on that angle, you can look here and listen here.

Of course, what Trump et alia are objecting to isn’t the overwhelming mediocrity of the larger culture. They’re mad about architecture that doesn’t scream RETVRN. They’re mad about drag shows (a legitimately lively art-form even taking into account its mainstreaming in Drag Race). They’re mad about Black people (oh my god are they mad about Black people). They don’t want art; they want propaganda.

Perhaps it’s this that makes Kendrick Lamar’s Super Bowl halftime performance feel so very vital. Of course, the NFL won't let me embed it here, but here's the link to YouTube.

I forgot that the Super Bowl was happening until it was happening. I didn’t even know that Kendrick Lamar, who just came off a spectacular year, was performing to an audience that included Donald Trump (in all of the flesh). When I saw the talk on BlueSky about the show, I was immediately eager to see it; I went to YouTube and found a crappy bootleg and watched it. Then I watched it several more times.

I’ve lived with this halftime show in my head since that day. It’s a meticulously put-together work of art of a kind that simply doesn’t exist in the context of a Super Bowl halftime show. After I finally grew exhausted with rewatching Lamar’s performance, I turned to look at some older halftime shows. There were a lot of great ones: Bruno Mars, Beyonce, Madonna. There was Diana Ross, who was my first halftime performance and who entranced me so much that it should have been a clue of a certain lavender cast to my own personality. But the thing about all of these performances, even the very greatest, is that they were more or less just that—really good deliveries of popular songs. There was very little cohesive or intentional about them—they weren’t saying anything.

Remember after Trump’s first election, when Lady Gaga performed? A lot of tongues were wagging beforehand with the usual suspects worrying that she would make it “political.” And she did, in a way; she positioned her show as a healing moment for America. It was a good show and totally flaccid, politically speaking, in spite of the fact that she performed her classic “Born this Way.” And, look, I love Lady Gaga. Nothing but respect for her. But it was a show wholly unsuited to the moment in which it occurred.

Kendrick Lamar, here at the dawn of the second Trump regime (the last one, however it ends, and it will), delivered something much more to the point. I won’t here go into the various symbols overt and (possibly) covert; the YouTube Industrial Complex has churned out so many explainer videos over the past few days that you could probably watch them end-to-end until the next Super Bowl and not run out of material. I’ll link a few here that I found particularly interesting. See here, here, here, and here. A lot of talk about the messaging here specifically comments on the Black experience in America and it’s worth listening to these voices. 

Lamar’s performance immediately put me in mind of two things. First, naturally, was Alan Moore and his argument that poets and magicians are one and the same thing: anyone can put a hex on your cows, but only a poet can make your name mud for generations. It’s actually pretty rare to see this happen; even the songwriters and poets I regard in highest possible esteem, whom I think of as prophets in their own way (Bob Dylan, for instance, or Ezra Furman) rarely have a measurable real-world impact. It’s tempting to listen to Kurt Vonnegut’s words about writers versus the Vietnam War and say that art, however well-intentioned, is a pretty poor weapon for social change.

But Lamar has done it; “Not Like Us” is an actual working. Lamar even (allegedly) begins the performance by flashing the cheat code for GTA: San Andreas that grants invulnerability, like a ceremonial magician performing the Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram. The song has already so totally demolished Drake that at the Super Bowl 70,000 voices rose as one to the words “a minor.” But I’m not (necessarily) arguing that Lamar performed an act of ritual magic in the Golden Dawn, Crowley, woo-woo sense. Not necessarily. But it is a kind of working all the same. The show itself has a narrative (something that most halftime shows that aren’t the Indiana Jones one don’t have). It’s a story about Drake, of course, but it’s also about America (an America divided and built on the backs of Black men, as countless YouTubers and BlueSky posters have observed). It’s a story about artistic integrity battling against cultural mediocrity (“too ghetto” is what Uncle Sam says; “DEI halftime” is what the ignorant proclaimed online). It’s a declaration that the artist has the power. And it’s a statement of intent to remake the world; indeed, it declares that the world is already being remade. It’s “Game Over.”

And it’s performed in front of the sexual-assaulter-in-chief. Kendrick Lamar is throwing down a gauntlet, here.

That’s magic in precisely the way Alan Moore talks about it. Kendrick Lamar is manipulating words and symbols to create a change in the world. He tells us what’s up at the very beginning when he promises that the revolution is about to be televised. So of course this turned me to Shelley and his "Defense of Poetry":

It is impossible to read the compositions of the most celebrated writers of the present day without being startled with the electric life which burns within their words. They measure the circumference and sound the depths of human nature with a comprehensive and all-penetrating spirit, and they are themselves perhaps the most sincerely astonished at its manifestations; for it is less their spirit than the spirit of the age. Poets are the hierophants of an unapprehended inspiration; the mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present; the words which express what they understand not; the trumpets which sing to battle, and feel not what they inspire; the influence which is moved not, but moves. Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.

In our postmodern (or post-postmodern) age, we are perhaps rightly skeptical of this sort of language; it takes no great knowledge of history or literature to know that poets are often ineffectual and that the best dreams of the poets are often phantasms.

But every once in a while there’s Kendrick Lamar. And he comes along and energizes symbols that the Right has tried to claim (the flag, Uncle Sam) and deploys a working initially intended to take down a rival, now reconfigured to combat the principalities and powers and the rulers of the age. What we witnessed at the Super Bowl halftime show was a sacred moment in which a powerful artist declared himself and uttered a resounding “no” against the cultural decay that is most concretely, though not exclusively, seen in the decaying undead corpse of the molester-in-chief. That’s pure poetry. That’s magic. And if there’s any hope to be had these days, this is where it is.