Kendrick Lamar on America's great stage
A meditation on the intersection of art, identity, and politics
How is one to engage in contemplation and debate anymore, anyway? Information is now chiefly disseminated and consumed in short, brain-scrambling bursts across social-media platforms that are owned and operated by tech billionaires - Brady Brickner-Wood
Why does poetry matter when there is genocide happening in the world, a woman asks poet Ocean Vuong at a talk in Berkeley. His response flows like a stream. “Poetry has always mattered… and it exists alongside crisis… During crises the culture always demands a poet either solve it or else poetry does not matter.”
So, can any singular art form save the world? Can sculpture? Can music?
Vuong concedes that language, and I assume other art forms, are tools. After all, politicians regularly use poetry in their speeches. “Language is this territory that gets occupied, coerced, and manipulated, and we are always in this tussle to take it back. Write all the poems you want while you fight for each other. There is room for that.”
a stage is for Art, not activism
A few weeks ago on February 9, 2025 Kendrick Lamar, the greatest rapper alive, performed at the Super Bowl halftime show. With Hip-hop in decline, Kendrick might have been its dying scream, on America’s largest stage, for 13 minutes.
His performance was met with a mix of positive, negative, and critical reactions. As I turned the T.V. off and digested his show over the course of a week, I felt all those reactions inside me. My verdict?
Kendrick Lamar is the most interesting artist alive.
Not the most radical, that would currently be Macklemore.
Not the most revolutionary, that would be Noname.
But he is the most illegible, meticulous, and compelling. Kendrick doesn’t say “Black Lives Matter”, he creates “To Pimp A Butterfly”. He doesn’t say “FDT” but he says, “The revolution about to be televised. You picked the right time, but the wrong guy” and ends his set with “T.V. off”. He promotes his new album and tour but reminds us that “…40 acres and a mule, this is bigger than the music.”
What does Kendrick care about most? Hip-hop? Compton? Winning? Ambition? There are no answers to these questions, which is precisely why, for me, Kendrick is the artist of the moment.
Intensely craft focused, rooted in time and place, and in conversation with artists past and present, Kendrick folds many artists into one. He is the GNX out of which endless people pop out. He is the avant-garde artist, the contemporary artist, the Hip-hop artist, the Pop star, the Black artist, the generation-defining artist, and a modern American artist. He is a clash of radicalism and caution, intensely-personal yet deeply community-minded; his complex music is possibly a reflection of the very real, complex people he represents.
During a terrifying political period for America, Kendrick used our biggest stage for art. Not for entertainment or activism, but for art. It made me wonder, is art the way forward or do we need much more?
sports and Art as Trojan horse
Before Kendrick even appears on stage Samuel L. Jackson, dressed as Uncle Sam, opens the show with, “This is the great American game”. Surely he is not referring to football? The rap game? The game of survival while being Black in America? Or the game of media and politics? We, the viewer, are Left asking, what does this performance mean? Is it Kendrick versus America? Kendrick versus Drake? The woke versus the anti-woke?
[Kendrick] is a clash of radicalism and caution, intensely-personal yet deeply community-minded; his complex music is possibly a reflection of the very real, complex people he represents.
Then Kendrick opens his act with, “The revolution about to be televised. You picked the right time, but the wrong guy”. This statement, a reconstruction of Gil Scott-Heron’s “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised”, warns the listener that “freedom is not a spectator sport”. It requires our participation and does not come from a savior. Are we to assume that yet again Kendrick is reminding us that he is not our savior? That we must, unfortunately, save ourselves?
Many of our freedoms, a concept Kendrick has rapped about before, are at stake in America. The man with the power to change the course of your life and mine watched Kendrick from afar as he went on to create an American flag out of a sea of Black men, in an NFL stadium, during Black History Month, while singing “Bitch, be humble” and then switches to the Fox News-retort, “DNA”.
The majority of America is not paying attention to politics. Polls show that only about 20% are engaged with political news. Those less likely to be informed are more likely to have voted for Trump or not voted at all. In a conversation between Ezra Klein and Yanna Krupnikov we learn how the majority of Americans subliminally receive political information and values through non-political outlets such as lifestyle influencers and sports media.
It is time to concede that the soft power of the right-wing, be that Joe Rogan or Dana White, is winning. I tip my hat to them, and turn the question to us. Will we embrace the soft power influence of Kendrick Lamar or will we scoff and dismiss him as a Black capitalist?
Will we celebrate and embrace Kendrick as one of us? Will we see his performance as an undeniable victory during a time where Google removed Black History Month from its calendar and Texas has issued 801 book bans, which include Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Between the World and Me, Toni Morrison’s Beloved and The Bluest Eye, and Maya Angelou’s And Still I Rise.
Kendrick could learn from Bad Bunny
If you were given the largest stage in America what would you do with it? Bad Bunny chose to create a stunning, anti-colonial body of work in “Debi Tirar Mas Fotos”.
In Lo Que Le Pasó a Hawaii he pens a simple song. Two verses. Three minutes and fifty seconds.
Thеy want to take my river and my beach too
They want my neighborhood and grandma to leave
No, don't let go of the flag nor forget the lelolai
'Cause I don't want them to do to you what happened to Hawaii
Bad Bunny sings about colonization without it being heavy-handed. He uses metaphor and melody to his advantage, preserving the artistic integrity of his work while pushing protest art that I actually enjoy listening to. He dips into his personal feelings, as he always does, to help us feel too. Do we want our radical artists to be chronically underfunded or will we manuever deftly, like Bad Bunny, to win the war for soft power?
they not like us, but we need them
What does it mean for Kendrick Lamar—a rapper who has built his career on introspection, Black liberation, and resistance—to take center stage at the Super Bowl, a historically conservative institution? He may have seen it as an act of subversion. He did claim it was the revolution televised, after all. His decision to do so reminds me of Beyoncé’s decision to dress herself and her dancers up like the Black Panther Party. The truth is, neither Kendrick nor Beyoncé’s performance at the Super Bowl halftime show was revolutionary. Their music is. Their art is. Their existence and presence in the culture is.
But they also serve as a reminder to the rest of us to not lose sight of our goals or be distracted from our mission. We need Kendrick, Beyoncé, and any and every talented and platformed creative to build power for the Left. We pushed Joe Rogan out. We pushed Elon Musk out. This is not to excuse their behavior or corruption, nor presume these adults are not responsible for their own development, or lack thereof. It is to point out that both prominent figures moved away from Leftist ideas and towards conservative ones, and with them they took their followers and reduced our political power.
Kendrick’s performance does not fundamentally change the structure, or the harms, of the National Football League. He drew in eyeballs which enabled the Super Bowl to generate more revenue, but we are culturally past the point of assuming the League is now progressive because they aligned with Lamar.
Kendrick is the artist who points listeners to Marcus Garvey and Huey P. Newton. Instead of enriching conservative institutions, what if all these presumably radical artists banded together to create their own spaces, like Tyler the Creator did?
Half of America wants football to be a place to escape politics, but the antithesis to acerbic politics is not escape, it is beauty. Joy. Humor. Kindness. Gentleness. Compassion. Curiosity.
Resistance, after all, is implicitly reactive; it does not construct or generate but, instead, exists in opposition to a constructive or generative force - Brady Brickner-Wood
The definitions of the Americas are shifting; we are not simply liberal and conservative America, rural and urban America, or white and black America. There is now so-called woke and anti-woke America. Kendrick sings “They not like us”, but which side is he on anyway? The ball is in his court.