Kendrick Lamar headlines the Super Bowl halftime show on Sunday already a champion. Last summer, he vanquished the pop superstar Drake in a volley of vicious verses, an incendiary matchup of wits and word craft, hypocrisy and conjecture. Mr. Lamar won in part by depicting Drake as a tourist in Black culture. But his coup de grâce hit Drake squarely on his own turf: the charts. “Not Like Us” transformed our dance floors into Drake roasts and, last weekend, yielded Mr. Lamar five Grammys, including one for song of the year. (Drake’s latest response to all this? A lawsuit.)
Mr. Lamar entered this duel crowned with literary laurels. In 2018, he became the first rapper in history to win a Pulitzer Prize. With his dexterous lyrics and vivid storytelling came a profound political consciousness. Mr. Lamar released his 2015 single “Alright” amid the protests against police violence in Ferguson, Mo.; the song became a chant for marchers and an anthem for the nascent Black Lives Matter movement. He made political symbolism a part of his television performances and voiced explicit support for the kneeling protest of the N.F.L. quarterback Colin Kaepernick. But you don’t get to the Super Bowl by winning Ivy League awards for political poetry; you get there by mopping the floor with your opponent. Mr. Lamar’s killer instincts placed him on Middle America’s greatest stage this year. Now that he’s there, it seems as if he has inherited all the conflicted expectations that await him.
There are the fans who want to see Mr. Lamar drag Drake across the line of scrimmage. But there’s also a hope that he’ll use this spotlight as an opportunity to move beyond intra-star warfare toward a grander gesture of resistance for this political moment, when many Black Americans are justifiably terrified of a rollback of rights and a reassertion of white hegemony in America. Then there are still others who take Mr. Lamar’s very appearance in front of a big American flag in a recent promotional video for the event as a sign of political acquiescence.
Mr. Lamar’s place in the Super Bowl halftime show is the product of a handshake between the N.F.L. commissioner, Roger Goodell, and the Roc Nation founder, Jay-Z. This deal, done in 2019, after Mr. Kaepernick knelt and before Black Lives Matter protests erupted nationwide, made Jay-Z the chief strategist for the N.F.L.’s live entertainment and was meant to be part of a larger social justice initiative. What it did was provide cover for the N.F.L. as it faced a backlash and the specter of a boycott. At the time, Jay-Z defended the deal with a pithy rejoinder: “We’ve passed kneeling.” It was a flippant way to state a hyper-capitalist hip-hop realpolitik: To defang the devil, we have to deal with him.
But it is just as likely justification for Jay-Z’s own quest for a slice of the devil’s pie. The mogul’s work with the N.F.L. has undoubtedly changed the complexion of the halftime show in recent years, but onstage diversity appears to be the extent of the league’s appetite for racial politics: It is reportedly ditching its “End Racism” signage in the end zones for the big game. Six years later, Mr. Lamar, the beloved bard of Black America’s struggle against police violence, will take a stage erected by a partnership that effectively sidelined Mr. Kaepernick. Anything that he does or doesn’t do on that stage will either be undermined or underlined by this history.
Mr. Lamar himself seems to have be backed away from taking overt political stances in the past few years; perhaps he has discovered that expressing his politics seems to alienate as many allies as enemies. Since his debut, Mr. Lamar’s words and deeds have been parsed and judged by a cohort of critics, intellectuals and fans who each plot and then police their own lines of demarcation between selling and selling out. Such is the conundrum of any pop star with an inkling of consciousness. As Chuck D of Public Enemy once put it, such a star must “reach the bourgeois and rock the boulevard.” An entertainer’s job is simple: Don’t be boring. An artist’s job is different: Reveal beauty, evoke emotion. A political artist must do both things, and more: Be right, righteous and lead us, we fans say, but make it rhyme, and make sure the music is hot.
But is that too much for us to ask? We raise young performers up, call them prophets when they validate our worldview, then scan their work for inconsistencies and blast them because they don’t deploy the privileged vocabulary, expertise or nuance of a graduate student. A song is not a dissertation, even if the singer has won a Pulitzer. An artist’s first job is to be an artist, and in this society — where art is ever more unsubsidized, undervalued, unprotected — there’s a real contempt in treating artists otherwise.
The celebrity culture that is now eating American politics and public discourse asks us to invest in the words and actions of prominent and often highly unqualified individuals while abandoning the responsibilities of collective action and critical thinking. We put our work on their shoulders, investing them with a mystical power that we in reality gave to them. After all, this isn’t Mr. Lamar’s first Super Bowl. In 2022, he was part of a Los Angeles-themed extravaganza: He performed “Alright,” Eminem knelt and nothing changed. The impact of a song like “Alright” isn’t in its staged choreography. It was always in the footsteps of the people who marched to it. Artists aren’t here to save the world for us. It’s our job to save the world for them.
And for all the ways Americans police our artists’ politics, we give ourselves a pass. We want our bread and circuses, as long as they’re organic and cruelty-free. We lament what pop stars and the N.F.L. don’t do for us and we can’t even turn the TV off. And whether our gladiators are on the gridiron or on Spotify, we pay to see them maul one another and act as if we have nothing to do with the damage.
Maybe Mr. Lamar, not unlike us, is doing what he can, when he can. Maybe he takes a stand simply by standing on that stage. He doesn’t have to raise his fist. He is a raised fist. Have we lost the ability to see what a miracle he is, a real dude in an otherwise mercenary business and materialistic culture who succeeded with skill and not bloodshed? If there’s a halftime show, and somebody gotta do it, why not Kendrick?
Of course, he might yet square all his contradictions with a creative, symbolic masterstroke. If anyone can, he can. But even if he doesn’t, it’s important to remember that when George Floyd was murdered and it came time to march, Mr. Lamar did so not as a star, but in his other role: citizen — one of the crowd.
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