More viewers tuned into watch Kendrick Lamar — 133.5 million people — than any other Super Bowl halftime show. And they witnessed a rousing concert by a 22-time Grammy-winning (as well as one Pulitzer-winning) artist. But there was much more on display, if you knew where to look for it.
Mr. Lamar provided a layered spectacle of cultural and political allusions, encoded in and percolating through propulsive rap, 13 minutes of profound protest art that compelled me to shout gleefully at my TV in response to the audacity I was witnessing. With the multifaceted symbolism unspooling before me, I felt compelled to break down the brilliant complexities. Here’s my take:
The performance began with an aerial shot of the darkened football field illuminated by alternating symbols: a square, a circle, a triangle and an X.
More than a few people noted the nod to the masks worn by the guards in the dystopian South Korean drama “Squid Game,” in which poor people compete against one another in a series of sadistic games. When I first saw the symbols I, along with many others, thought of the PlayStation controller buttons.
Both references point to one main conceit for Mr. Lamar’s premise: the gamification of the elusive American dream, which for too many of us has become the “dream deferred,” as in the Langston Hughes poem “Harlem.”
Mr. Lamar doubled down on the gamification theme when he rapped: “Forty acres and a mule, this is bigger than the music. Yeah, they tried to rig the game, but you can’t fake influence.” He was doing nuanced work: talking, yes, about his beef with Drake, which led to his hit song “Not Like Us,” but also extending the metaphor to indict America and white hegemonic power.
By citing “40 acres,” Mr. Lamar was alluding to Field Order No. 15, a promise to allocate some 400,000 acres of land once owned by Confederates to former Black slaves. The promise was broken when Andrew Johnson, Lincoln’s successor, overturned the order in 1865.
Then Samuel L. Jackson appeared dressed as patriotism personified: the military recruitment propaganda character of Uncle Sam, shouting like a carnival barker, “This is the great American game!”
Throughout the satirical performance, Mr. Jackson voiced critiques of Mr. Lamar, sounding like a different uncle: Uncle Tom of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” striving to placate, subdue and dilute Mr. Lamar’s message. At one point Mr. Jackson reprimanded Mr. Lamar, declaring his performance “too loud, too reckless, too ghetto.”
For me, this was a harsh reminder of several injustices — like the gruesome murder of Jordan Davis, 17, on Nov. 23, 2012. Jordanwas gunned down by a 45-year-old white man, Michael Dunn, at a gas station in Jacksonville, Fla., after playing what Mr. Dunn called his “rap crap” too loud.
It also recalled Sandra Bland, who refused to put her phone away during a 2015 traffic stop, stating that she had a right to record the interaction. A dispute erupted between her and a state trooper, who drew his stun gun and shouted, “I will light you up. Get out. Now.” Ms. Bland was forced to the ground and arrested.
The Texas Department of Public Safety stated that she “became argumentative and uncooperative” during the arrest — too loud, too reckless.
Three days later, Ms. Bland was found dead in her jail cell.
Mr. Jackson’s character also recalled his role as the narrator, Dolmedes, in Spike Lee’s “Chi-Raq,” as well as the traitorous house slave Stephen in “Django Unchained.” But I couldn’t help thinking of the historical context of minstrel shows, of burned cork smeared on the face of white actors, as they played lazy, buffoonish Black-faced characters for white audiences. Mr. Jackson both echoed and parodied these caricatures in his navy top hat decked out in stars and stripes, recalling a different Spike Lee film, “Bamboozled,” about the history of minstrelsy. The name of Mr. Lee’s production company? Forty Acres and a Mule.
In Mr. Lamar’s show — or, rather his game of a play-within-a-play — the Uncle Sam figure takes on the role of the high-status interlocutor, a character common in the minstrel tradition, who facilitates dialogue among the other performers and serves as a master of ceremonies. Mr. Jackson played Uncle Sam with a wink for those of us who got the joke — a breaking of the fourth wall for those of us living on the margins, actively threatened by this current administration.
We know that Mr. Jackson knows what Mr. Lamar knows: We at home are not just passive spectators. Mr. Lamar is speaking directly to us, but in code. “Not Like Us” is not just about Drake anymore. It’s a diss track to America, an audacious indictment delivered as a rallying anthem designed to unite us and revive our weary, burned-out reserves.
This perfectly set up perhaps the most resonant image of the halftime show: a living American flag as embodied by Black dancers in red, white and blue, a reminder of the backs that built this country against their will, with Mr. Lamar situated in the center. Reframing the threat of a Black man in a hoodie through powerful iconography, portraying what freedom can look like, instead of what we usually see on our TV screens: dead or broken Black bodies, exploited as pejorative tropes. This was American symbolism through the lens of bold and unapologetic Blackness.
Kendrick Lamar is the ultimate trickster in his Celine boot-cut jeans, outwitting the problematic American game by employing the lexicon of the rap beef repartee, weaving his coded messages for the intended audience that needed these camouflaged ciphers the most. He is like Harriet Tubman mimicking the hoot of the barred owl as a conductor on the Underground Railroad, guiding freedom seekers away from detection and danger.
But nothing could top the way I shouted at the significance of seeing Serena Williams “Crip walking” during Mr. Lamar’s “Not Like Us,” reclaiming Black joy. Not only did it celebrate Compton, the Los Angeles County city where Ms. Williams grew up, but it reclaimed the joy that was weaponized against her after she celebrated her 2012 London Olympics gold medal with a three-second Crip walk, unleashing an onslaught of racist commentary and a Fox News headline, “Serena Flubs Crowning Moment.”
Why must the ways we celebrate our victories be mocked and condemned? Why must our successes accommodate the comfort zone of people who do not value or recognize our humanity? Why must our resilient joy be caged? Ms. Williams answered each of these questions through a Black dance with gorgeous confidence, taking back what should have been her glorious moment 13 years ago.
After watching this 13-minute performance, I realized that, although I might not be able to stop the current onslaught of dispiriting news, I do have agency. I can turn off the TV — which was Mr. Lamar’s last command to the viewers, using his hand to mime a remote facing us. The action echoed his declaration at the start of his performance, as he knelt on top of a Buick GNX: “The revolution ’bout to be televised. You picked the right time, but the wrong guy.”
This mutinous slogan responded to and was an inversion of Gil Scott-Heron’s 1971 song “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised,” which, according to his biographer Marcus Baram, Mr. Scott-Heron wrote in part to highlight “the disconnect between the consumerism celebrated on TV with the protests happening on the streets of America.” Mr. Lamar flipped the meaning of these famous words during this radical televised performance — ending with a wake-up call meant to remind us that we do, indeed, have control, and the controller, in our hands. We have the tools for resistance and revolution at our disposal.
Kendrick Lamar’s transgressive joy might just be the antidote to political burnout and apathy, which is most evident in the viral image of him wearing a backward hat, smiling wide, looking directly at the camera, dripping in diamonds, exuding maximum delight. This ecstatic expression meant something deeper than a feud to me.
I turned off my TV, staring at the black void of the screen, buzzing from what I’d just witnessed. Texts spilled in from friends with a slew of exclamation points, all of us in awe, inspired and lit up. I played Mr. Lamar’s song “squabble up” and started dancing in my living room by myself, the first time I’ve let myself feel uninhabited and reassured in 2025. I didn’t realize how much I had been clutching my breath. My unyielding body — a tight fist since the inauguration.
There were, of course, dozens of other references, echoes and allusions in the show. If you didn’t catch or understand all of them, that’s OK. For those of us who did, we got the message, Kendrick Lamar. We heard you. We saw you — loud and clear and abundantly Black.
They can try to erase us. But we shall not be moved.
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