Kendrick Lamar, Folksinger

I can't help but unpack the Super Bowl Halftime Show, among other things

First: Hip-hop is folk music. Let’s just get that out of the way.

Before I get talking about the music, though, I want to share some things I know to be true.

1.) I am neither an expert on football nor on hip-hop, and certainly not on Black culture. I am a person who happened to be watching television this past weekend, who knows a lot about how music forms a chain back through time, and the potential that songs give us for connecting dots in history and culture, for making order out of what may look and feel like chaos. That is the spirit with which I’m going to go on about the genius of Kendrick Lamar.

2.) The Super Bowl took place in the New Orleans Superdome. You might recall, in August 2005, the Superdome became a focal point of media coverage about the deeply racist situation happening in New Orleans in the days following Hurricane Katrina. Further, New Orleans is one of the few Southern cities where free Black folks could own land, and thus amass intergenerational wealth, even before the Civil War. These facts, along with many other tidbits in the city’s history, make it a special location for talking about race and power in America.

3.) As a Pulitzer Prize-winning rapper-poet, Kendrick Lamar is no dope. He certainly knew at least some of this history.

4.) The Super Bowl pregame featured an HBCU marching band, the Spirit of New Orleans Gospel Choir, and Grammy-winning NOLA native Ledisi singing “Lift Every Voice and Sing”—the Black National Anthem.

Kendrick Lamar was walking into a Context. Let’s begin there.

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When I was in my Researching Era for my 2021 book A Singing Army: Zilphia Horton and the Highlander Folk School (University of Texas Press), I recall a conversation with the incredible folksinger, cultural organizer, and folk song collector Candie Carawan about the different utilities of music. This is not a conversation wherein I took copious notes, so I’m going to recall it from memory and thus not directly quote either of us.

But, if memory serves, the gist was that there is the music being used by organizers. This is music with a specific assignment. The job of the song in this context is to get everyone present, coalesced around a certain goal, ready to resist. “We Shall Overcome” does this nicely, and if you need more info about how and why songs like that work(ed), boy have I got the book for you. (See above.)

But then there are the ways pop stars use music to Say Something. This is also very important to any movement, even if it’s not something anyone on the street can pick up and run with. Even if the rest of us could never sing like that or rap like that or get those dancers to do those things. The job of the song in this context is to get everyone’s attention and think about something they haven’t considered before.

A person on a stage, with a microphone and lights that make them the focus of a moment, has an opportunity to use that platform for good, rather than evil—or, worse, complacency.

Enter Kendrick Lamar, on the hood of a car, performing “Bodies.”

Started with nothing but government cheese
But now I can seize the government too

As the lights come up, his dancers pop out of the car like a cabal of clowns dressed in red, white, and blue. I’ll refrain from digging into the history of clowning and its spectrum from Blatantly Racist to Unabashedly Subversive. I’ll let you fall down that wormhole on your own.

But this is Kendrick Lamar. Nothing he does has just one meaning.

Red and blue are Blood and Crip colors, of course. Together with white (the color of suffragettes; also the Klan), his dancers build the American flag with their bodies. They are all Black men, working together to build America. I don’t have to unpack that one.

You would not get the picture
If I had to sit you
For hours in front of the Louvre

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Back up.

Kendrick Lamar first started to blow up in 2012. He won the Pulitzer six years later and, by now, is known even to those of us who write about folk music for a living, as a sharp-tongued, masterful writer who spares no topic or person—whether government leader or Canadian rapper. His rhymes are deeply layered, and this extends to his fashion and his sets and his dancers and the entire aura around him.

So, as I watched Lamar own that stage—designed to look like equal parts Squid Games and prison yard—with his red, white, and blue cadre of Black male dancers using their bodies to build an American flag, the way America used Black people to build its wealth—all of these things swirled together in my mind.

Ain't no changing me
Ain't no shaming me
Flip a coin
You want the dangerous me or the famous me?

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Then there was SZA all in red—the color of blood, the color of love, the color of anger. She punctuated Lamar’s raps with her powerful vocals during “luther” and “All the Stars,” which provoked Samuel L. Jackson (as “Uncle Sam”) to commend Lamar for giving America what it wants—a calm Black man.

Then the record scratches and we’re into “Not Like Us”—the song that gave Lamar a handful of Grammy Awards this year. The song that Kamala Harris wrapped into the soundtrack of her run for President—a fact worth noting since the man to whom she lost the office was in attendance for this performance.

Granted, the song began its life as a diss track aimed at Canadian rapper Drake. Much has been made of these two rappers’ beef, and I really don’t know or care about any of it. (Though I do love what I saw someone say on Threads about how diss tracks boil down to two grown men so pissed at each other that they can see no way forward but to write poetry back and forth for years.) But if the beef with Drake is what brought Serena Williams out to do the Crip Walk for ten seconds, I applaud it.

Worth noting: When Williams did the same dance after winning a tennis match in 2012 (the year of Lamar’s debut), she was decried for being too Black. Look at her now—the GOAT.

So, if we are to believe this Super Bowl halftime show was all personal beef with no greater substance, would people still be discussing it? Fat chance. Besides, he began it by flipping a Gil Scott Heron reference on its head: “The revolution is about to be televised.”

What’s not to love?