Kendrick Lamar, a Pulitzer Prize-winning rapper, took the stage at the Super Bowl halftime show on Sunday and delivered one of the boldest and most thematically layered performances in the event’s history. While much of the preceding discussions fixated on whether he would perform “Not Like Us,” his Grammy Award-winning summer 2024 diss track against fellow rapper Drake, that debate proved trivial compared to the performance’s broader statements about Black culture, political resistance, and the complex relationship between entertainment and activism.
The NFL has a troubled history with racism and hostility toward protest. In 2016, the league blackballed Colin Kaepernick for kneeling during the National Anthem. Five years later, in 2021, they were found to discriminate against Black players in payouts for concussion-linked brain injuries. And this year, they removed the “END RACISM” slogans that have been painted on the ends of every Super Bowl field since 2020, perhaps in preparation for President Trump—who recently deemed Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion programs illegal—to be the first sitting president to attend the game.
With multiple billionaires in the audience, Lamar’s stage lit up like a tic-tac-toe board. His dancers were dressed in monochrome red, white, and blue uniforms reminiscent of Squid Game, the hit Korean TV series that critiques capitalist exploitation and forces individuals to play children’s games for survival. His message was clear: in America, power is a game, and the rules are rigged.
Crouched atop the hood of a Buick GNX—the inspiration for his 2024 album title—in near-darkness, Lamar opened with an unreleased track. “Started with nothing but government cheese, but now I can seize the government too,” he rapped before launching into “squabble up,” one of the two lead singles from GNX (2024).
But before Lamar could finish the song—which, like all the songs Lamar would play, was performed live, seemingly without a backing track—Samuel L. Jackson, dressed as Uncle Sam, interrupted, saying: “No, no, no, no. Too loud, too reckless, too ghetto! Mr. Lamar, do you really know how to play the game?”
Right before performing “Humble,” his all-Black entourage came together to form an American flag, with performers raising their fists. At the center stood Jackson, a Black man personifying an iconic symbol of American patriotism. The ensemble made a clear statement: Black America is America, despite persistent attempts at erasure.
Lamar then launched into “DNA.,” his famed 2017 track from DAMN., defined by its pulsating beat and sharp commentary on the contradictions of Black identity in America: “Loyalty, got royalty inside my DNA / Cocaine quarter piece, got war and peace inside my DNA / I got power, poison, pain and joy inside my DNA,” he rapped.
After performing three more of his newest tracks—“euphoria,” “man at the garden,” and “peekaboo”—he teased “Not Like Us,” saying, “I wanna play their favorite song, but you know they love to sue,” a jab at Drake’s defamation lawsuit against their shared record label. But first, he said he wanted to slow things down,” bringing SZA on stage for “Luther” and “All the Stars.” The latter was originally released as the lead single for the Black Panther (2018) soundtrack—the first Marvel Cinematic Universe film centered on a Black superhero.
Then came the moment of the night. The stadium erupted as Lamar launched into “Not Like Us.” But as the lyrics say, “This is bigger than the music.” From playing at Dodgers games to blasting from lowriders in South Central, the song, originally released as a diss track, has been adopted as a celebration of Los Angeles’s dominance in hip-hop and a rejection of those perceived as outsiders attempting to profit from its culture. Serena Williams, another Los Angeles native, crip walked across the stage in a blue tennis skirt and Chuck 70s. Lamar grinned directly into the camera as he delivered the song’s most scathing line with unmistakable clarity: “Say, Drake, I hear you like ‘em young.”
But amid the carefully orchestrated spectacle, one performer pulled out a banner combining the Palestinian and Sudanese flags with a heart and a fist. Whether this was part of the planned performance or an unsanctioned act of protest remains unclear.
Lamar performed as an invited and celebrated artist, handpicked for a corporate-sponsored spectacular. The protester, by contrast, operated outside of sanctioned limits, met not with applause but with swift removal by security. That part of the revolution was not televised, leaving audiences to question the limits of institutionalized protest and whether true defiance can ever be fully staged within an event designed to uphold the status quo.
The show closed with “tv off,” a song urging audiences to disengage from manufactured narratives and focus on reality. For the final song, Lamar brought out Mustard, a longtime West Coast collaborator and key producer on GNX. As the track reached its final moments, a high-pitched beep rang through the stadium, and the lights abruptly cut out, leaving the arena in total darkness before “GAME OVER” lit up across the stands in stark white letters. Rather than offering resolution, Lamar’s ending reinforced the illusion of control in entertainment, the spectacle of performance, and the discomfort of unfinished narratives.
Lamar’s halftime show was a rejection of the sanitized, easily digestible performances the NFL typically favors. Yet, for all its subversion, the performance still existed within the carefully managed boundaries of an institution that thrives on spectacle. Even as Lamar challenged the game, he was still playing within its rules. The removal of the protester exposed the limits of dissent in corporate-sponsored entertainment; his performance was allowed to critique, but only within a framework that ensured control remained intact.
