The Tartan

Subtlety, thy name is not Kendrick Lamar.

I am writing this in the wee hours of a Monday morning. It’s the sort of Monday I already know will be draining, but at this time, I’m not thinking about it. Even if it’s been a hectic week, even if I have homework I haven’t done yet, I’ve spent the last few hours watching one of the most cathartic blowouts I’ve seen in a good while, and that’s exactly where I want to be.

You see, it’s the day after the Super Bowl, or as it’s called in this part of America, “Huh? I have finals this week, I’m not watching.”

Because Kendrick Lamar’s Super Bowl Halftime Show (sponsored by Apple Music?) was a spectacle that had the subtlety of a brick being tossed at your head, and yet I feel like it was sort of brushed over in a way I’ve never seen an explicitly political act treated before. It would be like if Katy Perry did her entire act on why the war in Iraq was bad and the next day we went back to speculating on whether “I Kissed a Girl” was her coming out or not. The biggest takeaway from the Apple Music Super Bowl Halftime Show wasn’t “Kendrick Lamar is making a political statement,” it was that Drake is allegedly a pedophile.

While that is a completely unfounded accusation that I am not in any way endorsing or encouraging, it shouldn’t have been the takeaway. Not to say Kendrick doesn’t like playing “Not Like Us.” He had a blast when he did perform it, and it was absolutely a lynchpin to the performance, but the song itself had a little more going for it than the typical performance — after all, Uncle Sam had an aneurysm trying to stop it the first couple times.

Okay, okay, wait, that last line needs some explanation.

Kendrick’s halftime show opened with Samuel L. Jackson dressed up in an American flag-themed suit calling himself Uncle Sam. If that ain’t a hell of a metaphor, you might’ve failed the eighth grade. A Black man, dressed up as the avatar of America, decrying Kendrick from his height that he is “too loud, too reckless, too ghetto.”

That last word is charged. That last word cannot be anything but charged because that last word is the cry that has met Black artists for years.

And America Himself is asking Kendrick to “play the game.” Uncle Sam (Jackson) shows up a few times here and there, but the spirit of America remains the central focus of the show, with Kendrick dancing in the middle of a crowd of dancers dressed in red, white, and blue distributed in the pattern of the flag itself. 

It only escalates from there.

Kendrick is a born performer, and he’s performing on the biggest stage you can for an American audience that is pre-trained to care about the Apple Music Super Bowl Halftime Show. 

Then Jackson yells at Kendrick for bringing the culture with him, and he deducts one life. 

It’s right after that interaction that Kendrick hints at “Not Like Us” for the first time in the entire show. He asks if they should play it — and then decides to hold off, so he can transition to a song with SZA. It’s lighter, it’s more fun, it’s an absolutely amazing song, and it’s what the mainstream American audience wants — the song Kendrick and SZA sing is “luther,” one of the biggest hits from his most recent album.

Uncle Sam confirms it to us. He agrees. I mean, of course, he agrees! All he wants are fun beats and good songs to keep the good times rolling right along. It’s the Super Bowl, after all, what else do you want?

***

In 2017, the New England Patriots beat the Atlanta Falcons 34-28 following the biggest comeback in Super Bowl history. It was set against the backdrop of what can only be considered one of the biggest disasters in American politics — when Donald Trump beat Hillary Clinton to become the 45th president of the United States. He’d come into town cheering for the Patriots. The owner, Robert Kraft, loved him, and he had appeared with leadership. The Patriots were, for all intents and purposes, the team that represented Donald Trump. They were a dynasty, THE dynasty, the greatest team to ever grace the National Football League.

They were facing the Atlanta Falcons. Atlanta, Georgia. A blue city in a red state that was the home to civil rights leaders past and present. It’s John Lewis’s state. It’s the city where Martin Luther King Jr. was born. It is a city that would fundamentally reject everything Donald Trump stood for.

It sounds silly. It IS silly. It’s just a sports game, and it was just one little thing that seemed to mirror a world so many of us were not happy with, and for so many of us a small reprieve from, well, everything else.

***

Eight years later, Donald Trump is returning to office following what can only be considered one of the biggest disasters in American politics, beating Kamala Harris to become the 47th president of the United States. And this time, his team is the Kansas City Chiefs. They’re full of people like him — Harrison Butker telling women their highest calling is to be housewives, Brittany Mahomes (Patrick Mahomes’s wife) supporting racist and anti-immigrant policies. They’re the new great evil of the NFL. They’re the new dynasty, posed to threepeat. 

And this time, on stage in front of America, is Kendrick Lamar, the most famous rapper of our generation, a man out of Compton reminding us that Black America is here, that Black America is not going anywhere. That you, yes you, on your phones and your TVs and your screens and your couches all across America need to sit up and listen.

He opened by telling us that the revolution will be televised. “You picked the right time but the wrong guy.” He starts by kowtowing to the sort of minority celebrity Uncle Sam wants him to be: light, fun, breezy, not too… What were those adjectives? “Loud, reckless, ghetto?” 

“Not Like Us,” is, fundamentally, a song about how much Kendrick Lamar hates Drake. And somehow, by a transformation that seems so bizarre and so incredible, it has become the grand crowning of rebellion, the pushback in the face of Uncle Sam, the Thing That We Are Not Meant To Do, on the largest scale, on the largest stage. 

There are rules on what you can say on TV. The FCC is very protective, the Good Christian Mothers of America might get offended by the mean words coming out of someone’s mouth. Kendrick can’t swear and he certainly can’t say “pedophile,” but he can sing out as loud and proud as he can “A MINORRRRRRRRRR” and oh my God, the entire crowd shouts it back.

He’s not supposed to do that. But he does. Because that’s his right. 

On stage for this moment is Serena Williams, one of the greats of women’s tennis. (I say the greatest, but I don’t follow tennis and I don’t want to antagonize our small but loyal tennis contingent.) She’s crip walking. She did it after the 2012 Olympics when she beat Maria Sharapova. And when she did it last time, she was screamed at, she was blasted by critics. It was too trashy. It was too reckless. It was too…

Kendrick closes the whole thing with the grand spectacle that is “tv off.” The horns in the beat, the grand triumphant beat? It’s a song you don’t get to ignore. He wants to remind you that he’s the biggest rapper in the world. Don’t you dare forget that.

He’s not a subtle man. He has been, in the past, there is subtlety in many of his songs, but right now? At this moment? Kendrick is not subtle. Uncle Sam is a lot of things — the government, the critics, the haters, anyone trying to keep you down — and Kendrick wants people to know that it’s no way to live. He’s going to keep on going. He’s going to turn the TV off. The revolution will be televised.

I loved watching the Chiefs get humiliated in New Orleans, a humiliation that was a long time coming. I hated watching that humiliation come at the hands of the Eagles, a team I loathe with all my heart — at least, as long as they’re not stopping a Chiefs threepeat.

But I will always remember Kendrick Lamar, standing amongst a crowd dressed and organized like an American flag split in two.