Super Bowl Sunday indicated new bounds for Kendrick Lamar, as he seemed more interested in the commercial side of his career than the politics of his past music. The performance focused on songs from his two most commercially successful albums: “DAMN.” and “GNX,” which was released ahead of the Super Bowl and after his diss track, “Not Like Us,” spent much of the summer at the top of numerous charts. Interestingly absent for his performance were earlier albums, like “Section.80,” “good kid,” “m.A.A.d city,” “To Pimp a Butterfly,” which had a political edge, and “Mr. Morale & The Big Steppers,” Lamar’s most personal album.
“Mr. Morale & The Big Steppers” was released at a moment when Lamar was at the top of the industry, yet had failed to look internally at himself and his family. Lamar suggests throughout the album that being the face of a movement, like Black Lives Matter, was too much for him, especially when new focuses, like raising a family and going to counseling to uncover generational traumas, were now in play.
Amongst those traumas is a multigenerational experience of sexual and domestic violence, which he writes about in “Mother I Sober.” Lamar is right to build up his own community before committing himself to being a political messiah for millions, yet this perspective seems disingenuous when compared to his career choices over the last year.
Noname, a Chicago rapper, seemed to accurately gauge his commercial interests in her 2023 album where she wrote, “Go, Kendrick, go/ Watch the fighter jet fly high/ War machine gets glamorized.” Her critique comes after Lamar seemed to distance himself from politics for the sake of commercial success at venues like the Super Bowl.
The Super Bowl stage is particularly questionable given that the National Football League (NFL) pushed Colin Kaepernick, who took a knee during the national anthem to protest police violence, out of the league for his actions. If not for Jay-Z, who was made the chief strategist for the NFL’s live entertainment in response to the Black Lives Matter movement, Lamar would not have been on that stage. Therefore, Lamar functioned less as a revolutionary and more as a pawn for a league that refuses to pursue the demands of Black Lives Matter as it profits off of Black musicians and athletes.
Yet Lamar himself has prioritized success over his politics in his most recent performance and he’s done so at the expense of social movements and radical history. Lamar played off of Gil Scott-Heron’s song “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised,” arguing instead that it actually will, and that “they picked the right time but the wrong guy.” Here, Lamar is referring to himself and his lack of interest in being the face of a social movement. He’s right to say that the revolution will be televised, but only in the sense that his performance served more as a cultural revolution than a political one.
Contrastly, Scott-Heron, who Lamar quipped off of, meshed his activism and politics. His argument was that the revolution would never be brought to you on a Super Bowl stage, or any other stage that aligned itself with capitalism. For Lamar’s performance to have been revolutionary, he needed to perform one of his more politically provocative songs like “Alright,” which had a massive impact on the Black Lives Matter movement, or “Hiiipower,” which positions Lamar with Black historical figures like Marcus Garvey, Malcolm X and Huey P. Newton.
There’s no doubt that Lamar’s performance was an important incursion that celebrated American Blackness, as evidenced by the all-Black cast of dancers whose bodies formed the American flag, making the accurate point that Black Americans built this country. But Lamar’s performance ultimately disappoints if it is to be read as politically revolutionary. We must be critical of artists and how they are aiding or abetting a revolutionary political project, especially as they become more famous and wealthy.
When Lamar notes in “Not Like Us” that he doesn’t care if the industry cancels him, we need to ask why he’s no longer willing to risk his own fame for any number of political purposes, but will gladly do so for the sake of a diss track.
In our current moment, we must ask why Lamar is more interested in breaking his silence to respond to a diss track than to speak about Palestine or Sudan. In the end, it was not Lamar who represented radicalism on that stage, but Zul-Qarnain Nantambu, who raised the Sundanese and Palestinian flags in an act of protest during the halftime show. Artists have an important role to play in expanding our political imaginaries, and Nantambu’s solidarity was a performance necessary for such a project.
