On the first full day of the NFL season, the league announced that Kendrick Lamar would headline the Super Bowl LIX halftime show in New Orleans. Although New Orleans native Lil Wayne exactly there for a collection of hits from his hometown, NFL leadership (with advice from Jay-Z’s Roc Nation) chose Lamar. The moment feels like the league is trying to capitalize on Lamar’s momentum as he cements one of the greatest runs in rap history that didn’t involve a real project. Lamar’s Twitter account speaks to the efficiency of his 2024: There are three shares of his Drake disses, then a Super Bowl announcement. It’s fitting that the Compton native hails from an earthquake hotbed, because every time he’s appeared, the shit has been shaken up.
While Rihanna, who refrained from playing new music at Super Bowl LVII and referenced her vast catalog, last year’s artist Usher released an album the weekend before the big game, there’s still a glimmer of hope for a new Lamar album by January. Regardless, with a string of chart-topping hits spanning more than a decade and collaborators who can take the set in different directions, Lamar deserves a place in the pantheon of Super Bowl halftime performers. He’d be a no-brainer if his 2024 performance didn’t shake up the music world. But it did.
With this performance, he refutes Drake and J. Cole’s “big as the Super Bowl” chorus from “First Person Shooter.” During his video announcement of the show, he dismissed Drake’s mysterious “game two” post by noting that there was “no second round.” It took an effort as calculated and massive as the one Lamar put in to clearly defeat Drake in the court of public opinion. He wrote vicious disses, released a hit song, and now has the chance to use the world’s biggest stage to take his hate campaign to the world. However, no one knows how much the conservative NFL would let him perform “Not Like Us,” a diss full of pedophilia accusations. But even if he did sing the chorus, it would be devastating—has a diss song ever been played at the Super Bowl?
Yet the song also brings us to one of our favorite moments in pop culture: Two things can be true at once. In the space of three months, Lamar went from chiding Drake for “running to Atlanta when he needs his bank balance” to partnering with a company that relies on black music when it needs to distract the country from its racial bias. In 2019, the NFL announced a five-year partnership with Jay-Z and Roc Nation that included producing Super Bowl halftime shows and promoting social justice initiatives. The move came shortly after the league faced calls for a boycott following Colin Kaepernick’s professional ban for kneeling during the national anthem. For many, the NFL was using Jay-Z to cover up the stench created by effectively banning Kaepernick for protesting. Rap fans must now ask themselves what is worse: Drake abusing the music scene for his own ends, or Lamar joining the PR apparatus of a country (and corporation) that thrives on racial inequality and exploits countries around the world for their resources.
Lamar announced his Super Bowl appearance with a video featuring an American flag the size of a small building. Viewers will notice that while Kaepernick’s career was derailed by protesting a symbol of American culture, Lamar celebrated his contribution to the NFL’s great pastime with a commercial that glorified a different piece of iconography. Half of “Not Like Us” is a historical treatise on Drake as a cultural “colonizer,” including the lines “Once upon a time, we were all in chains” and “The settlers used the townspeople to make them richer.” These lines are at odds with the celebration of the American flag, a primary symbol of the settler colonial state (Black folks: there is no “reclaiming” the flag if enslaved Black people never claimed it). The NFL also hopes Lamar’s presence will bring in tons of advertising revenue.
Maybe someone will make a three-hour video about how the flag is a veiled insult to Drake and Canada, but until then, Lamar’s patriotism looks shaky as he sides with a corporation that promotes the U.S. empire, one of the primary enforcers of imperialism. The NFL runs military ads on television that glorify the armed forces, and it has publicly vowed to “honor, empower, and connect with our nation’s soldiers” — while destabilizing countries around the world. And that’s without even mentioning the NFL’s hiring practices: The league’s players are 53 percent black, but only six of its 32 head coaches are black.
Lamar’s Super Bowl announcement once again forces listeners to question exactly who the “we” in “Not Like Us” are and what their principles are. The song was a huge hit, but with Lamar’s loyalty to people making their own “weird” sexual allegations and his recent decision to join the NFL despite the continued blacklisting of Kaepernick, among others, its impact is waning. The moment is reminiscent of activist Monifa Bandele’s statement Rolling Stone that “culture is very powerful, but it is also a tool … that can be used for progress or destruction.”
Time has revealed “Not Like Us” to be a sonic Swiss Army knife. Imperialist politicians, sports teams, and rap fans of all ethnicities have adopted it. The beauty of it is that everyone feels like it’s about them when it’s on. But when the song starts, you wonder how much it even applies to its creator. “Not Like Us” wasn’t created as a Tao for Lamar’s real worldview; it was created to make Drake look bad. It served its function, but it’s worth wondering how much Lamar has pushed himself into the role of hypocrite over time.
Like most entertainers, Lamar forges his own path to his North Star, with no discernible moral barriers. Sometimes his actions are profound, sometimes embarrassing; as he’s told us repeatedly, he’s only human. He’s brilliant when he creates “Alright” for the Black Lives Matter movement or meticulously takes down Drake with long-held criticisms. But when he supports accused abusers like Dr. Dre and Kodak Black and throws his arms around the flag, we understand why he chooses to “shelter his soul in the valley of silence.”
This text comes from “Savior”, a Mr Morale … song in which he declares, “I’m not your savior.” It’s obvious that despite the pro-black themes in his music, Lamar doesn’t want to be an advocate for the people. Nor does he need to. But fans who relate to the “Savior” lyric need to realize that this isn’t a license to go to jail. It doesn’t absolve him from criticizing people or hiding the consequences of his decisions. Kaepernick never declared himself a savior, but he did kneel for a cause during the national anthem. Several of the black artists who have gained sympathy through their feigned pro-black behavior, including Lamar, continue to help the NFL discredit his fight. Whatever anyone says, we’re not “past kneeling” because the issues Kaepernick brought attention to still exist. So Lamar may have the viral performance of a lifetime in January, but access to the Super Bowl stage comes at a price.
