The NFL Doesn’t Deserve to Be in on Kendrick’s Moment — But He Let Them

On the first full day of the NFL season, the league announced that Kendrick Lamar would be headlining the Super Bowl LIX halftime show in New Orleans. Despite New Orleans native Lil Wayne being right there for a hometown set of hits, NFL brass (with consultation from Jay-Z’s Roc Nation) decided to go with Lamar. The moment feels like the league attempting to get in on Lamar’s momentum as he cements one of the greatest runs in rap history that didn’t include an actual 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 is from an earthquake hotbed, because every time he’s popped out, shit’s been shaken up. 

While Superbowl LVII performer Rihanna decided to forgo new music and stick to her immense catalog, last year’s performer, Usher, dropped an album the weekend before the big game. So there’s some shred of hope for a new Lamar album by January. Regardless, with a decade-plus-spanning slew of chart-topping hits, and collaborators who can take the set in a variety of directions, Lamar deserves to be in the pantheon of Super Bowl halftime performers. He’d be an uncontroversial pick if his 2024 didn’t shake up the music world. But it did. 

With this performance, he’s able to refute Drake and J. Cole’s “big as the Super Bowl” refrain from “First Person Shooter.” During his video announcement of the show, he slyly dismissed Drake’s mysterious “game two” post by noting there’s “no round twos.” It took an effort as calculated and massive as the one Lamar undertook to cleanly defeat Drake in the court of public opinion. He wrote vicious disses, dropped a hit song, and now has the chance to use the world’s biggest stage to take his hate campaign in front of the entire world. Though, who knows how much the conservative NFL would let him perform “Not Like Us,” a diss full of pedophile accusations. But even him performing the hook would be damning — has a diss song ever been performed at the Super Bowl? 

Still, the song also brings us to one of our favorite junctures in pop culture: Two things can be true at the same time. Within three months, Lamar chided Drake for “[running] to Atlanta when you need a check balance,” and then partnered with a corporation that ran to Black music when they needed to distract the country from their racial biases. In 2019, the NFL announced a five-year partnership with Jay-Z and Roc Nation that included producing Super Bowl halftime shows and spearheading social-justice initiatives. The move came on the heels of the league facing boycott calls after Colin Kaepernick was professionally exiled for kneeling during the national anthem. For many, the NFL used Jay-Z to offset the stench of effectively banishing Kaepernick for his protests. Rap fans are now left to consider what’s worse between Drake co-opting music scenes for his pockets or Lamar playing into the PR apparatus for a country (and corporation) that subsists on racial inequality and exploits countries for resources all over the world. 

Lamar announced the Super Bowl performance with a video featuring an American flag the size of a small building; it can’t be lost on viewers that while Kaepernick’s career was derailed for protesting a symbol of Americana, Lamar celebrated his contribution to the NFL’s grand diversion with a commercial glorifying another piece of iconography. Half of “Not Like Us” is a historical treatise on Drake being a cultural “colonizer,” including the lines “Once upon a time, all of us was in chains” and “The settlers was usin’ town folk to make ’em richer.” Those lines feel antithetical to celebrating the American flag, a chief symbol of the colonial settler state (Black people: There’s no “reclaiming” the flag when enslaved Black people never claimed it in the first place). The NFL is also hoping that Lamar’s presence brings in boatloads of ad revenue.

Maybe someone will craft a three-hour video about how the flag is a covert diss toward Drake and Canada, but until then, Lamar’s patriotism looks shaky while aligning with a corporation that propagandizes the U.S. empire, a chief enforcer of imperialism. The NFL runs military TV advertisements that valorize the armed forces, and they have a public pledge to “honor, empower, and connect with our nation’s service members” — while they destabilize countries all over the world. And that’s to say nothing of the NFL’s hiring practices: The league’s players are 53 percent Black, but just six of its 32 head coaches are Black. 

Lamar’s Super Bowl announcement once again compels listeners to scrutinize who the “Us” in “Not Like Us” are, and what their principles are. The song was a smash hit, but with Lamar’s allegiance to people carrying their own “weird” sexual accusations, and his recent decision to align with the NFL despite, among other issues, the continued blackballing of Kaepernick, its potency is cratering. The moment harkens to activist Monifa Bandele telling Rolling Stone that “culture is very powerful, but also a tool … that could be used to advance or to destroy.” 

Time has revealed “Not Like Us” as a sonic Swiss Army knife. It’s been co-opted by imperialist politicians, sports teams, and rap fans of all ethnicities. Its beauty is that everyone feels like it’s about them when it’s playing. But when the song goes off it’s worth wondering how much it even applies to its creator. “Not Like Us” wasn’t made as a tao for Lamar’s real-life worldview; it was crafted to make Drake look bad. It succeeded in its function, but it’s worth wondering how much Lamar’s set himself up to look like a hypocrite over time. 

Like most entertainers, Lamar walks a path toward his own North Star, with few discernible moral barriers. Sometimes his moves are profound, sometimes they’re cringeworthy; as he’s repeatedly told us, he’s only human. He’s brilliant when creating “Alright” for the Black Lives Matter movement or meticulously lambasting Drake with long-held critiques. But when he supports accused abusers like Dr. Dre and Kodak Black and steeps himself in the flag, we understand why he decides to “[protect his] soul in the valley of silence.”

Those lyrics come from “Savior,” a Mr. Morale … song on which he declares “I’m not your savior.” It’s apparent that despite the pro-Black themes in Lamar’s music, he doesn’t want to be an advocate of the people. He doesn’t have to be. But the fans referencing the “Savior” lyric need to realize it isn’t a get-out-of-jail-free card. It doesn’t absolve him to critique or banish people from noting the consequences of his decisions. Kaepernick never proclaimed himself a savior, but he kneeled during the anthem for a cause. Several of the Black artists who’ve won favor by feigning pro-Blackness, including Lamar, continue to help the NFL throw dirt on his fight. Despite what anyone says, we’re not “past kneeling” because the issues Kaepernick was calling attention to still exist. So Lamar may have the viral performance of a lifetime in January, but the access to the Super Bowl stage comes with a price.