They Not Like US

He Got Game - Kendrick's attempt to game the system

Kendrick Lamar’s performance during Apple Music’s Super Bowl Halftime Show confirmed one thing: he sure knows how to play the game. The game Kendrick was playing obviously wasn’t football - he was playing both sides against the middle.

The celebrated counterculture figure was using a mass cultural event to play two opposing sides against each other for his own advantage. The competition on display was, of course, the “Great American Game” he called the “cultural divide”.

As any African American will readily attest, the game is rigged and dangerous. If they want to play ‘the game’ and survive, black American’s need to have the talk to learn how to de-escalate inevitable conflict situations, be taught to code switch to better fit into different social contexts or racial groups and play into racial stereotypes in order to succeed on an unlevel playing field.

Kendrick’s goal was twofold: to tell a provocative story and bridge a divide he uniquely occupies. The means of engagement was a spectacular performance structured around a recurring visual motif or thematic element (life as a video game). Kendrick not only performed on a stage designed to invoke a PlayStation but the stadium’s seats were alternatively lit up to spell Start Here, Warning Wrong Way and Game Over to highlight the main theme. Kendrick’s performance was no replay of Dr. Dre’s crowd pleasing Pepsi Super Bowl Halftime Show (in which he featured alongside Snoop Dogg, Eminem, Mary J. Blige, & 50 Cent three years prior).

Given the current cultural climate - the Trump administration’s attack on diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives and the NFL’s decision to remove End Racism pledges from End Zones -Kendrick’s performance was primed to poke and prod.

Kendrick Lamar navigated the cultural divide via an elaborate pageantry incorporating colour coded visuals, overt symbolism and narrative urgency. The performance was fraught with layered - and contradictory - allusions that was perhaps best exemplified by Kendrick’s claim that “The revolution about to be televised / You picked the right time but the wrong guy”. The NFL’s pick then immediately launched into Squabble Up and culminated with a demand to “turn this TV off” (TV Off).

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Kendrick was playfully alluding to Gil Scott-Heron’s incendiary 1971 track The Revolution Will Not Be Televised. The theme of Scott-Heron’s poem is that a black culture’s revolutionary spirit would ideally not be commodified or neutralised by commercial television. The song highlights the tension between the consumerist values sold (and bought into) on network television and the protests happening on the streets. The Revolution Will Not Be Televised was intended as a wake-up call to anyone who thinks that black freedom is possible by sitting on the sidelines or viewing it as a spectator sport.

If a change was going to come, viewers would need to turn off their TVs and join the uprising.

When the resistance does allow itself to be co-opted by top-down media it will have only succeeded at being a “cop out”.¹ As Heron urges, black resistance cannot be brought, sold or televised because it can be neither sanitised, sanctioned or sponsored. The revolution will not “give your mouth sex appeal” “make you look five pounds thinner” or falsely promise that a “coke” will teach the whole world to sing in perfect harmony. The black revolution has to be the real thing, and not some half measure or occur during halftime at a sporting game.

The irony was not lost on the ever ascendant Kendrick Lamar. Despite his renowned ambivalence about being a spokesperson for the black community or its personal saviour, he endeavoured to rise to the occasion anyway. The theme of his set couldn’t have been more transparent: the United States remains divided against itself. Kendrick wasn’t commenting on ‘red and blue states’ but ‘black and white’ relations. The most striking thing about the set, though, has somehow gone unnoticed or was lost in translation.

The halftime’s most talked about performance served a purpose other than to publicly diss Drake on the world’s biggest stage. Not Like Us was repurposed into the night’s bigger narrative arc. Not Like Us also provided a critical comment on the State of the Union’s cultural identity or claim to authenticity. According to the elaborately staged pageantry, blacks remain tethered to their nation - this is US (‘they don’t like us’ or whites are not part of the same US as African Americans). Despite his presence at Caesars Superdome in New Orleans during Super Bowl LIX, the state of play remains: US versus Them (or They).

Kendrick wasn’t telling a story in black and white terms though - the racial divide isn’t so clear-cut. He made it clear that African Americans are also divided amongst themselves over how to best play the game. This theme was literally announced when a black Uncle Sam (Samuel Jackson) took centre stage on the field. Uncle Sam - the US traditionally personified as an elderly white man - was invoked for two reasons: to play on (elicit) patriotic emotion and to enlist the support of viewers watching the game. His role was similarly two-fold: to act as a chorus (or collective voice) and to try and control the narrative by ‘keeping score’. Samuel Jackson was clearly no Uncle Sam though - this renowned motherfucker was playing the role of Uncle Tom again , or a house negro demanding deference and subservience from field Negros.

Kendrick initially appeared to be playing along. When we first see him, he is (briefly) framed as if he were engaged in an act of supplication or humble petition. He appears to be bending the knee -kneeling or submitting - but (of course) taking the knee has a very different meaning within the NFL: it is a symbolic - and defiant - gesture against racism. The camera’s initial framing, however, is mischievous misdirection. As the camera pulls back we see that Kendrick was also pulling our leg - he is just perched on top of his beloved black Buick GNX (Grand National Experimental).

Perhaps that’s why the GNX almost immediately turned into a clown car and had a comical number of coloured performers (black dancers in red, white and blue) tumble out for our viewing pleasure.

During the course of his 13 minute set, Kendrick refused to be Humbled: humility was not in his DNA. As Uncle Sam/Tom chastised, “too loud, too reckless, too ghetto. Mr Lamar, do you really know how to play the game? Just tighten up”. Lamar’s idea of tightening up was upping the ante and playing peekaboo, or a game of surprise, balanced with expectation. Kendrick inputted the “culture cheat code”: he called on some “homeboys” to help him perform an a cappella version of man in the garden as if they were all happily standing on a ghetto street corner. To some extent, this was what Uncle Sam was “talking about…nice and calm” music that acts as a palliative (or sedative). But like black coffee it was still too black, too strong for him.

The finger tapping smiling black faces suddenly turned into violently gyrating Negroes in the menacing Peekaboo - a song that brought the noise by pointing the finger at playas “talking bout nothin”. Kendrick then went on to give everyone what they wanted - the smash hits (Luther, All The Stars, Not Like Us) that would bring the house down.

Prior to launching into his biggest hit, Kendrick explicitly reframed the euphoric Not Like US into a cultural lament. Specifically, where the US marks a “cultural divide. I’m going to get it onto the floor. Forty acres and a mule/this is bigger than the music’ (and Drake). The phrase forty acres and a mule refers to the ‘promised land’, or a (broken) promise given to freed slaves about land ownership and self determination after the American Civil War ( 1861-1865). Although that ship has long sailed, the sense of betrayal and exploitation remains.

The Civil War was supposedly about black slavery - whether it should be abolished or extended into Western states - and the promise made to freed slaves was intended to transform race relations. Racial justice - social, economic, political - is obviously yet to come and remains contested on other terrains.

The phrase forty acres and a mule not only represents a broken and/or unfulfilled promise, it remains historically significant for a more contemporary reason: it has been incorporated into the modern discussion about reparations for slavery and balancing the scales of social justice.

The night’s most potent (and recurring) theme was arguably conveyed in images representing the body politic : black dancers in red, white and blue sweatshirts assembled into an American flag - and Kendrick dividing the flag by standing between them.

Kendrick Lamar’s show stopping performance, nonetheless, remains caught in a performative contradiction. This black ‘outsider’ was performing inside the middle of a stadium because of the institutional dynamics that brought him there in the first place. Kendrick Lamar is clearly not a marginal voice, minority figure or armed revolutionary. He is amongst the most revered and rewarded artists of the twentieth first century. The most inattentive viewer could see that his halftime show had the support of the very system being critiqued: it was produced, directed, designed, choreographed and flogged (sold) within an inch of its life. While he deserves all his international success, it would not have been possible without the global dynamics of contemporary racial capitalism supporting it. Lamar’s anger and despair at systemic oppression has been absorbed and capitalised upon by the very forces he was railing against.

An exploitative system has increased Lamar’s social capital in two related ways: it has provided an outlet for black resistance and it has allowed consumers to participate in the resistance at a safe distance. The production and/or consumption of black anger has thereby become a socially sanctioned and administered act. There is no need to take to the streets when it is safer to release records, put on a good show or participate as a safe observer. Everyone can potentially profit from the social transaction - the organisations that strategically align themselves with the resistance, the players trying to beat ‘the system’ at its own game and the spectators supporting them all from the sidelines. Consequently, Kendrick Lamar is not just a virtue signalling mechanism...an avatar for the self that we want others to see but systemic racism’s safety valve or pressure release. Specifically, he is where rising anger and despair can be safely released back into a fail-safe system as mass consumption and performative activism.

To cut a long story short: how many of us actually ‘turned off’ their tv’s and joined an uprising? Did he end up gaming the system or were we all played by it? The Super Bowl scored record ratings again and invariably gave rise to the tide that lifted all of Kendrick’s respective boats on streaming services.

We’ll be right back after this break.

1. The sad irony is that a down on his luck Heron allowed his track to be used by Nike for a television commercial directed by Spike Lee in 1994. He not only sold the rights to his anticapitalist song to make ends meet, he felt he had no choice but let capitalism beat him at his own game of social criticism by co-opting and/or overturning the song’s original meaning. To quote Marcus Baram's biography Pieces of a Man, New York, St Martin’s Press, 2014, pp.262-263.

Despite the modest success of album Spirits, his money troubles continued, as did his drug ad￾diction. To make some fast cash, he sold the rights of his most famous and incendiary track to Nike to use in a commercial. In 1994 the sneaker giant hired Spike Lee to create an ad featuring NBA stars playing basketball, to the tune of Gil’s signature song, “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised.” Over the instrumental, rapper KRS-One transformed the lyrics into an ode to basketball, name-dropping players Jason Kidd and Kevin Garnett and ending on the line “The revolution is about basketball and basketball is the truth.” The commercial was widely criticized by music purists, who claimed that Spike Lee and the rapper had flipped the polemic on its head, trans￾forming it from an anti -capitalist protest song warning of the dangers of consumerism into an endorsement of an exploitative company trying to sell overpriced sneakers to underpaid black consumers. The irony was thick for an artist who had always denounced consumerism.