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HOW THE “SUBVERSIVE GENIUS” OF KENDRICK LAMAR SENT TRUMP HOME A
LOSER  
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Dave Zirin
February 10, 2025
The Nation
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_ The Philadelphia Eagles and Kendrick Lamar’s collective of
geniuses made this the Super Bowl we needed. This year’s Super Bowl
in New Orleans could have been a fascist Mardi Gras. Then, the
unexpected.... _

Kendrick Lamar performs during halftime of Super Bowl LIX between the
Kansas City Chiefs and the Philadelphia Eagles, Sunday, February 9,
2025, in New Orleans., Matt Slocum /AP Photo // The Nation

 

This year’s Super Bowl in New Orleans could have been a fascist
Mardi Gras. Over a week ago, state police forced more than 100
unhoused people, under threat of arrest, into a freezing warehouse
from which they barred the press. State agencies destroyed homeless
encampments, and the operation cost taxpayers $17.5 million
[[link removed]].
Then, this last week, police, Secret Service members, and the
Department of Homeland Security smothered
[[link removed]] the
Superdome and the city. And, of course, Donald Trump would be at the
game, the first sitting president—as we’ve been told ad nauseam
all week—to go to the biggest spectacle in the country. The scene
was set beforehand when Trump got a cozy Fox News interview where,
making his frowny face, he again signaled that a judge’s ruling to
stop Elon Musk from controlling our financial records doesn’t mean
anything to him
[[link removed]].
He also picked the Kansas City Chiefs to win, citing his affection for
Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes’s MAGA wife, Brittany. He also
said he was attending the game for the “good for the country.” As
if it were not obvious at this point, crypto-coin Trump does nothing
for the good of the country. He was there to bask like Caesar in a
display of authoritarian power. Trump’s message was that resistance
was futile.

Then, the unexpected: In the first half, the Philadelphia Eagles
knocked the snot out of Mahomes and the Chiefs. The two-time defending
champions looked overmatched—like bullies who withered after being
punched in the mouth. But even that trouncing was a pillow fight
compared to the halftime show, where hip-hop maestro Kendrick Lamar
took center stage. Lamar unleashed an artistic inferno rooted in Black
culture, Black poetry, and Black resistance. Trump’s most prominent
racist online trolls—I don’t want to link and give them the
attention they crave—were already spitting that it was a “DEI
halftime show,” which was more pathetic than upsetting. They are
pieces of soggy Wonder bread, reduced to attacking brilliance because
it exposes their mediocrity. It’s just stupid to think some addled
78-year-old misogynist caked in orange is the peak of masculinity.

But many of the people watching Lamar were those who have been deeply
shaken by the constant, unaccountable cruelty pummelling us every day.
Innumerable people—I’ve been hearing from them all week—were
praying that Lamar would say something about Trump or Musk to the tens
of millions of viewers. They wanted him to take on all the weight of
this moment. It’s an understandable desire, but it’s also unfair:
a “save us” burden that always disproportionately falls on the
shoulders of Black artists. A popular slogan now is “No one will
save us but us.” This plea was more “Save us, Kendrick.” But
Lamar, who is more an abstract master of symbology than political
rabble-rouser, performed something right in Trump’s face that I
think people will be decoding for years. It was a textured, deeply
layered, colossal middle finger to the worst of US history, Trump, and
anyone who would try to obliterate Black culture in this country.

Playing off Samuel L. Jackson dressed as Uncle Sam and
representing—at least to me—the false promise of assimilation
through erasure, Lamar started in a crouching pose. It wasn’t a
knee, as in Colin Kaepernick’s protest against police violence, but
for someone who is incredibly self-aware of his every physical and
verbal metaphor, starting in that posture on a football field was not
happenstance. So many people would have cheered a
knee—understandably!—but that would have been way too obvious for
this man. Then, he started by performing just one bar of a lyric that
does not exist in his catalog. He said, “The revolution is about to
be televised. You picked the right time, but the wrong guy.”

To me, these 16 words are not a puzzle but a work of art. It’s not
literal. It’s something you hear, something you feel, and something
you interpret. Like a moving sculpture or tapestry, you need to
account for the intentions of the artist but also how those intentions
interact with your own perspective and gut emotional response. I take
it as him saying—again in Trump’s face—that our mindset needs to
be aimed toward revolution, but do not look to him to carry the
weight. It’s the “right time,” but I am the “wrong guy,” if
that’s your intent. No more martyrs. This is an “all of us”
project.

That “all of us” was on stage. Yes, it was Lamar in the spotlight
delivering the most 100 percent pure hip-hop show ever shown to so
vast an audience. But it was more than the power of one. He had
brilliant Black dancers dressed in red, white, and blue, looking like
an American flag, and he marched right through them, timing it to the
lyric, “40 acres and a mule, this is bigger than the music / They
tried to rig the game, but you can’t fake influence.” To my eyes,
he was tearing apart the flag with history and truth—saying you can
try to shackle Black people, but Black culture is an ineradicable part
of this country. It was especially powerful that he did this in New
Orleans, a place that has been left for dead time and again but is the
cradle of the Black music that is at the heart of this country’s
culture. Saying this in the face of the man canceling Black History
Month also mattered.

At this point, the dancers were all Black men. For a later song, he
was framed exclusively by Black women in nearly identical clothing as
the men, moving with both power and grace. Then they all came
together. In the middle of it all, a male dancer, on his own it is
believed, unfurled a Palestinian flag attached to a Sudanese flag
[[link removed]].
His protest was surrounded
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dancers dressed in all black, faces covered, raising their fists. He
held the flags high before being tackled by security and detained.
Whether planned or not, it connected with the broader themes of
resistance, which felt electric, improvisational, and, to those who
want to kill hope, dangerous. There is so much more to discuss—the
lyrics chosen, SZA’s genius, a very pointed
[[link removed]] Serena
Williams cameo!—but much was also beyond me. I need to read
others—like Lamar codebreaker David Dennis Jr.
[[link removed]] (journalist and
son of civil rights legend Dave Dennis), who called Lamar’s
performance “subversive genius” and maybe “the biggest rap
performance ever.”

As for Trump, according to reports, he stood next to his date, Ivanka,
during the halftime show and then immediately left. He is our fragile
orange flower and couldn’t bear seeing his dream of Black erasure
rebuked. He couldn’t bear seeing art that he was unable to
appreciate or understand. He couldn’t bear looking like a loser for
picking the Chiefs because he likes the quarterback’s wife. So he
hightailed it home before the cameras could catch him. After leaving,
to make himself feel better, he banned the penny
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As for the game, the Eagles wrecked the Chiefs, before a couple of
late garbage Kansas City touchdowns made it a final score of 40–22.
Eagles quarterback Jalen Hurts, who was clearly the most salty about
Trump’s presence in the lead-up to the game—when other players
were walking on eggshells—was the official MVP. Now, we’ll see if
the Eagles, a team that after winning in 2018 boycotted going to the
White House
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will even get an invite from the King of Petty. Since he couldn’t
stay to congratulate them, I can’t imagine why, if an invitation is
offered, they would accept. (If the Chiefs had won, Trump would have
preened on the field and chased cameras like a Hollywood ingénue.)

But as great as Hurts was, the real MVPs were the dancers, the
choreographers, the costume designers, SZA, and Lamar. They created
something collective, and we should understand it as cooperative
political art, instead of decrying it because Lamar didn’t stand
there reading a lefty pamphlet. The Eagles won, and the Chiefs lost.
But I’ll remember this as the night when Kendrick Lamar sent Donald
Trump home.

_[DAVE ZIRIN is the sports editor at The Nation. He is the author of
11 books on the politics of sports. He is also the coproducer and
writer of the new documentary Behind the Shield: The Power and
Politics of the NFL [[link removed]].]_

_Copyright c 2025 The Nation. Reprinted with permission. May not be
reprinted without permission
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Distributed by PARS International Corp
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_Please support progressive journalism. Get a digital subscription
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to The Nation for just $24.95!_

* super bowl
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* Kendrick Lamar
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* Super Bowl LIX
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* football
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* Half-Time Show
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* Samuel Jackson
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* Serena Williams
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* Black culture
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* hip hop
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* Donald Trump
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* Racism
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* New Orleans
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* African Americans
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* Philadelphia Eagles
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* NFL
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* Jalen Hurts
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* Black athletes
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