The Power of Protest Art

The subversive genius of Kendrick Lamar's halftime show

“The revolution will be televised. You picked the right time but the wrong guy.”

-Kendrick Lamar at the beginning of the Super Bowl halftime show

Much has already been said these past few days about Kendrick Lamar’s Super Bowl halftime show this weekend. Kendrick fans loved it, conservative critics panned it as a “DEI halftime show”, and many average Americans not typically inclined to listening to rap music were just left a bit puzzled.

My goal here is not to attempt to decode the subtleties of Kendrick’s show. Other writers have already done a good job of that, such as David Zirin for The Nation and Soraya Nadia McDonald for Capital B.

I’m more interested in the context and the role of the performance itself as protest. The context being one President of the United States, Donald Trump, freshly entered into his second term after one of the most virulently racist political campaigns in U.S. history, and the first sitting president to attend a Super Bowl. Given the unprecedented audience, and his reputation for socially astute lyricism, it seemed logical that Kendrick might address the elephant in the room in some way. As Zirin puts it:

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.

Between Samuel L. Jackson as Uncle Sam/Uncle Tom telling Kendrick to essentially tone it down and play nice music for the white people, the cadre of black dancers dressed in red, white, and blue, and his inclusion of black women like SZA and Serena Williams (whose faced her own racism), Kendrick gave America a musical history lesson on the black experience, and essentially told Trump to his face “you cannot erase us”.

All of the talk around Lamar’s performance got me thinking about something poet David Gate wrote on his Substack at the beginning of the year about art as resistance:

Making art is resistance because it disrupts the machinery. The machinery wants you compliant, busy, scrolling, buying. Art demands you stop. It asks for your attention—not the fractured, distracted sort, but the whole of it. The attention of mind and spirit. We all know the experience of hearing a song for the first time and feel it rattle loose something buried deep within you. Art rehumanizes us in a system that seeks to reduce us to units of labor, consumers & target audiences.

The act of creating is also a refusal. To write a novel in the middle of societal collapse, to carve a piece of wood into something beautiful when the world is on fire, is to say: I am more than what is being done to me. I am not defined by the violence of my time. Artists bear witness, but they also dream. They imagine futures where the machinery breaks down, where we gather in the ruins and build new worlds together.

They fear the artists, the poets, the filmmakers. Because a painting can ignite a revolution. A song can topple a regime. Art reminds us of our humanity when everything else conspires to strip it away. It reminds us we are still here. And we are not the only ones still trying, still fighting.

For 13 minutes on Sunday night, in the midst of America’s once-a-year sports-and capitalist-orgy, at the beginning of a new and terrible presidential administration, Kendrick Lamar demanded us stop and pay attention as he bore witness to black suffering and black excellence in a country that is still trying to erase and enslave both.

Lamar’s performance will probably not start a revolution, but it has definitely started a conversation.