Kendrick Lamar and the cluttered art of meta-performance

A feeling of abaser is hovering over the practitioner of the Super Bowl -half -time show. It’s easy, but it’s there. The chosen musician must be an internationally recognized star, and yet this star must also submit to regulations and standards set by a conservative sports organization. (Jay-Z of it all despite.) The production team is awarded only a few minutes to erect the stage setup, and after viewing is wrapped, they have to separate it just as quickly. Gig – a live concert – is essentially done for free. It ends, the practitioner is the liquor away, and the advertisements of several million dollars and CVs of several million dollars. It’s popular music like Doula for football. The next morning all big talk about history and play making; The feeling of reduction is hanging.

But the artist invited to take on this stressful task almost always agrees because there is no platform like the one in this country – a large equalization stage, a microcosm of all things holy and profane. Kendrick Lamar, idealized as he is as the relative ascetic among his class of self-designed rap prince, is very attracted to such power. What makes him unique is his relationship with it: the laurels he has won, prices and roses that include about twenty Grammys and a Pulitzer award – the first to be awarded a rapper – Burden his persona. (That’s why the cover of his 2022 album, “Mr. Moral & The Big Steppers,” depicting Lamar in a crown of thorns and holding his young daughter.) His ego is healthy – how couldn’t it be? Whether you rock with his music or not, you know he is a genius. But the complex that keeps him rooted is one of self -development. And then on the Super Bowl choreographed Lamar his anxiety sharply and memorable, but consciously. He gave, but he gave only so much. The restriction was ready for anyone who has seen him perform in other venues – Say, Bet Awards, in 2016, when he and Beyoncé stamped in the liberation water, made their Black Lives Matter Anthem, “Freedom” or on Grammys the same year when Lamar led A prisoner’s chain band. In connection with his serious, theater exhibitions, I think the right word to describe Lamar’s Super Bowl performance that hit another tone is existential.

However, Lamar is not a quake. The show – deep, a real party for the eyes – aspirated to sluggish. It was fun! A viewer who was only half of being attentive would have been happy just to see Samuel L. Jackson’s familiar face realized on her screen, giving an eerie politicians’ smile. Dressed in a star-and-strip suit designed by Bode-a Premier Remixer of Hvep and Bohemian Traditions-Jackson tense his head and said, “Greeting, it’s your uncle. . . Sam. “The break in the speech was thick and spelled with Uncle Tom and his colleagues Negroes (a type once played by Jackson even in” Django Unchained “), the miserable creatures who ran the dangerous slip between entertainment and minstrelsy. Uncle Sam promised a clean show. Would Lamar behave? The artist appeared curly on the cap of a muscle car, warm and looked down. Buick GNX is the fetical object on the front of the “GNX”, the surprise album, which Lamar dropped last November. He named the album after this rare car to call on a kind of person who Lamar thinks is scarce: the black man who adheres to a code.

The car door opened and a comic number of dancers streamed out – another reference to clawning. Every dancer (and there were dozens or even hundreds) was black. They wore red, white and blue, and the choreography diffused them around their star that slid and jumped in boot-cut Celine jeans, a letterman jacket and a back NFL-CAP.

A particular pique that was used to come from Lamar when he was on stage. I’ve seen him perform three times. The first one was in a degrading context: Brown University’s annual spring weekend in 2013. He was distant from the audience. He hoarded his soul when drunken college students rapped together for every word with “swimming pools”, a melancholy song about alcoholism and the depression that takes over our uncles and our fathers, from the album “Good Kid, Maad City.” How much older lamar is now. On Sunday he steered the stage and hit his brands with an oily ease, more like a crooner than a rapper. He also looked sexy, smiling and two-step, even when he delivered the G-Funk-infused hostility of “Squabble up”, his first big set. His smoothness contrasted interesting with the main scene, designed to induce both night streets of Compton, California, the place that made him and barrenness in a prison yard. The dancers were sometimes in a Falanx, moved militaristically, and sometimes they were completely free.

There were completely four stages. Lighting made them look like in the fixed drone shots, such as the buttons on a video game controller. Uncle Sam referred to “to play a game.” There are songs in Lamar’s catalog – “Okay”, the aforementioned “Swimming Pools”, Hell, even his verse on Taylor Swift’s “Bad Blood” – it looks like an obvious arena feed that plays the game well. But Lamar mostly stabbed the recent songs (with the exception of songs like “Humble” and “DNA”) that rewards newcomers in his work. “GNX” is a paean to California’s music-g-funk, hyphy and flamenco make regionalism undeniable for the ear-one love letter, which is completely overwhelmed, in music conversations, of its status as a death button for drake-cult. His semi-recognized reluctance to the Canadian rapper who steered the twenty titers broke out exquisite way; Lamar’s denigrations not only by the man, but of what the man represents catapulted him to the stratosphere. The dissipated “not like us”, which makes up Drake as a bag, a cultural strip and much worse, is ubiquitous; The slamming notes come in, and in almost any room in the world people stand vertically. “Certified love boy? Certified Pedophile, “A line from the song, is arguably one of the more famous lyrics in the last decade.

These days, Lamar seems captivated by his own dominance. I think he needs some antagonism, a certain sense of incorrect adjustment with the so -called popular culture to bloom completely. But 2024 made him a king and he works with it. Lamar had it both ways last night by using Drake Candy to smuggle in his dissertation on the dangers of black entertainment. Serena Williams, whom Drake allegedly dated and then was startled in a song, appeared for a moment, the crip-walking-the same dance she was exhorted to have done after a victory in tennis many years back. Two rights, one personal, the other racial, wrong at once! Drake has initiated a lawsuit against UMG, Lamar’s record label, for defamation and harassment. (The label has called the suit “illogical” and “junk.”) “I want to perform the favorite songs,” Lamar teased during the break, mocked with his dancers, “but you know they love to sue.” The camera then swept to the Singer-Songwriter Sza, a working wife of kind of lamar, and a muse of drakes that seemed inclined on one of the scenes and sings “All Stars” “Album Lamar Curated.

If a message is blaring is it still subliminal? Lamar put the tone in his set early, called on the poet and singer Gil Scott-Heron: “The revolution is becoming television,” he said. “You chose the right time, but the wrong guy.” Later, the dancers gathered in a flag where their colorful backs act as paint. Lamar went through them and split the flag, and the people who were now black bodies spread on the ground like chalk contours. This was either Nadir or Zenith of the law, I think, not the performance of “not like us” that came towards the end, with Lamar laughed into the camera as he conquered Drake. This was not a view of black trauma for the white look – Lamar’s dismantled flag was a visually tailor -made for the modern black look. An aspect of déjà vu weighs these expressions of black resistance, caught in the box with the camera frame. Consider the performance as a kind of choice-your-only adventure. A segment of the audience is horrified, another mores, another is politically refreshing. We should consider feeling a little numb. At one point, one of Lamar’s dancers produced a Sudan-Palestine flag. The dancer was chased by security and has allegedly been banned from NFL stadiums and events for life. Through Lamar’s thirteen minutes of performance, the camera would turn to Uncle Sam in interstitias that gave his reprisals and his approvals: “Too high, too reckless, for ghetto.” Of Sza’s softness, he said, “That’s what America wants! Lovely and calm. “To Lamar’s Conjuring of Compton,” oh, I see you brought your homeboys with you, the old culture cheat code. Scorekeeper, draws a life. “Meta-performance, absorption of criticism in the work-this is the tenor with very black popular art as it drives further and further from the complaining and ordinary talk of what the black life centers were commercial era, to a tangible ambivalence.

Was this the political undermining that America needed? A protest performance that was fed to someone as influential as the reinstalled hopeful dictator Donald Trump, who attended the Super Bowl to root for his beloved Kansas City Chiefs? This team, consistently dominant, lost Handily to Philadelphia Eagles. Lamar is expanding the good mood in popular culture this month. At Grammys, “Not Like us” also dominated, and young female artists took most of the prey. A sad joke has emerged: These monocultural “winner” gives glimpses into the Harris administration that was not. No one is too serious. A fever dream about sanguinity emerges. Find hope where you can, right? Next year we will do it again. And the following year.