Dr. James Peterson
There is a kind of mourning and a kind of mastery in what Kendrick Lamar gave us during that performance. It is the musical embodiment of his now-legendary anthem, "Not Like Us," a song that, in the annals of hip-hop battle rap, is both a cultural sledgehammer and a deftly crafted treatise on Black American artistic distinction. The song has already won too many Grammys. But the performance itself—like much of Kendrick’s work—was impenetrable for some. Pundits and social media commentators stumbled over themselves trying to decipher it. Some dismissed it. Others demanded subtitles as if the layers of Lamar’s genius should be served up like fast food or foreign films too densely depicted in lost translations.
But Kendrick was never speaking to them. He was speaking to US.
What Kendrick tapped into that night—and throughout his career—is a variation of nativism. Not the exclusionary, xenophobic nativism that animates white nationalist politics, but a radical Black American nativism. A cultural claim that asserts: We were here first. Our stories matter most. Our culture—in all of its forms: music, art, athleticism, ingenious inventiveness, creative excellence—is the most potent, most dominant expression of American culture itself.
For authentic aficionados of K.Dot’s body of work, Kendrick’s performance was not a halftime show. It was a historical reckoning, a reminder, and a reclamation. It was the latest movement in the long, somber symphony of Black history—a history often played in a minor key. When Kendrick Lamar performs on a stage like the Super Bowl, he is not simply entertaining. He is testifying.
My son, James, put it best when we talked about the show afterward. He said: “I think that while looking at and analyzing the Super Bowl performance, one thing that has to be considered is that Kendrick’s not putting on this performance for people who don’t consume his stuff to be able to get it right away. If you don’t get it, you have to want to get it. You have to engage. You have to learn more about his catalog, about the symbols, about why the American flag shows up during ‘HUMBLE,’ why he stages himself under a streetlight surrounded by homies, and then runs when Uncle Sam shows up.”
The show was filled with this kind of symbolism: bodies crawling out of the GNX, a visual echo of the clown car chaos of American racial spectacle; Lamar’s own performance under surveillance, as if constantly watched, constantly targeted. And yes, the gnawing presence of Samuel L. Jackson as Uncle Sam—Uncle Ruckus and Nick Fury rolled into one—a nod to the impossible, contradictory roles Black folks are asked to perform in this country.
You can’t understand Kendrick’s halftime performance without understanding how it calls back to the entirety of his artistic canon—from Good Kid, M.A.A.D City to To Pimp a Butterfly, from DAMN. to Mr. Morale & the Big Steppers. You can’t understand it without understanding the lineage of resistance and cultural critique embedded in the Heart series, where Kendrick lets us peek into his state of mind before each album drops.
As young James reminds me, those Heart tracks are like trailers to the full-length feature of his albums. They are, in themselves, meditations on grief, rage, history, and survival. "The Heart Part 4" jabbed subtly at his future rival, Drake, while indicting the state of the world—Russia, Trump, police brutality. "The Heart Part 5" is a damning elegy to the culture Kendrick both critiques and embodies, literally morphing into the faces of Black men scarred by violence, fame, and contradiction.
Kendrick’s Super Bowl performance was, in essence, a culmination of all the themes he’s been wrestling with for over a decade. A performance not staged for the high-rolling attendees in the stadium but for us, watching at home, who can’t afford to be there. For those who have been carrying this history in their pockets, in their playlists, and in their hearts.
It is no accident that during Black History Month, Lamar delivered a show that refused to perform joy without context. It is no accident that the performance felt like a funeral march as much as a celebration. It is no accident that it echoed the most important, often overlooked line of the Negro National Anthem: "True to our native land."
That line, tucked at the end of Lift Every Voice and Sing, is often sung with a rise in volume and pride. But we forget how heavy it is. Because what is our "native land"? For Black Americans, it is a land where our ancestors were enslaved, where the government exploited us, where white racists demanded to be segregated from us, where we are overpoliced and too often murdered for just being us—and yet, it is ours. The contradiction of belonging to a place that never intended for us to belong is at the heart of Black history, and at the heart of Kendrick’s performance.
This is Black History in A minor.
Black History refuses to be triumphant without sorrow. It is not celebratory without critique. It is not a simple "look how far we’ve come" narrative. It is a call to wrestle with the fact that America is ours—not because it was freely given to us, but because we built it, shaped it, and made it beautiful in spite of itself.
That’s why Kendrick’s performance resonated so deeply. It wasn’t just about hip-hop dominance, though it was that. It wasn’t just a victory lap over Drake, though it was that too. It was about the cost of excellence. About the labor, the blood, and the survival strategies Black people have had to employ just to be seen, to be heard, to be alive.
Black history, when told honestly, is not written in the key of C major, full of major chords and happy endings. It is written in A minor—complex, unresolved, melancholic, but powerful.
In that sense, Kendrick’s halftime show was not just entertainment. It was a lesson plan. A hermeneutic challenge. A Black History Month offering in a somber tone for these sobering times.
It’s no wonder some people didn’t get it.
The question is: will they ever want to?
Dr. James B. Peterson is founder of Hip Hop Scholars, an organization devoted to developing the educational potential of Hip Hop. He is the author of Hip Hop Headphones: A Scholar's Critical Playlist.
