Isn’t that like a yearly tradition for them at this point. I honestly can’t remember the last half time show they didn’t bitch about
Most people liked Katy Perry and the shark costume. That’s the only one that comes to mind. No clue how long ago that was, and maybe a bunch of people were mad about that one too.
They cried about how sexualized it was
LOL guess I shouldn’t be surprised.
Remember when they complained about gratuitous violence too?
Yeah me neither. They just bitch about the fun stuff.
Annoying generalization and useless Internet noise what even is journalism
They saw like five tweets and they wrote a story about it. And here we are on the front page
Why would the pedophile Matt Gaetz be offended by a song dissing pedophiles?
But also fuck this type of partisan rage bait article. This type of writing is what divides us, even if it’s saying things you wanna hear.
But also fuck this type of partisan rage bait article. This type of writing is what divides us, even if it’s saying things you wanna hear.
Hear, hear.
This kind of ‘information’ is like doing drugs, it feels good but it destroys your ability to function as a normal human being. Getting addicted to outrage and ‘owning the <other side>’ is playing into the divisive politics that allows the powers that be to divide us. Nobody is going to want to work with you if you’re calling them a MAGAT and you’re not going to want to work with anyone who’s attacking you.
Your enemy isn’t the other middle class and poor people who’ve been convinced to wear a different color hat than you. If you can’t see that and adjust your behavior appropriately then you still have a lot to learn and I hope we have enough time for you to catch up.
Im 50 and white. A lot of the people I know who hated the halftime show aren’t hip-hop fans and/or have trouble interpreting dance performances. The racist people I know just didn’t watch it at all.
don’t forget about Trump…and Musk.
The Daily Beast is to the left, what Fox News is to the right.
So sick of these clickbait headlines. From the headline to the body “Melts down” -> “wasn’t too impressed”. BORING. Journalists need to do some actual work like they used to instead of just farming rage bait.
Shocking that MAGA wouldn’t like someone who disses pedophiles.
Kendrick dropping truth bombs on the NFL’s biggest stage? Cue the MAGAverse hyperventilating into their flag-print fainting couches. Nothing terrifies fragile hegemony more than Black artistry that isn’t sanitized for their comfort. Oh no—a Pulitzer-winning rapper dared weave politics into the sacred ad-break circus! Next they’ll demand halftime shows be replaced with Lee Greenwood AI covers.
The meltdown’s a feature, not a bug. Conservatives need perpetual outrage to mask their cultural irrelevance. Imagine stanning a draft-dodging conman but seething when an actual poet weaponizes the mic. Stay mad—the future’s rhyming without you.
Remember, these are the free speech absolutes that are anti cancel culture. Right?
Kendrick dropping truth bombs on the NFL’s biggest stage
What truth bombs did he drop? Some vaguely rebellious sounding lines? “The revolution will be televised?”
This was milquetoast at best. Actively harmful at worst. I really enjoyed the performance but he is doing exactly what he criticizes the record labels of doing. Taking black culture and commodifying it by turning it into a spectacle.
This was corporate spectacle and nothing more.
“Come, comrades, and claim your Che Guevara t-shirts. Indulge that half-buried discontent with the system by picking up these subversive punk rock accessories. For a fleeting moment, we’ll even add a trans flag poster—yours for nothing but shipping and handling. Put on the revolution you crave.”
Kendrick’s performance wasn’t meant for you to dissect like some detached art critic sipping lukewarm coffee in a gallery. It was the spectacle—because that’s where the power lies. You want revolution without the mess, rebellion without the noise, but that’s not how this works.
Corporate stage or not, he hijacked their platform and made them pay for it. That’s subversion, not commodification. You’re so busy clutching your purity checklist that you missed the point: this isn’t about your approval.
And spare me the faux-radical cynicism about Che t-shirts. If you’re waiting for a revolution that doesn’t touch capitalism, you’ll die waiting. Meanwhile, Kendrick’s out there making people uncomfortable. What are you doing? Writing snarky posts? Congrats on your service to the cause.
I don’t claim to be an activist. I’m interested in the ideological undercurrents
You want revolution without the mess, rebellion without the noise, but that’s not how this works.
This is the very thing I’m claiming about the performance. It’s controlled rebellion. Performative dissent. Dissent and dissatisfaction itself becomes commodified and sold back to you. It allows the viewer to feel like they’re part of something revolutionary without ever threatening the system. Imagine a safety valve, releasing just enough pressure to prevent real change. It’s like a laugh track in a sitcom. It tells you what to feel. You can have the experience of laughing without actually having to laugh.
This type of “socially conscious” art (movies, music, etc) functions in a way lets the consumer feel like they have participated in something emancipatory without actually having to. It’s ideology.
Note at no point did he criticize the status quo. He did not mention president Trump, who was present in the crowd, at all. Kendrick, a legendary socially conscious rapper who is an icon for life- chose not to say anything at all. Why?
Either a) he doesn’t care or b) he understands there is a very small window of acceptable “dissent” he is allowed to express. I think this micro-dose of dissent pacifies and sedates the viewer.
hijacked their platform and made them pay for it
He made them pay? He made them hundreds of millions of dollars. This was the most highly viewed super bowl performance in my adult life.
this isn’t about your approval.
You seem to care more about my approval than I do. What difference does it make if I approve? I liked the performance but I’m discussing the ideological basis for these styles of performative vague dissent.
Me and you both are constantly eating from the trash can of ideology. It’s painful, but it’s worthwhile to put on the glasses so you can at least see what you are eating. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TVwKjGbz60k
You’re not wrong, but there’s a layer you’re missing. Yes, dissent is commodified, and yes, it’s a pressure valve. But the system doesn’t just pacify—it co-opts because it has to. The spectacle you describe isn’t just a distraction; it’s evidence of cracks in the facade. Controlled rebellion still signals fear of uncontrolled rebellion.
Kendrick didn’t name names because he didn’t need to. The subtext was clear: the system that profits off his performance is the same one he critiques in his art. That contradiction isn’t a flaw—it’s the point. The machine can’t help but consume its own critique, and every time it does, it exposes its own absurdity.
You’re right to put on the glasses. Just don’t forget they distort as much as they reveal.
The machine can’t help but consume its own critique, and every time it does, it exposes its own absurdity.
I appreciate your second response here, it seems less hostile.
My counterpoint would be that capitalism is an Ouroboros. It’s forever devouring its own tail- consuming its own critique and spitting it back out as commodity. It’s not a bug, it’s a feature. Every once in a while there is some sort of social movement (punks, hippies, hip hop, gays, etc) and it has a real chance to threaten the system.
Punk becomes a fashion statement, hip-hop a soundtrack for commercials and corporate events, gay pride becomes a marketing gimmick. It’s incorporated, stripped of any revolutionary potential and repackaged as an ideological product for you to consume.
This is the perverse genius of capitalism. It doesn’t survive in spite of crisis. It needs the crisis to survive. The absurdity becomes palpable, like you mentioned, but it doesn’t matter. The system flaunts this absurdity, knowing full well that we have no way out.
It is a trap- a Möbius strip of ideology.
So while I enjoyed the performance and I don’t expect anything more from Kendrick (he is under no obligation to be a real revolutionary figure), I also think we shouldn’t delude ourselves into thinking this was anything more than a corporate spectacle meant to sell future Super Bowl tickets by way of exploiting the discontent and dissatisfaction of poor blacks. (and really, it’s two fold. a) you exploit the black culture not only in the positive way that’s black-positive b) you exploit the angry white culture who is threatened by it). You get to double dip.
You’re right to put on the glasses. Just don’t forget they distort as much as they reveal.
Yep. When you think you have been freed from ideology at that moment you are in ideology. Turtles all the way down. I am under no illusion that I am an not an idiot.
I’ll admit my initial tone was sharper than it needed to be—chalk it up to the sheer amount of garbage I usually get for posting opinions like this. That said, I genuinely appreciate you engaging in open discourse instead of resorting to knee-jerk dismissal. It’s rare and refreshing.
Capitalism as an Ouroboros is not just a metaphor but a mechanism—a system that thrives on consuming its own contradictions. You’re absolutely right that it doesn’t merely survive crises; it metabolizes them, converting dissent into fuel for its perpetuation. But the trap isn’t just ideological—it’s structural. It’s not just a Möbius strip; it’s a cage.
The double exploitation you describe—of Black culture and white fear—is capitalism’s perverse genius at work. It doesn’t just commodify rebellion; it weaponizes it, turning every critique into a product and every product into a reinforcement of the status quo. Kendrick’s performance wasn’t revolutionary, but it wasn’t meaningless either. It was a mirror, reflecting the absurdity of a system that sells resistance as entertainment.
Your cynicism isn’t misplaced. It’s clarity.
I like Kendrick Lamar and still found it kind of boring.
You didn’t like the image of the American flag walking down stairs while he sang sit down, be humble? Most of the rest of the world found it pretty apt.
I think many didn’t understand the meanings he was looking to convey.
Even one as simple as Samuel L Jackson representing the white gaze and reprising his role as house n***** from Django Unchained.
The guy is a Pulitzer prize winner. This wasn’t going to be all glam.
Huh. I like Kendrick Lamar and found it awesome.
I just like big visual stuff at halftime. Katy Perry’s huge tiger was a memorable one, as was U2 after 9/11.
Fair enough.
I do think the visuals here were great. We had crips and bloods colours both sharing the stage. That’s a bold statement.
I’ll go watch the two you mentioned as I’ve not seen them. Although I’m not a fan of either of those people, musically.
You’re not alone, many feedback I heard is that it wasn’t “big” enough - but also, that’s sort of Lamar’s style. This is the guy that preformed at SNL on an empty stage with only a microphone and white lights.
Why? It was straight up nationalist propaganda
Which part?
What’s with the media’s obsession with the opinions of known trolls like Matt Walsh?! Fuck, stop highlighting his drivel and that of people like him. You’re giving them free advertising!
Maga melting down over a black performer isn’t news. It’s olds!
Welcome to seeing the white supremacist hegemony. They’ll platform racists criticizing Black Art forms, but they’ll actively avoid giving any room for those Black Art forms. You see it everywhere in what artists get radio promotion and algorithmic boosts vs who toils in the underground for years, or else releases a couple EPs, a couple of mixtapes, and then goes into a boring graphic design job because shit, they need food man.
Yeah for some reason nobody has on a black man to criticize white culture but they will do the opposite often.
and if he does he’s too much, too loud, too political, reading too far into things, or needs to learn to take a joke. always bugs me
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I hear you and all. But this post is about a Black Art form being performed by exclusively Black artists on one of the largest platforms available.
for sure. and it was extremely gratifying. kendrick is a master of understanding propaganda, messaging, and co-opting broadcasts because he studies the entirety of everything that hip hop has ever been from its early years to now. but i’m not talking about one moment. i’m talking about the entire cycle of media promotion and analysis we exist in, and that favors pro-capitalist, patriarchal, white centered view points. but that conservatives criticizing it gets more airtime than than critics of the system celebrating it is neither a surprise nor an accident.
You’re right. I have to think pretty hard to name a single black artist because of how little attention they get in the media. Meanwhile, practically every white group formed by friends in high school gets a tour and record deal.
Conflict drives engagement
EDIT: This turns out to just be a folklore factoid after all, see the comment replying to this one
Forgive the tangential side-note: Although I get that “news” vs. “olds” was justified punning, I still want to mention what I think is interesting about the term “news”, and seems to be in danger of being forgotten. I remember learning in school (pre-internet so I couldn’t easily verify) that the origin of the word “news” was “North, East, West, South”.
I’m sure that’s what’s you were taught, but it’s not true: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/news-etymology/
It doesn’t work in other languages either.
The Dutch word for news is nieuws, but that does not form an acronym of noord, oost, west, zuid.
The German word is Nachrichten. Which is very far from Nord Ost Süd West.
Very cool, thanks for finding that. I must admit that factlet (which turns out to be a factoid after all) always hovered in a grey-area part of my brain between “interesting enough to remember” and “urgent enough to actually research/verify” (hence why I wisely added the “not verified” parenthesis).
I thought Kendrick was very good, and I don’t listen to him or very much of that style music. He is amazingly talented and I thought a top tier showman. In the article, Jack Posobic said that he wished it was Creed (like In the 2001 half time) instead. Since this was the Apple Music streaming halftime show, I looked it up. #1 Streamer of last year was Kendrick, I didn’t see Creed in the top 50. Also Billboard has Kendrick at #4 all year for Streaming, also no Creed. I know Creed had a big resurgence last year touring, but I was around listing to music in 2001 and we all voted that Creed sucks. I didn’t like those people who liked Creed then, and even more so now.
but I was around listing to music in 2001 and we all voted that Creed sucks
Can confirm, was also listening to music in 2001, and Creed sucks
Given current events though, I wonder if Disturbed and System of a Down will be moved to make something new.
I was in my late 20s back then. Anyone who told me they were into Creed during that time always ended up being the guy the women around would all have a story about regarding abusive behavior.
John Dolmayan from SOAD is actually a huge Trump supporter for some reason.
SYSTEM OF A DOWN drummer John Dolmayan, who has publicly voiced his support for former U.S. president Donald Trump on a number of occasions, claims that he has lost “friends” and “hundreds of thousands of fans” due to his opinions.
I guess there’s always one in a crowd but damn. That’s like having a right nutter in RATM
LOL, Creed?
Probably because of the xtian thing, but…still.
If all MAGAts just spontaneously died that would be fucking boffo.
Kendrick killed it, who gives a shit what haters think.
Taking shots at Drake when Trump is there seems kinda petty tho.
shots taken at trump:
- “you picked the wrong man”
- samual l jackson’s uncle sam persona
- the great american game framing of the performance
- the american flag being assembled from black workers
- performing DNA
- the fact that almost every single one of k.dot’s criticisms of drake can be leveled at trump as well
- squid game imagery
- member of his crew flying sudanese and palestinian flags
oh and the gloves
So basically, a whole lot of unnoticed under currents while he’s yelling at the top of his lungs about drake?
Yeah, seems totally not petty now.
Those that didn’t/couldn’t see the symbolism either are ignorant, willfully ignorant, or a racist… Which is you?
when you’re co-opting the great american military-consumerist propaganda broadcast, if you want to get your message past the shield’s censors, you gotta do some misdirection and have some faith the people you’re trying to reach will have enough media savvy to know who you are and what to look for. for a lot of us they weren’t unnoticed undercurrents, they were the main event. that he did the song that got him there was just… always going to happen and wasn’t of particular interest
He could literally just say whatever he wanted on a hot mic.
Stop trying to pretend it was a protest. It wasn’t.
I imagine there was a rehearsal and if he deviated from that they would’ve just muted him. I’m no tv producer but iirc they also have a few seconds delay of wiggle room. Don’t imagine they want another Janet Jackson.
I hate that fucking “wardrobe malfunction” narrative they came up with. I watched that shit live. JT deliberately reached up and pulled her titty out, and she had on a fucking pasty. That was a deliberate move in a choreographed show, and they didn’t even have the balls to just say “opps, guess that didn’t go over well.”
they literally cut the cams, tackled, and jailed the member of his crew with the flags. the wiggle room was tight dude. i get you wanted more, i’m sorry you didn’t get it. but know he got a shocking amount through. that was the most political halftime show i ever seen
And then he publicly disavowed and abandoned that guy.
Ya, half that list is an epic stretch. Borderline numerology shit.
Tell me you don’t know about rap without telling me
Tell me you can’t see a promotional tie-in to a TV show for what it is without telling me.
I 100% see the commercial aspect. Crazy fucking thing, you can do both at the same time!
Hardly shots at Drake, that victory lap already happened at the grammys. Just giving ppl what they want. Really though was bigger than that, he brought black uncle sam lmao
Dude used one of the largest platforms available to cook that beef. Agree, def petty.
I am not even a fan and I found the show enjoyable.
I enjoy kendrick and found the SB entertaining, but I can see where people can say it was a fine performance. Certainly nowhere close to worst of all time though
Right-wing commentators Eric Daugherty and Benny Johnson took their criticism to the extreme, describing the performance as “Black nationalist" and calling Lamar a “mumbling pagan Satanic cultist”.
This would only make me want to see it if I hadn’t already lol
Can you even be both pagan and Satanic?
“He’s a mumbling pagan, Satanic, Jewish, Mexican, Socialist, Antifa, Chinese…” Beyond all the social abuses, I hate MAGA and right-wing pundits because they’ve robbed words of meaning, on a scale that forces adjustment unlike anything else.
Having grown up strictly Catholic I can tell you it’s because they view the world extremely binary black and white. Either you’re a Christian, or you’re “led astray by Satan’s lies”, so literally everything else is Satanism.
To a Catholic even a Protestant could be considered a Satanist.
To be fair a lot of protestants don’t believe Roman Catholics are Christian either because if the overt idolatry and the whole fact that the state that supposedly killed Jesus also formed the Roman Catholic Church.
Can you even be both pagan and Satanic?
Only in the eyes of people incapable of rational thought.
They are fundamentally completely different religions, and paganism is much much older.
Paganism is not a religion. It’s literally “not an Abrahamic faith ” in most uses. There’s no one form of Paganism.
I am a Christian… a Christian agnostic, but still.
My comment was kind of bigoted, sorry. i wrote it without really thinking. i’ve removed the offending part
I appreciate the revision. Thank you
He can be if you don’t know what a dictionary is and you get revenue by being divisive. The more charged the language, the higher the revenue gets.
And Kendrick Lamar is famously Christian and makes references to God frequently in his lyrics. Although, I doubt they consider the black church “Christian” since prosperity gospel megachurch bullshit strays so far from Christ that they probably can’t recognize an actual Christian any better than they can recognize a fire beat.
Prosperity gospel is by no means a white only thing. Unless he’s gone into detail about the church he attends you can’t know what version of Christianity he is part of.
If your entire personality, beliefs, reactions, actions, debates, arguments and statements are all based on anger … at one point nothing in this world will make you happy and you’ll just be angry at everyone and everything.
Stay mad America … we can’t help you any more.
That Star Trek quote about and becoming comfortable like a leather glove still rings true
When one has been angry for a very long time, one gets used to it. And it becomes comfortable, like… like old leather. And finally… becomes so familiar that one can’t ever remember feeling any other way.
comfortable, like… like old leather.
Quote from Captain Jean Luc Picard from Star Trek … wow, I’ve watched so much Star Trek in my life that stuff like this is probably ingrained in memory without me knowing it at this point. I watched all of TNG years ago and honestly, I don’t remember much and hope to rewatch all of it again some day because of writing like this. Thanks for sharing this.
It’s my favourite show of all time.
Yeah, it’s cheesy as hell and rough around the edges, but there are episodes that go so hard on a topic and the characters all feel like good role models to emulate.
I rewatch it every now and then.
To this day it’s refreshing to put on old Trek and see characters that behave like grown adults.
They’re not perfect, they don’t have everything figured out, but they have a willingness to be curious and compassionate and humble, to learn and change and improve.
I think people write it off as cheesy and silly because they don’t like admitting the quality of the writing and content that is part of these shows. Some of the episodes are cheesy and fun … but some just hit the nail right on the head and place a big giant mirror in front of society to ask everyone to have a deep dark look at who we really are. I think that insight into ourselves is what upsets people about these shows … most people don’t want to think about things like that and instead want to watch a funny show about some soap opera love story.
It’s been about 20 years since I last saw TNG … I have so much more Trek to watch but I’m looking forward to rewatching TNG again some day.
Same, it has been years since I’ve watched any Star Trek but every now and then I’ll dream about an episode or just randomly remember a scene or quote.
Maybe a rewatch is exactly what I need to restore my faith in humanity right now?
You were helping? Huh, and well, to take a note from Kendrick: Damn.
The opening was propaganda and the ads were propaganda. What do they have to complain about?
Yeah, I couldn’t hear what they were singing though.
