Dreams I’ll Send You | Essay 9
A birthday month practice
For the month of February 2025, I’ve decided to publish a micro essay once a day. I described the why and what here.
I don’t watch the Super Bowl. I don’t know much about football. The NFL is an institution that hasn’t tried to make its moral arc bend toward justice, so I have little interest in learning about the sport, and the event too often perpetuates throwback aspects of militant Americana. But the Super Bowl is a cultural event — one of the few monoculture moments we have left, apparently— so the lead-up will seep through all your cultural filters if you happen to be in this country.
This year I heard Taylor Swift’s current boyfriend was playing on one of the teams — (did he lose?) — and that Kendrick Lamar was playing the half-time show. I do watch the half-time show, and that got my attention. Prince shredding his guitar in the Miami rainstorm will always be the gold standard of half-time performances, but tonight Lamar, with his West Coast hip-hop roots, came in close.
In front of 45/47 and a crowd of diehard football fans, Lamar opened his set saying, “The revolution ‘bout to be televised. You picked the right time but the wrong guy.” Listen to the fire in that.
And he took off from there, wearing bootcuts while blending the political with mischievous levels of diss against Drake deeper than the first days of their rap battle. Seventy thousand people at the stadium in New Orleans (the stadium that housed Black people left behind from Katrina in the city that was the site of an attack this year) screamed “A Minorrrrrr” when he sang it — what a way to build community. They sang along with his diss track “Not Like Us,” partly as a tribute to Los Angeles in the aftermath of wildfire destruction, where Black and brown communities are still picking up the pieces of their burned down lives.
The semiotics of the set made it unforgettable. Serena Williams crip walking over Drake’s face was a cheeky, overt provocation. Samuel L. Jackson as a Black Uncle Sam — isn’t it past time for a Black Uncle Sam? —played the satirical minstrel role in this deliberately bread-and-circuses chorus, channeling objections to Black culture heard in the past (and most likely in homes across the US in the present moment). And the American flag formed by Black male dancers dressed in red, white, and blue, was an image of protest, healing, confrontation, and reclamation: There is no United States without the labor and culture of Black people. And the rest of us would do well to embrace that.
Lamar made the constant subtext of racism visible and made defiance against it text. It was one more flame.
Essay 10 is here.
