Kendrick Lamar Performed at the 2025 NFL Super Bowl fresh off five Grammy wins. His performance attracted millions of viewers and exceeded expectations for the entire world. Lamar’s set was entertaining and exposed the world for its political views, racial inequality and the music industry’s standards. The dancers stood in symbolism of the American flag showing the division in the country, Samuel L. Jackson, an African American actor and civil rights activist for racial inequality and social justice who made an influential voice for African Americans, guest starred as Uncle Sam. Where Jackson is the personified United States telling him his music is “too aggressive” “ghetto” or “inadequate.” The performance featured Grammy Award Winner SZA who Lamar shares a close friendship and has collaborated with in the songs “All the Stars” and “Luther.” As the performance went on the dancers began to form an inner circle while the outside of the circle stopped dancing and collapsed to the ground, the inner circle stayed standing expressing that only people in the inner circle of society survive. The shape of the stage was shown as a video game, seemingly the Netflix series “Squid Game” based on wealthy people influencing poor people to get taken advantage of. Lamar’s set featured only African American dancers, some dressed in all red and the others in all blue, representing the gang violence in America as well as a prison yard setting to express the amount of massive incarceration within the black community.
The most viral moment of the performance was Lamar’s song “Not Like Us” a diss track toward the artist Drake, exposing his actions in the industry. During the track, famous tennis player, Serena Williams, was brought on stage to crip walk, the same dance as she did at Wimbledon when she won the 2012 Olympics and later got backlash for the dance because it was seen as “inappropriate.” Williams had a previous romantic encounter with Drake which later took a wrong turn when she turned him down. Throughout social media, fans noticed Lamar wearing a diamond cut chain with a lowercase “a” while performing, leading fans to wonder what the chain meant towards the performance. The lowercase “a” could symbolize Lamar’s multimedia communications company, pgLang. But many believe it to be the written representation of the A minor chord referenced in a verse in the “Not Like Us.”
The Superbowl half time performance was aimed to entertain the audience but also to remind the audience that this isn’t just about being entertained, it’s about being aware. “40 acres and a mule this is bigger than the music” was not a lyric to skip by on, the first part 40 acres and a mule refers to the enslaved African Americans after the Civil War, a broken promise made to African Americans and the repeated fights for justice. “The revolution is about to be televised” referring to a poem from Gil Scott Heron meaning we need to take actions into our own hands to make a change within society instead of waiting for that change to come to us. Lamar is telling everyone that we are divided as a country, although African Americans have “freedom” we are still and might always be treated unequally and that the United States is moving in the wrong direction as more time passes. It feels as though we’re going backward instead of forward. Lamar ends up asking us through the entire performance about the systemic racism within black history and the relationship patriots have with African Americans. What are we going to do to put a stop to history constantly repeating itself?
