The Super Bowl half-time show is Plato’s perfect form of pomp and ceremony, a corporate-sponsored, highly choreographed musical performance used to entice people who don’t follow the NFL into watching TV in order to secure even higher ad fees from Doritos and Dunkin’ Donuts. Over the years it has provided moments of great spectacle: Prince playing Purple Rain in the rain, Rihanna announcing her pregnancy flanked by hundreds of sperm-looking dancers in duvet drip – but it’s never been a site of serious artistry. Its biggest controversies – Janet Jackson’s nip slip, MIA’s middle finger – have been teenage in their puerility.
Could that change with the arrival to the Super Bowl stage of Lamar, one of this decade’s great public intellectuals – a Pulitzer prize-winning rapper who has transformed the possibilities of hip-hop? It’s an unlikely match for the NFL in an ordinary year, but performing in front of a president who has attacked intellectualism, Black activism and the communities in which Lamar was raised, it felt momentous before it even began.
