Critics say Kendrick Lamar was too loud and hard to understand — they said the same thing about Bob Dylan in Newport
Lamar’s politically-charged halftime show and Dylan’s 1965 Newport performance both upset precedent
Photo by Getty Images/Canva
Driving home from watching A Complete Unknown, fired up by Bob Dylan’s middle finger to the establishment, my mom said she wondered how today’s musicians would respond to the Trump administration. We appear to have our first example in the form of Kendrick Lamar’s Super Bowl halftime show.
Lamar’s concert defied the norms on the biggest night in American sports, usually expected to be a moment of celebration and unity.
Instead, Lamar’s performance addressed issues of race and fascism in America. A crew of Black dancers, dressed in red, white and blue formed an American flag and did a mocking, goose-walking step. Meanwhile Samuel L. Jackson, dressed up as Uncle Sam, parodying both the patriotic symbol and Uncle Tom syndrome, condemned Lamar for being “too loud, too reckless, too ghetto.”
Conservative figures quickly took to the internet to criticize Lamar just the way he predicted they would.
“Raise your hand if you survived the black nationalist Super Bowl LIX halftime show,” pundit Eric Daugherty wrote on X.
Conservative commentator Matt Walsh also took to X to call the performance “trash,” complaining that “nobody can even understand what he’s saying. And the vast majority of football fans haven’t even heard of most of these songs.”
These criticisms of Lamar — that his music is wrong for the audience, that he’s unintelligible, that he’s too radical — echo the remarks leveled at Bob Dylan’s electric performance at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival. His performance was also criticized by members of the folk world as being too loud, impossible to understand and by all measures wrong for an event meant to uplift the finger-strumming tunes of classic folk.
However, the critics who called Dylan’s new sound wrong for Newport, a festival that from its founding was intertwined with the protest movement, were proven to be behind the times. Dylan’s transition to electric is often credited with ushering in the folk-rock era and a new, revolutionary age of music embracing the loud, brash sound of rock.
The performance raised questions about the future of Newport: Should it hold onto the roots of classic folk even if the political power of the genre was slipping away, or should it embrace the new sound of revolution? It did the latter, as in subsequent years, more electric acts took the stage.
Lamar was facing a similar issue, but with higher stakes. Antisemitism is on the rise, civil rights are under attack, and the cultural soul of the country feels divided. In such a polarized time, is the Super Bowl halftime show supposed to provide us with reprieve from the conflict and unite us around our — supposedly — shared love of traditional America, demarcated by football, cold beer and benign pop performances? Or is it a space for artists to speak to current politics?
Lamar is not the first artist to stir up this debate. In 2016, Beyoncé’s guest performance with the headliners, Coldplay, used Black Power symbols such as Black Panther berets and the symbol “X” — it was seen by many viewers and critics as championing the Black Lives Matter movement. The right criticized the performance as being anti-police, anti-American and inappropriate.
Today, as the federal government is attempting to dismantle diversity and racial justice initiatives in education, business, and the arts, Lamar, unlike Dylan, is taking an overt political stance — by most accounts, Dylan’s act of rebellion, despite introducing a new political sound, was to escape the label of “political artist.”
Dylan did not play Newport again for over 30 years. It’s possible Lamar won’t be invited back to the Super Bowl for a while — or at least not for the rest of the Trump administration.
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