Since folks are asking, am I a Kendrick Lamar fan? Hmm, that's maybe the wrong question. I know and respect his work, but the only two songs in my playlist are DNA and HUMBLE. Do I know when not to sing the lyric? Yes.
Did I get *every* reference on first watch during the Super Bowl halftime? No.
But I sure did howl when he teased "They Not Like Us" and then went a different direction, as if to say "I'll be back to diss Drake later" and then later when he looked in the camera, said Drake's name, and smiled. I sure understood that.
I have respected his work since I saw his powerful To Pimp A Butterfly performance at the Grammys years ago. It was clear he was telling a story about Black identity in the United States, and telling it in a new and interesting way. He was telling it in a way that put it in the conversation with Walker's A Color Purple or Morrison's Beloved and August Wilson's Fences or perhaps or Ellison's Invisible Man - books that helped show me an America I had never seen before. An America where people like me, young white men, were seldom told "no." But a country where everyone else had restrictions, some unwritten and invisible, but very real nonetheless.
Later, his album DAMN. won a Pulitzer Prize for continuing to tell that story in a way that showed his personal struggle with how one can be famous and rich and still imprisoned in a country where that claims to value wealth and fame over Whiteness. Sure there was amazing songwriting and storytelling, but here was an artist where the medium and the message and the person were all intertwined.
He was dragged into this dispute with Drake. And he ended it with They Not Like Us. And then came 5 more Grammys, and the most watched Super Bowl halftime show in history. Nail in the coffin type stuff. And Drake could get up, but first he would have to look inside and tell a story that's real. Show us the stretch marks, so to speak. America could do the same, but the even deeper irony is that Kendrick performed the halftime show on a field that had been modified - the words "End Racism" were removed from behind the end zones to make the White President feel more comfortable.
So like all visionaries, Kendrick Lamar is leading a conversation America is not ready to have. And I'm here for it.