February 10, 2025

Hello, Friends. I want to start by once again apologizing for the lack of updates lately. It’s not that there hasn’t been any significant news of late, nor that I have nothing to say about it. Quite the opposite. In fact, there has been just so. much. news. that it has left me feeling like the proverbial fellow who’s been tasked with eating an elephant. Yes, it’s one bite at a time, but I’ve been kind of overwhelmed at the entirety of the dish before me.

So we’re going to take a quick detour here to briefly discuss something that did happen within the past 24 hours: Kendrick Lamar’s Apple Music Super Bowl Halftime Show (as it was billed). If you haven’t watched it, here’s a link to the official video.

I did see the show, emphasis on the verb “see”. I was at a friend’s house watching The Big Game, as it is known. At home, due to my hearing impairment, I almost never watch any sort of video without closed captioning turned on. I hadn’t really thought about it until last night, when I realized that, through the game, commercials, and halftime show, I was utterly incapable of hearing/understanding 90% of what anyone was saying on the television. To be absolutely fair to my friend, I don’t blame him at all for this situation; I didn’t mention it to him. Part of this was due to a certain amount of embarrassment on my part; the other part was a deliberate move on my own part to experience my disability on a more tangible level. Between captions and my hearing aids (which I wear constantly when I’m out of bed), I manage pretty well within my household — to the point that I don’t even think about myself as “disabled”. But I know that I’m in a privileged subset of the hearing-impaired population with that, so I decided to force myself to experience things otherwise.

And experience I did. Honestly, as far as the football game itself was concerned, not being able to hear the commentators didn’t diminish the experience of the game in the slightest. I’m sure I missed plenty of interesting trivia tidbits that I would have enjoyed absorbing, but I was able to easily follow the game without the majority of the audio. The commercials were a bit of a mixed bag. Some were more baffling than others without much audio, and some were much more clear. (I appreciated being able to read Seal’s … adjusted open-captioned lyrics to “Kiss from a Rose” for Mountain Dew Baja Blast, but of all the commercials that were shown, that was the one that really reached out to include me, huh? Wowzers.)

And then there was the halftime show. Before I really speak any more about it, let me be real with you. Before yesterday, here is the sum total of what I knew about Kendrick Lamar:

• He performed a collaboration with Imagine Dragons during the Grammys a couple of years back.
• He had a beef of some sort with Drake last year.

Yeah, that’s it. Taylor Swift re-mixer? Multiple Grammy-award winning rapper? One of Time Magazine’s 100 Most Influential People in the World for 2016? Awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Music in 2018? Black Panther soundtrack curator? Icon of the Black Lives Matter movement? Nope. Didn’t know any of that (and so much more) until I started correcting my lack of knowledge after the show.

During the show itself, I did my best to catch the vibe as it went on. An initial image of Playstation controller-like symbols in the field gave me the impression that some video game imagery might follow, but things took a sharp turn. Right away, I caught that there was a hefty amount of satire happening with Samuel L. Jackson opening the program dressed up as Uncle Sam (heh), but not a patriotic one. Instead, his mugging to the camera and calling Lamar out in an exaggerated voice (a lot of which I actually was able to hear) was instantly recognizable: This was not the “America Wants You” Uncle Sam. No, this was a mash-up, mixed with an “America Wants You to Pipe Down” take on Uncle Tom. The satire was punctuated and emphasized further by the visuals of a large group of black male dancers, dressed in red, white, and blue, forming an American flag that Lamar symbolically tore in half as he waded through the crowd. Further imagery through the program resembled the recreation yard of a prison, or a sea of bodies, splayed on the ground in grotesque fashion.

I was unable to clearly hear or understand Lamar’s rapping (and being utterly unfamiliar with his songs), leaving me at a loss for the specifics of his words (though I did remark at the time that he had a very good flow). But the searing attitude and emotion was clear. Nor did I recognize at the time tennis legend (and one-time Drake paramour) Serena Williams’ cameo during the climax of the show. What I did recognize was that Lamar was making a statement. Perhaps to the millions of people watching the show on TV, perhaps to the thousands in the crowd surrounding him, or perhaps to just one audience member in a private box, with members of the Secret Service flanking him. But a statement was being made.

Another friend of mine in a group chat texted that it was the “worst halftime show ever”. And when he texted that, I briefly agreed, thinking that this was nowhere near the spectacle and artistry of Prince’s show, the solemnity and cathedral-esque nature of U2’s post-9/11 program, or even the audacity of Michael Jackson’s 90-second silent stare from behind sunglasses, waiting to start the show. This didn’t feel like any of them.

But as I hopped on Bluesky after the show was over, I found a very different reaction. And I realized that my hearing wasn’t the only disability I had been experiencing in the moment. My privilege acted as blinders, preventing me from truly experiencing and absorbing the message that Mr. Lamar was conveying to millions of viewers around the world. And with the final image of the words “GAME OVER” being displayed in the stands, and with “TV off” being some of the only words of Lamar’s I was actually able to make out, I realized that it wasn’t a message for me, but it was definitely a message directed at people like me. And that I needed to sit down, listen, and learn in response.