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Guest Essay
Feb. 14, 2025, 5:03 a.m. ET
By Tiana Clark
Ms. Clark is a poet who teaches creative writing at Smith College.
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More viewers tuned into watch Kendrick Lamar — 133.5 million people — than any other Super Bowl halftime show. And they witnessed a rousing concert by a 22-time Grammy-winning (as well as one Pulitzer-winning) artist. But there was much more on display, if you knew where to look for it.
Mr. Lamar provided a layered spectacle of cultural and political allusions, encoded in and percolating through propulsive rap, 13 minutes of profound protest art that compelled me to shout gleefully at my TV in response to the audacity I was witnessing. With the multifaceted symbolism unspooling before me, I felt compelled to break down the brilliant complexities. Here’s my take:
The performance began with an aerial shot of the darkened football field illuminated by alternating symbols: a square, a circle, a triangle and an X.
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More than a few people noted the nod to the masks worn by the guards in the dystopian South Korean drama “Squid Game,” in which poor people compete against one another in a series of sadistic games. When I first saw the symbols I, along with many others, thought of the PlayStation controller buttons.
Both references point to one main conceit for Mr. Lamar’s premise: the gamification of the elusive American dream, which for too many of us has become the “dream deferred,” as in the Langston Hughes poem “Harlem.”
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