Driving Without a Map: How Kendrick Lamar's 'This Is Bigger Than Music' is a Location

I. Exposition

In the late 1980s, I disconnected from television, turning it off. Literally. My husband still watched his beloved Giants, on Sundays, but beyond that, our lone TV stood quiet in the corner. Yes, we flirted with Twin Peaks sometime in the early 90s, but it wouldn’t be until 2015 when Rob so sick from stage 4 lung cancer ‘discovered’ The West Wing and we momentarily engaged with TV again. We binged as Rob grew sicker and Donald Trump, that brass New Yorker, entered what seemed then an improbable race. So seeing myself watch and rewatch Kendrick Lamar’s 13-minute halftime show stunner this past week was a bit of a surprise. 

I spent Sunday evening as I do most Sundays talking books, politics, and life with a group of dear friends in a book club. The Super Bowl and its halftime show were not on my radar.  But the next morning, I read a post by a former colleague. She wrote how her daughter (who I truly hope to vote for someday) had sent her a completed lesson plan for her to use with high school students based on Lamar's Super Bowl performance. "Mommy you have to." 

So after hearing a lot of buzz about Lamar's performance, an artist frankly I knew only by name, I figured 15 minutes on the treadmill watching the show would work well. An hour later I was still walking, and rewatching. 

II. Subject

Last week, I read a small snippet on Dr. Victoria Williamson's blog about the cognitive importance of listening to new music as we age. It fascinated me. She writes,

“Listening to new music as we age provides the brain with a cognitive challenge that activates multiple, simultaneous neural systems. The benefits of music listening will never compare to the enchantments we get from actively performing music, but, nevertheless, new music listening activates areas of the brain from root to tip, from early auditory processing centres through to the outer reaches of our context.”

Listening to new music is good for us—that is, anyone beyond their teenage years. We tend as we age to deeply appreciate (regardless of quality) the music of our adolescence and early 20s. Neural nostalgia. The music of our youth is tightly bound with experiences. We tend to favor the familiar, such as that beloved song played and replayed on the way to and from school. Or in my youth, that one song my girlfriends and I waited to hear on a cheap AM transistor on the beach. We screamed each time it came on as if we had wished it into existence. Or that evening in Central Park when the concert we waited so long for got rained out, and we made a mad dash to the subway singing too loudly the songs we came to hear. Or maybe for you, it's the prom song, or the songs that followed you to college, or like me, the music that played at the first funeral of a too-young friend who had died. All it takes are the first few notes and memories flood us. The familiar is a comfort. But sometimes the familiar is also too comfortable.

I was thinking about how listening to new music breaks patterns and increases perspective. But doing that requires a modicum of discomfort. After watching the halftime show several times, I wanted to know more as there were holes in my understanding. I wanted a map that could locate what I was hearing with what I knew. But to understand also required a bridge. Whereas I grasped bits and pieces of what Lamar was rapping, and appreciated the choreography, lighting, and symbolism of America built on and by Black bodies, I wanted the full gestalt. So I read a few reviews a details became clearer. No longer was this performance an outline, but rather a map of our history.  Lamar's pronouncement, "40 acres and a mule, this is bigger than the music" connects the performance with Black history which is US history--and perhaps it is there in that slim space that some discomfort arises for some of the 133+ million people who watched. Yes, this is bigger than music. This is our collective history. 

III. Countersubject

Online opinions of the performance seemed to fall into two distinct camps that we might label, Blue and Red. (We are nothing if we are not tragically consistent.) For many, myself included, this performance was thought-provoking, re-affirming art.  For others, it was culturally affirming. We are here. Our history will not be erased.  Some commented on how it was storytelling, protest, playful, and necessary.

In a NJ newspaper, the reviewer, Bobby Olivier, wrote this: 

“… While Lamar is certainly one of hip-hop’s great minds and typically a blistering performer, the 37-year-old emcee came up small here: serviceable at best, pedestrian at worst…What I would’ve given for some older jams like “m.A.A.d City,” “Swimming Pools,” or “Alright.”

Bobby wanted nostaligia. Like Bobby, many wanted the remembered experiences they had at other halftime shows. The familiar. An America that was less truthful. That was not entertaining, became an ironic refame from many. 

For others, the commentary was less dressed up and I directly quote from several posted reactions:  “It was boring and offensive, a waste of time, DEI halftime show, This makes no sense, Zero diversity.”

Dr. Williamson explains that 

"Listening to new music is a challenge. It is like driving in a new area without a map – our attention is all over the place, faced with unfamiliar input, and we struggle to appreciate our surroundings when faced with the challenge of constantly unfolding novelty. It can be overwhelming to our brain since it cannot rely on memory."

Are some of the more negative experiences with the halftime show about driving without a map? For those and all of us who acknowledge that we all have moments when it might feel easier to turn away than engage, how do we collectively move from the too-quick response and dismissal to dwelling?

IV. Answer

With what bridge do we build that might join land and landscape be?  All the vitriol and hate speech that floods our days have ramifications, as does the targeting by our President of vulnerable populations.  Such hate speech has already resulted in deaths. 

Martin Heidegger in a powerful essay, "Building Dwelling Thinking" writes, "But only something that is itself a location can make space for a site."  

Be a location. Not the location, but a location.

Our practice, like Lamar's art, cannot simply be about using our energy to return to a place we have been. The mythology of making America great again is predicated on that belief. Such desire amplifies the separation we feel and leaves too many of us hungry, frustrated, and unforgiving.

How brave Kendrick Lamar was last Sunday to trust us to look beyond the spectacle of entertainment and the chiding voice of Uncle Sam warning of failure, of "too much ghetto" so that we could feel, think, and witness. This was an aesthetic that required our response. 

Let us learn to hear beyond the nostalgia and familiar tune.