Lamar takes it to the limit, a bit like those other Eagles

Kendrick Lamar’s Super Bowl performance in front of the president will go down as one of the most important halftime shows in the history of the event,

- Mark Beaumont

“Salutations!” beams Samuel L Jackson, spinning around the centrefield of New Orleans’s Caesars Superdome clad in a traditional all-American red, white and blue tailcoat and wisps of white beard, our host and personification of the new US resistance. “It’s your Uncle Sam, and this is the great American game!”

While the Kansas City Chiefs are trying – and failing – to make three-peat history against the Philadelphia Eagles, the stakes of the Super Bowl halftime show have never been higher. As Kendrick Lamar appears crouched in a spotlight on the hood of a classic GNX car beneath the crab-like eyes of Donald J Trump – the first sitting president ever to attend a Super Bowl – he seems impishly intent on using the biggest moment of his career so far to charm and disarm the cruel world order. “The revolution about to be televised, you picked the right time but the wrong guy,” Lamar raps. And, among 120 million global viewers, the right-thinking world holds its breath for scandal, spectacle and a second, ideologically polarised 2025 inauguration.

There’s a lot to unpick. Firstly, America’s Crybaby in Chief has already exploited this most iconic of US events to forward his plan to Make America Hate Again. The NFL’s field-side banners reading “END RACISM”, a mark of progress for an institution with its own troubled history on racial equality, have been replaced with ones suggesting we “CHOOSE LOVE” because, well, racism in Trump’s America is just dandy. Now here comes conscious rap’s most defiant and outspoken champion, whose 2015 track “Alright” became a Black Lives Matter anthem, promising a halftime to make America and the world “think a little”. Part biker jacket Batman, part bass-riding bomb.