Kendrick Lamar headlines the Super Bowl halftime show on Sunday already a champion. Last summer, he vanquished the pop superstar Drake in a volley of vicious verses, an incendiary matchup of wits and word craft, hypocrisy and conjecture. Mr. Lamar won in part by depicting Drake as a tourist in Black culture. But his coup de grâce hit Drake squarely on his own turf: the charts. “Not Like Us” transformed our dance floors into Drake roasts and, last weekend, yielded Mr. Lamar five Grammysbetsoler, including one for song of the year. (Drake’s latest response to all this? A lawsuit.)

Mr. Lamar entered this duel crowned with literary laurels. In 2018, he became the first rapper in history to win a Pulitzer Prize. With his dexterous lyrics and vivid storytelling came a profound political consciousness. Mr. Lamar released his 2015 single “Alright” amid the protests against police violence in Ferguson, Mo.; the song became a chant for marchers and an anthem for the nascent Black Lives Matter movement. He made political symbolism a part of his television performances and voiced explicit support for the kneeling protest of the N.F.L. quarterback Colin Kaepernick. But you don’t get to the Super Bowl by winning Ivy League awards for political poetry; you get there by mopping the floor with your opponent. Mr. Lamar’s killer instincts placed him on Middle America’s greatest stage this year. Now that he’s there, it seems as if he has inherited all the conflicted expectations that await him.

There are the fans who want to see Mr. Lamar drag Drake across the line of scrimmage. But there’s also a hope that he’ll use this spotlight as an opportunity to move beyond intra-star warfare toward a grander gesture of resistance for this political moment, when many Black Americans are justifiably terrified of a rollback of rights and a reassertion of white hegemony in America. Then there are still others who take Mr. Lamar’s very appearance in front of a big American flag in a recent promotional video for the event as a sign of political acquiescence.

Mr. Lamar’s place in the Super Bowl halftime show is the product of a handshake between the N.F.L. commissioner, Roger Goodell, and the Roc Nation founder, Jay-Z. This deal, done in 2019, after Mr. Kaepernick knelt and before Black Lives Matter protests erupted nationwide, made Jay-Z the chief strategist for the N.F.L.’s live entertainment and was meant to be part of a larger social justice initiative. What it did was provide cover for the N.F.L. as it faced a backlash and the specter of a boycott. At the time, Jay-Z defended the deal with a pithy rejoinder: “We’ve passed kneeling.” It was a flippant way to state a hyper-capitalist hip-hop realpolitik: To defang the devil, we have to deal with him.

But it is just as likely justification for Jay-Z’s own quest for a slice of the devil’s pie. The mogul’s work with the N.F.L. has undoubtedly changed the complexion of the halftime show in recent years,fef777 casino but onstage diversity appears to be the extent of the league’s appetite for racial politics: It is reportedly ditching its “End racism” signage in the end zones for the big game. Six years later, Mr. Lamar, the beloved bard of Black America’s struggle against police violence, will take a stage erected by a partnership that effectively sidelined Mr. Kaepernick. Anything that he does or doesn’t do on that stage will either be undermined or underlined by this history.

Mr. Lamar himself seems to have backed away from taking overt political stances in the past few years; perhaps he has discovered that expressing his politics seems to alienate as many allies as enemies. Since his debut, Mr. Lamar’s words and deeds have been parsed and judged by a cohort of critics, intellectuals and fans who plot and then police their own lines of demarcation between selling and selling out. Such is the conundrum of any pop star with an inkling of consciousness. As Chuck D of Public Enemy once put it, such a star must “reach the bourgeois and rock the boulevard.” An entertainer’s job is simple: Don’t be boring. An artist’s job is different: Reveal beauty, evoke emotion. A political artist must do both things and more: Be right, righteous and lead us, we fans say, but make it rhyme and make sure the music is hot.

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In between, Mr. Trump invited Laura Loomer, a right-wing influencer known for promoting Sept. 11 conspiracy theories, to join him at events commemorating the anniversary of the attacks. He urged a government shutdown, attacked a cornerstone of his own tax policy, declared “I HATE TAYLOR SWIFT!” on social media after she endorsed his rival and — at events intended to woo Jewish voters — said “the Jewish people” would be responsible if he lost the election, prompting fears of antisemitic reprisal.

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