Stanford Humanities Center
On Sunday, February 9th, 2025, from roughly 3:30 to 7pm PST, America was suspended in the annual collective cultural moment that is the NFL Super Bowl. As someone framed it to me on the Monday afterward, he hadn’t even looked at a TV on Sunday but was aware of what was happening with the 59th iteration of the American football game, hosted in 2025 in New Orleans: he knew the game’s score (the Eagles won), who was there (Donald Trump and Taylor Swift), and he’d heard all about Kendrick Lamar’s explosive half-time performance—from the Drake diss to videogame chess board—purely because everyone was talking about it.
As a media scholar witnessing personal conversations and social media feeds reverberate in the Super Bowl’s wake, I was interested in Lamar’s half-time show because of the opportunity it presented to analyze in real time America’s collective response to what Lamar and his creative team brought to the table. The performance also posed an opportunity for the narrative theory class I taught later that week: as I posed it to my students, how could the narratological tools of literary studies help us parse the performance and its budding place in the broader American zeitgeist? In other words, why was everyone talking about the performance? What about it made it have such an explosive impact? These were the core questions we were engaging with in the class—where stories got their strength, their momentum, their movement; how the form of a story or performance, both the sum and the collection of its individual parts, contributed to a reader’s experience of the piece. We’d spent the first half of the class going through the different scholars and schools of narrative theory, from Roland Barthes, Mieke Bal, to Mikhail Bakhtin. Kendrick Lamar’s performance would be an opportunity to put those abstract ideas into contemporary practice.
Depending on who you talk to, the initial reception of Lamar’s thirteen-minute performance waffled between confusion and elation, disappointment and awe. As I discussed with my students in a class just days after the Super Bowl, all of these reactions are part of the form of the performance. By taking this collectively experienced moment and turning it into a pedagogical exercise, I gave my students a space to discuss their own cultural theories while providing the underlying narratological tools to structure their analysis. What class discussion revealed was that, by employing basic narratological analysis in our real-life cultural analysis, we gained a much deeper understanding of the artistry pulsating throughout Lamar’s performance and its surrounding context, and we also saw the ways in which Lamar and his creative team implicate us as viewers in the meaning-making process. From this, my students were able to extrapolate applications of narrative theory to contemporary performances at a broader level. What follows is a demonstration of such an analysis adapted from class discussion, as well as a rumination on the utility of mobilizing narratological tools to analyze the contemporary here-and-now.
The Half-Time Show from a Syntagmatic Perspective
As Aristotle outlines in his Poetics, a traditional story has a beginning, middle and end. By introducing Saussure’s articulation of syntagmatic relations, we see how this linear trajectory can also be mapped onto the words of a story themselves: a sentence has a logical beginning, middle, and end, just as a story, or in Lamar’s case, a Super Bowl half-time performance, does.
Reading Lamar’s performance for its fabula, its syntagmatic chronological articulation, reveals a pretty standard face-value, chronological reading of the show: we are time-warped through an Apple logo (this year’s half-time show sponsor) into the New Orleans Caesars Superdome. The camera pans out to a stage arranged as a PlayStation controller (Figure 1) before cutting to Samuel L. Jackson, dressed in Americana, who announces himself as the performance’s emcee Uncle Sam, and then introduces us to “great American game.” From here, Lamar begins to perform, weaving a verbal repartee with Uncle Sam between his songs; walking across the stage with his red, white, and blue backup dancers; and bringing his friends—SZA, Mustard (who helped produce some of the songs), and Serena Williams—to share in the half-time show spotlight. About midway through the performance, Lamar asks his backup dancers if he should start singing his Drake diss track—the opening chords begin to play—before Lamar changes his mind and brings SZA onstage instead, a traditional and uncontroversial choice that Uncle Sam applauds. But by the end of the performance, Lamar has fully rebelled from Uncle Sam’s recordkeeping: he performs the diss track, cutting out the legally questionable word about Drake’s alleged pedophilia but smiling at the camera as he sings the diss anyway. Lamar then transitions into the performance’s outro song, “Turn the TV Off,” and in the repetitions of this refrain, the music stops, the stage goes dark, and the lights in the stadium spell out “Game Over.” Where the show starts with a video game controller and Lamar shouting that the revolution will in fact be televised, he ends by closing off these visual and verbal motifs.
Lamar’s Paradigmatic Signification
As Saussure reminds us, meaning does not only happen along this horizontal syntagmatic progression; rather, the paradigmatic space—the symbols, the metaphors, the double-entendres—open up meaning vertically, outside of what is explicitly contained within a text, creating a web of meaning that is the stuff literary critics typically analyze. This narratological distinction is fundamental to a text’s life in the reader’s realm. As Mieke Bal puts it, things gain broader significance because of the ideological structurations readers bring to the thing. As Ernest Hemingway puts it—the paradigmatic is all the stuff of the iceberg beneath the water, the stuff that a reader should know and therefore an author should not have to explicitly state.
This submerged space of meaning is where Lamar’s performance is particularly ripe for formal analysis. There is explicit meaning in Lamar’s performance, yes—the video game imagery, the pro-Americana imagery, the actual lyrics of the song, Lamar eventually acquiescing to the mass public's barely latent desire that he diss Drake—but the narratological mastery of the performance introduces layers of additional subtext that reward a sharp-eyed viewer on the lookout for interpretable symbols, symbols that mean different things to different people.
In class, I showed the first three minutes of the performance and asked students to identify in smaller groups both what is on the surface and what is beneath it. Here is a sample reading: First, by starting the performance with the Apple warp imagery, the show is marked as entering a nether-space, a different media space from the reality of the Super Bowl game, a demarcation that is made explicit when emcee Uncle Sam calls the performance the “big game.” Additionally, there is an implicit historicized demarcation in this imagery, first seen in the birds-eye shot of the Caesars Superdome—symbolized as a continuation of the Apple warp by the shared color scheme (Figures 2 and 3). This image of the Superdome both deictically centers us in a real space, New Orleans, at the same time it also reminds us of the other times the Superdome has been shown to millions on the news: a little over a month before the Super Bowl, fourteen people were killed in a terrorist attack less than a mile away, and this is the same Superdome whose ceiling was ripped apart by the 2005 Hurricane Katrina, where many families sheltered in place while feeling largely abandoned by the broader American public. Even if not explicitly visible when the Superdome is shown on the screen, these historical realities underlie and thus overlay the image, capturing the dissonance of a place that has been turned into both a metaphorical game (according to the parameters set by the half-time performance) and a multimillion dollar sports arena. New Orleans of course has a much richer (and complicated and violent) history than these more recent tragedies, and starting with the dissonance of the warp and Uncle Samuel L. Jackson’s opening invites a further look back into performance’s potential historical signifiers.[1] Again, these historical references mean something more when we consider how these histories, both violent and incredibly profitable, both for entertainment and full of immense suffering, all exist in this same nether-space. And depending on the viewer and which histories they tune into, the break from “Super Bowl reality” into this “game space” can evoke varied responses.
A widely circulating paradigmatic reading of the performance is that Samuel L. Jackson’s Uncle Sam character is a coded articulation of the cultural policing that the broader American public perpetuates against its Black citizens. But to mesh the explicit—Samuel Jackson, a Black man, dressed in hyperbolic Americana policing another Black man with an all-Black backup dancer lineup—with the implicit—the allusion to a white patriotic symbol refigured as a panopticon of surveillance—requires a deeper reading to find another syntagmatic and paradigmatic alignment.
Consider this: the first recorded visual iteration of Uncle Sam as an American patriot occurred around 1830. Twenty years later, the American zeitgeist would be revolutionized by another uncle figure—Uncle Tom (Figures 4 and 5), whose problematic servility and self-hatred maps onto Uncle Samuel’s policing of the people in Lamar’s performance who look just like him. When you formally read the Uncle Sam figure also as a Janus-faced Uncle Tom, Lamar’s performance dramatizes its own multiplied narratives and refers back to America’s long history of defining American-ness on the violent exclusion of the racial Other (until of course, this other becomes discursive entertainment. Do you see the resonances with Lamar’s own performance?).
Here, we see how the show is aware of the fact that there is an explicit pro-America engagement with the performance, that some people will memeify Lamar’s “A minor” necklace and Drake diss and call it a day (look at Part One of the NFL’s half-time show TikTok compilation and you’ll see what I mean). The performance is also aware that people will read the Uncle Sam-Lamar repartee as a barely latent critique of Black cultural policing. But having Uncle Sam embody these layers at the exact same time presents another paradigmatic reading: that Lamar and Uncle Sam Jackson and Mustard and Serena Williams and all of the performance’s backup dancers are aware of the fact that they themselves are participating in a performance for the white gaze, a gaze that Jackson’s character, in its multiplicitous overlaid meanings, seemingly critiques. And in that awareness, Lamar and his creative team re-assume creative control—connecting hundreds of years of anti-Black racism, violence, commodification, and performance into the thirteen-minute show Lamar staged between the two Super Bowl quarters. Perhaps one could connect this performance commentary to the Super Bowl itself as entertainment—at what cost, disproportionately felt by Black bodies,[2] does this bread and circuses come? Perhaps even one could question where and how these Black symbols emerge in the first place (or what it means for Serena Williams to be doing a Crip Walk after living in Compton for seven years because her middle-class father believed “the ghetto…would make you tough”). To put it yet another way, what could this show be asking us to see about the relationship between mass American profit and mass poor Black suffering? The deeper one digs to complete the show’s meaning, the more meanings emerge.
Where the Syntagmatic and Paradigmatic Diverge: Description
In our discussion of this discursive distance between the syntagmatic and paradigmatic elements of Lamar’s performance, I also asked my students to consider the narratological place from whence the immense cultural power of these symbols might come. The week of the class, we read Bal’s chapter on “Overwriting as Un-writing,” where she advances the argument that description, typically viewed as interrupting (and outright antithetical to) conventional narration, is actually a narrative motor, and a dangerous one. To put it in four words, “by binding, narratives unbind” (607): descriptions both interrupt the subject-predicate relationship while also providing the deictic glue that holds these two logical units together. The power of Lamar’s performance exists in this paradoxical dissonance.
By applying this theory of narrative to the performance, I encouraged my students to consider the performance’s cultural engine: it’s not actually the explicit words in his songs or the narrative progression of the show’s video game metaphor; rather, the force behind the performance is in its description, the details like Uncle Sam / Uncle Tom that both threaten to unravel the contiguity of the performance at the same time that these are the very things that make the show. In dancing around the line of critique and placability, one might argue that Lamar not only reveals that line, but in doing so, he also highlights its arbitrary mutability (he cannot be both a culturally policed Black rapper and a beloved American performer, but he also can’t seem to stay in one place for the viewer to choose).
Reader as Producer and the Writerly Performance
The final narratological takeaway I wanted my students to get from formally analyzing this performance is our own participation within its meaning-making. Returning to Hemingway’s iceberg quote that opened the class—“If a writer knows enough about what he is writing he may omit things that he knows and the reader… will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them” (Death in the Afternoon, 192)—I highlighted how the fact that Lamar did not have to explicitly narrate the symbolic resonances of his message speaks to how incisively the performance engaged with his audience: yes, he gave us the Drake diss, but it was repurposed into something much thornier than a rap rivalry. Though not literally, Lamar’s performance constructed a mirror where the viewer’s own subjective positionality articulated meaning within the open symbols displayed across the stage. And the fact that not everyone had the same interpretation—that some people called the performance boring; that some stopped at one layer of reading while others went and continue to go deeper—highlights the point, too: this was never meant to be a Drake diss show; it was always meant to be a critique of uncomplicated consumption of Black performance, a critique that has a much longer history in this country than February 9th, 2025. The multiplicity of meaning is, at its core, a narratological phenomenon, or as Barthes would call it, a writerly show, where we as readers become producers in the text’s spiraling meaning.
Of course, I could have talked about these narratological features with my students in Hemingway’s “Big Two-Hearted River,” the more canonical text used to discuss these things. But giving them the option to apply these skills to a live zeitgeist-in-the-making both gave them an incredibly tangible way to engage with and thus understand the theory, and it also empowered them with a real-life example to participate in the discursive meaning-making happening all around us. As an educator, it is my goal to teach the narrative concepts but also to create more media literate and critical democratic citizens. With 135 million live viewers, Lamar’s performance was the most viewed Super Bowl half-time show, with more viewers than the Super Bowl itself. As of August 2025, the YouTube video of his performance had another 142 million views. Combined, Lamar’s show had almost as many viewers as the entire American population, which is exactly to his point: the revolution will be televised, but not in the ways we might think.
Notes
[1] As others have noted, Lamar’s performance was full of these deep cuts, most notably Lamar’s line about “40 acres and a mule,” a reference to post-Civil War reparations offered to America’s formerly enslaved.
[2] Duke cultural anthropologist Tracie Canada has a great episode on NPR’s CodeSwitch that gets into what NFL football reveals about the relation between race, labor, and power in America.
