MAGA melts down over Super Bowl halftime performance

Annoying generalization and useless Internet noise what even is journalism

So sick of these clickbait headlines. From the headline to the body "Melts down" -> "wasn't too impressed". BORING. Journalists need to do some actual work like they used to instead of just farming rage bait.

I like Kendrick Lamar and still found it kind of boring.
- Huh. I like Kendrick Lamar and found it awesome.
  
  I just like big visual stuff at halftime. Katy Perry’s huge tiger was a memorable one, as was U2 after 9/11.

Why would the pedophile Matt Gaetz be offended by a song dissing pedophiles?
But also fuck this type of partisan rage bait article. This type of writing is what divides us, even if it's saying things you wanna hear.
- don't forget about Trump...and Musk.
- Im 50 and white. A lot of the people I know who hated the halftime show aren’t hip-hop fans and/or have trouble interpreting dance performances. The racist people I know just didn’t watch it at all.
  
  I definitely didnt like it.
- The Daily Beast is to the left, what Fox News is to the right.
  
  This is why i only read from centrist news sources

Why? It was straight up nationalist propaganda
- Maybe you don't know 1. Gang colors or 2. TV networks are bound contractually to always support the military or they can get their broadcasting licenses revoked.

Shocking that MAGA wouldn't like someone who disses pedophiles.

Snowflakes

If all MAGAts just spontaneously died that would be fucking boffo.

Where can I watch the halftime show? Gotta see him dunking on these pedos.
- NFL'S yt channel

Kendrick dropping truth bombs on the NFL’s biggest stage? Cue the MAGAverse hyperventilating into their flag-print fainting couches. Nothing terrifies fragile hegemony more than Black artistry that isn’t sanitized for their comfort. Oh no—a Pulitzer-winning rapper dared weave politics into the sacred ad-break circus! Next they’ll demand halftime shows be replaced with Lee Greenwood AI covers.
The meltdown’s a feature, not a bug. Conservatives need perpetual outrage to mask their cultural irrelevance. Imagine stanning a draft-dodging conman but seething when an actual poet weaponizes the mic. Stay mad—the future’s rhyming without you.
- you like write
  
  Writing’s just thinking with structure, friend. Some of us wield words like a scalpel; others prefer crayons. Both have their place, but don’t confuse one for the other.
- Remember, these are the free speech absolutes that are anti cancel culture. Right?
- Headlines are short and easy to understand for sure.
- Kendrick dropping truth bombs on the NFL’s biggest stage
  What truth bombs did he drop? Some vaguely rebellious sounding lines? "The revolution will be televised?"
  This was milquetoast at best. Actively harmful at worst. I really enjoyed the performance but he is doing exactly what he criticizes the record labels of doing. Taking black culture and commodifying it by turning it into a spectacle.
  This was corporate spectacle and nothing more.
  "Come, comrades, and claim your Che Guevara t-shirts. Indulge that half-buried discontent with the system by picking up these subversive punk rock accessories. For a fleeting moment, we’ll even add a trans flag poster—yours for nothing but shipping and handling. Put on the revolution you crave."
  
  Kendrick’s performance wasn’t meant for you to dissect like some detached art critic sipping lukewarm coffee in a gallery. It was the spectacle—because that’s where the power lies. You want revolution without the mess, rebellion without the noise, but that’s not how this works.
  Corporate stage or not, he hijacked their platform and made them pay for it. That’s subversion, not commodification. You’re so busy clutching your purity checklist that you missed the point: this isn’t about your approval.
  And spare me the faux-radical cynicism about Che t-shirts. If you’re waiting for a revolution that doesn’t touch capitalism, you’ll die waiting. Meanwhile, Kendrick’s out there making people uncomfortable. What are you doing? Writing snarky posts? Congrats on your service to the cause.

Good to see.

I thought Kendrick was very good, and I don't listen to him or very much of that style music. He is amazingly talented and I thought a top tier showman. In the article, Jack Posobic said that he wished it was Creed (like In the 2001 half time) instead. Since this was the Apple Music streaming halftime show, I looked it up. #1 Streamer of last year was Kendrick, I didn't see Creed in the top 50. Also Billboard has Kendrick at #4 all year for Streaming, also no Creed. I know Creed had a big resurgence last year touring, but I was around listing to music in 2001 and we all voted that Creed sucks. I didn't like those people who liked Creed then, and even more so now.
- LOL, Creed?
  Probably because of the xtian thing, but...still.
- but I was around listing to music in 2001 and we all voted that Creed sucks
  Can confirm, was also listening to music in 2001, and Creed sucks
  Given current events though, I wonder if Disturbed and System of a Down will be moved to make something new.
  
  I was in my late 20s back then. Anyone who told me they were into Creed during that time always ended up being the guy the women around would all have a story about regarding abusive behavior.
  
  John Dolmayan from SOAD is actually a huge Trump supporter for some reason.
- I remember when creed came out, it gave rise to a shitload of bands with lead singers that would go out of their way to sound like Scott Stapp. If you hated creed, this became very obvious and annoying
  
  Yearah eehhvreahy bodeyh sauunded likeha thais rollen theah Ehhh's...
  ...Instead of just saying the letter A
  
  I've always noticed growing up that there seems to always be one band that music fans seem to randomly focus their hate on disproportionately, often for little reason beyond "because fuck you that's why".
  When I first entered middle school, it was Quiet Riot. Then Winger. Creed. Nickelback. I'm sure I'm missing some in the middle, but you get the idea. There was always one band that everybody just focused their hate on, and god help you if you were actually a fan of the band because you were bullied relentlessly and labelled a "poser". And the thing is.....most of the time, these bands weren't that bad. They were mostly cookie-cutter, middle of the road bands who brought nothing really new to the table, but they weren't terrible either. But they got a disproportionate amount of hate for merely existing.
  
  I just remember the drunk suburban girl who would load up the jukebox with Creed and Nickelback at the bar. Nothing kills a good Friday night at the bar faster than that.

What’s with the media’s obsession with the opinions of known trolls like Matt Walsh?! Fuck, stop highlighting his drivel and that of people like him. You’re giving them free advertising!
Maga melting down over a black performer isn’t news. It’s olds!
- Conflict drives engagement
- Welcome to seeing the white supremacist hegemony. They'll platform racists criticizing Black Art forms, but they'll actively avoid giving any room for those Black Art forms. You see it everywhere in what artists get radio promotion and algorithmic boosts vs who toils in the underground for years, or else releases a couple EPs, a couple of mixtapes, and then goes into a boring graphic design job because shit, they need food man.
  
  Yeah for some reason nobody has on a black man to criticize white culture but they will do the opposite often.
  
  You're right. I have to think pretty hard to name a single black artist because of how little attention they get in the media. Meanwhile, practically every white group formed by friends in high school gets a tour and record deal.
  
  I hear you and all. But this post is about a Black Art form being performed by exclusively Black artists on one of the largest platforms available.
- EDIT: This turns out to just be a folklore factoid after all, see the comment replying to this one
  Forgive the tangential side-note: Although I get that "news" vs. "olds" was justified punning, I still want to mention what I think is interesting about the term "news", and seems to be in danger of being forgotten. I remember learning in school (pre-internet so I couldn't easily verify) that the origin of the word "news" was "North, East, West, South".
  
  I’m sure that’s what’s you were taught, but it’s not true: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/news-etymology/
  It doesn’t work in other languages either.
  The Dutch word for news is nieuws, but that does not form an acronym of noord, oost, west, zuid.
  The German word is Nachrichten. Which is very far from Nord Ost Süd West.

Kendrick killed it, who gives a shit what haters think.
- I am not even a fan and I found the show enjoyable.
- Taking shots at Drake when Trump is there seems kinda petty tho.
  
  shots taken at trump:
  "you picked the wrong man"
  samual l jackson's uncle sam persona
  the great american game framing of the performance
  the american flag being assembled from black workers
  performing DNA
  the fact that almost every single one of k.dot's criticisms of drake can be leveled at trump as well
  squid game imagery
  member of his crew flying sudanese and palestinian flags
  
  Hardly shots at Drake, that victory lap already happened at the grammys. Just giving ppl what they want. Really though was bigger than that, he brought black uncle sam lmao
  
  Dude used one of the largest platforms available to cook that beef. Agree, def petty.
- I enjoy kendrick and found the SB entertaining, but I can see where people can say it was a fine performance. Certainly nowhere close to worst of all time though

Right-wing commentators Eric Daugherty and Benny Johnson took their criticism to the extreme, describing the performance as “Black nationalist" and calling Lamar a “mumbling pagan Satanic cultist”.
This would only make me want to see it if I hadn’t already lol
- Can you even be both pagan and Satanic?
  "He's a mumbling pagan, Satanic, Jewish, Mexican, Socialist, Antifa, Chinese..." Beyond all the social abuses, I hate MAGA and right-wing pundits because they've robbed words of meaning, on a scale that forces adjustment unlike anything else.
  
  Having grown up strictly Catholic I can tell you it's because they view the world extremely binary black and white. Either you're a Christian, or you're "led astray by Satan's lies", so literally everything else is Satanism.
  To a Catholic even a Protestant could be considered a Satanist.
  
  Can you even be both pagan and Satanic?
  Only in the eyes of people incapable of rational thought.
  They are fundamentally completely different religions, and paganism is much much older.
  
  He can be if you don’t know what a dictionary is and you get revenue by being divisive. The more charged the language, the higher the revenue gets.
- And Kendrick Lamar is famously Christian and makes references to God frequently in his lyrics. Although, I doubt they consider the black church “Christian” since prosperity gospel megachurch bullshit strays so far from Christ that they probably can’t recognize an actual Christian any better than they can recognize a fire beat.
  
  Prosperity gospel is by no means a white only thing. Unless he’s gone into detail about the church he attends you can’t know what version of Christianity he is part of.

If your entire personality, beliefs, reactions, actions, debates, arguments and statements are all based on anger .... at one point nothing in this world will make you happy and you'll just be angry at everyone and everything.
Stay mad America .... we can't help you any more.
- That Star Trek quote about and becoming comfortable like a leather glove still rings true
  When one has been angry for a very long time, one gets used to it. And it becomes comfortable, like... like old leather. And finally... becomes so familiar that one can't ever remember feeling any other way.
  
  comfortable, like... like old leather.
  
  Quote from Captain Jean Luc Picard from Star Trek .... wow, I've watched so much Star Trek in my life that stuff like this is probably ingrained in memory without me knowing it at this point. I watched all of TNG years ago and honestly, I don't remember much and hope to rewatch all of it again some day because of writing like this. Thanks for sharing this.
  
  Mans was very angry at the Borg in First Contact.
- You were helping? Huh, and well, to take a note from Kendrick: Damn.

The opening was propaganda and the ads were propaganda. What do they have to complain about?
- Yeah, I couldn't hear what they were singing though.

I’m just mad he didn’t say the word “pedophile”
- Honestly, I thought the nod early in the performance was all we were gonna get. I didn't think he was going to do ANY of that specific song. The fact the only thing censored was the word pedophile just makes more people that don't know what's up want to look it up.
  
  It definitely wasn’t the only censored word. Kendrick skipped more than a few words overall. But it was far and away the most obvious one
- can't say that on tv!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
  
  I assumed it was because of the lawsuit that is already pending. I don’t think “pedophile” is a censored word

Well of course.
The host and musical guests were black.
Kendrick calls out pedophiles.
They can't have either of those obviously.

Also, it's wild just how unpopular NFL is on Lemmy - there's just not a whole of discussions at all, even about the halftime show.
- Well considering a lot of the discussion on here is around tech and specifically Linux that doesn't surprise me. Very online tech people usually aren't that interested in sports.
  
  Did you see that ludicrous display last night?
- Fun fact: unpopular is not antonym to popular.
  Unpopular implies active dislike or hate. Antonym to popular is "not popular", which also includes stuff that is not actively hated, but simply ignored.
  
  Yeah, nah buddy
  
  Your description makes unpopular the antonym to popular.
- Because it’s American capitalism 💸💰and jingoism 🛫🇺🇸💣 at it’s finest.
  
  thank you for the little pictures, now i understand :)
- i flipped the game on for a bit. one play, two commercials. i was done.
  
  I searched "Superbowl 2025" and just refreshed that result every so often. Zero commercials, and the score and quarter time was up to date.
- As an Eagles fan, I fucking loved that shit. But I can understand why Chiefs fans would have not enjoyed it, and everyone else would have been bored.
  Kendrick fucking killed it, though. That was a great halftime show.
- Sports is boring. The games are vaguely entertaining if you're actually playing them, but watching? Washing dishes is more engaging.
  Hell, CSPAN is a better watch.
  
  Im glad you have your opinion but I respectfully disagree. Sports can be a good time to watch for certain people, but dont rag on it just because its not your cup of tea.
- John Cleese said it best, the only imaginative part of american football are the ad breaks.
  Watch rugby.
- I always preferred CFL rules tbh
  
  Congo has football!?
  
  me too. it is a much more entertaining game.
- Lemmy users only like round footballs, because it allows them to sneer at Americans for having a differences in their dialect.
- At the best of times, this place reeks of "sportsball" stupidity which covers the football aspect.
  And I would be shocked if we had even 5% black representation which nukes the interest in tuning in for Kendrick alone.
  
  Way to show your racism on your sleeve

Bitches can stay mad.

"Melts down", like when a nuclear reactor goes critical, isn't the apt descriptor for this response.
It was more like, "Maga generally disliked or was otherwise uninterested in the super bowl halftime performance".

https://lemmy.world/post/25381892

Somewhere along the way, complaining about something you don't like, while that thing is occurring, became a meltdown. Personally, if you aren't screaming, jumping up and down, flailing your arms like a maniac, or in the least doing that thing where you force blood into your head and your face gets all blood flushed and if you keep doing it you pass out and crumble like a building made of peanut brittle, unless you did atleast one of those then you aren't melting down... But based off constant headlines, Complaining about something is a meltdown, then I have constant melt downs, and I really don't know what it is when I've had what I called a meltdown, but apparently is now much worse than what is defined as a meltdown. I have a meltdown when I hit every red light(I complain annoyingly about it), I have a meltdown when I buy diet instead of sugar soda, but I honestly don't know what it's called now when my face gets flushed, I start flailingy arms in the air, hollering up and down for whichever deity will bring down holy fire upon the video game that I just died for the 100th time for the same boss... Is that now a psychotic episode? Cuz I always thought psychotic episodes you were psychotic, and melt down you lost your composure, but complaining is a meltdown, so is losing your composure now going psychotic which used to be having a meltdown?
- Stfu gang

Did anyone else notice how weirdly X it was? Sure, "Gen X" but also dancing in the X, and the hand to heart then out to wave gestures. Really felt like trying to downplay what Elon did versus highlighting it for what it was. The whole performance was weird in that way, and I wish he would have make a stronger point with the stage he was given or something.
- The X, O, square, triangle set was probably a reference to squid games, a show with a strong anti-oligarchy motif. The show had repeated American imagery like Samuel L Jackson and the flag. If you interpret thr lyrics at those points, the show was definitively anti-establishment. If you interpreted it any other way, I suggest you watch it again.
  
  One theme was that Kendrick’s life is like a video game so I’m pretty sure it was just the PlayStation buttons.
  In a way, there were two themes: Kendrick rapping about his life while the choreography and Samuel Jackson as Uncle Sam making a statement that “The flag and America don’t belong to fascists.” (I guess a third theme was “Fuck Drake” but he couldn’t just not play the biggest song of the year that just won 5 Grammy Awards and has over a billion plays on Spotify.)
  I’m probably reading too much into it — if that’s even possible with Kendrick — but a lot of what he criticizes Drake about applies equally to Trump. “Certified loverboy? Certified pedophile.” “I hear you like 'em young / You better never go to cell block one.” Kendrick obviously didn’t know Trump would be there when they planned the show but even if it was unintentional, I like that Trump and his ilk got to find out one of the most popular artists in America won a rap battle by mocking an adult for fucking teenagers.
  
  It's about the lowest common denominator of viewship. I really doubt they understand that kind of symbolism or depth. IMO at the lowest level is the focus of cinematography, imagery, which really didn't feel impactful. Just disappointed how placated it felt, even as the performance as a whole was phenomenal.