What happens when a halftime show becomes more than just a performance? When an artist refuses to be confined by the expectations of entertainment and instead transforms the moment into an intellectual intervention?

Kendrick Lamar didn’t just perform—he dismantled, reconstructed, and redefined what it means to occupy the world’s biggest stage. From the deliberate subversion of spectacle to the strategic deployment of silence, every movement, every note, and every disruption carried layers of meaning beyond the music itself.

Is entertainment just another apparatus of control?

This episode explores how Lamar’s performance can be understood through the lens of Foucault’s power structures, Deleuze’s concept of disruption, and Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence. We break down how his choices—his refusal to conform, his engagement with historical memory, his manipulation of expectation—mirror deeper philosophical inquiries into control, agency, and subversion.

📖 Books for Further Reading

📖 Discipline and Punish – Michel Foucault

📖 Difference and Repetition – Gilles Deleuze

📖 The Birth of Tragedy – Friedrich Nietzsche

📖 The Society of the Spectacle – Guy Debord

📖 Specters of Marx – Jacques Derrida

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Deleuze’s Theories of Subversion in Art

The Philosophy of Absence and Presence

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