College football's annual championship game last night certainly lived up to its reputation for providing great competition and thrilling finishes as Alabama rallied from a 13-point deficit to defeat Georgia in overtime. Except for a substandard halftime program, ESPN's broadcast focused on football, and there was no real evidence of the local Atlanta NAACP's protest over President Trump's presence at the game.
For ESPN's blog, The Undefeated, the exciting game and President Trump's appearance at the game took a back seat to the halftime show, when rapper Kendrick Lamar created a so-called historic cultural moment.
A Grammy Award winner, Lamar has mocked President Trump in some of his songs and, in his "God is Gangsta" video, he used the n-word, the f-word and vented a lot of hate. He didn't do that last night, but during his short, history-making time on stage he showed America that he knows where his crotch is, repeatedly grabbing it. Mark Ngugi, an amateur music producer, says "there isn't really much explanation as to why the left hand would gravitate to the crotch, but it's a method of giving balance and stabilizing your flow. Plus it looks cool." In the forum Huskermax this morning, HuttoHusker wrote, "Him grabbing his crotch constantly was special."
Is Paul McCartney available to rescue college football's 2019 championship game halftime show, as he did for the Super Bowl the year after Janet Jackson's "wardrobe malfunction"?
These fans of crotch-grabbing rappers are on the same page with Clinton Yates, senior blogger at The Undefeated, who declared "Kendrick Lamar Makes History at CFP National Championship." Yates said the notable thing about Lamar's appearance wasn't about being on national television or the fact that it came on a night when President Trump was present and showed he didn't know the words to the Star Spangled Banner. It was a chance to create a beautiful black cultural moment:
"It was that during the most important game of the year, in a sport largely controlled by white men, while young black men risk life and limb for no pay, a rapper from Compton, California, who often tells tales of revolution and resistance, was tapped to entertain the nation, and it all made sense. While Georgia and Alabama, two states with no shortage of history in the antebellum South and steeped in football tradition, battled it out on the field, a West Coaster dressed in a parka was easily the star of the show."
Yates sees Lamar's show as an important milestone in recent history in line with:
"President Barack Obama. Police brutality and the murders of unarmed black people becoming what felt like nightly appearances on the national news. A non-insignificant resurfacing of a movement to compensate college athletes for their work. A Beyoncé Super Bowl halftime show that many people took offense to, as an ode to the Black Panther Party. A massive 'recorrect' by America in electing a reality show star to the White House. None of us had any reason to believe that King Kenny, or anyone like him, would grace a stage like this, in this setting, in the near future. Except for the people who made it happen."
To rap lovers like Yates, the organizers of the event set out to "make it the hottest stage in the game." And he concluded, "They’re off to a great start." LOL! Two years ago, Public Policy Polling conducted a survey revealing rap had a 19-percent favorability rating compared to 68 percent unfavorable. If this was an attempt to please a small portion of Americans, it succeeded.
But who cares about what Americans like or don't like? It was more important for Lamar to "infiltrate one of the oldest practices in the book," Yates notes:
"To see it go down on a such a grand stage is a real testament to who Lamar has grown to become. It’s easy to call Lamar transcendent. But, like so many others who grew out of their original solitary genres as artists to become megastars, he’s in fact black as hell.
"On the night in which he could have made a scene and directed the ire of so many fans of his in the direction of the commander-in-chief, or made an obvious political statement with everyone watching, he didn’t. Because he didn’t have to. His existence in that space alone was enough of a statement, and just being himself was plenty. He didn’t have to allow himself to be defined by the moment — he defined it himself. Which is what he does and is exactly why even when the leader of the free world is right next door, Lamar comes out on top."
Despite Yates' fawning adulation of King Kenny, many people on social media accused the rapper of lip syncing. Someone who claims to have been associated with the halftime show said TV viewers saw a pre-recorded performance.
