"There's a time in life for Hoagy Carmichael. There's a time in life for Claude Debussy. There's a time in life for Jerry Lee Lewis. There's a time in life for Destiny's Child. All these things have their moment." ~Elvis Costello
From the start, Kendrick Lamar wanted to turn his life into a video game for his big Super Bowl halftime show. The team tasked with doing that knew what to do—right down to sourcing a vintage GNX.
Photograph: Darrell Jackson
(via Wired) by Angela Watercutter
Kendrick Lamar wanted a GNX. Not the one from the cover of his new album of the same name. One that could be gutted and turned into a “clown car” for his Super Bowl LIX halftime show. That’s how Shelley Rodgers, the show’s art director, tells it. Rodgers has solved such big-stage problems for everyone from Beyoncé to Lady Gaga; she won an Emmy for her work on Rihanna’s halftime show in 2023. A car wasn’t a huge deal, but she still needed to find one. They couldn’t borrow Lamar’s own Buick Grand National because they’d kind of need to destroy it to pull off the visual trick.
“That car was not easy to find, especially since he dropped his album,” Rodgers says. “We could have just used his, but I don’t know that he would’ve liked it after.”
Erik Eastland from All Access, the company responsible for fabricating the stage for Sunday’s show, was the one who found what Lamar wanted. Eastland and his team located the GNX at a mom-and-pop car lot in Riverside, California, after a thorough search and at least one near mishap…
Kendrick Lamar performs onstage during Apple Music Super Bowl LIX Halftime Show at Caesars Superdome on February 09, 2025 in New Orleans, Louisiana. Gregory Shamus—Getty Images
(via Time) By Andrew R. Chow
When the NFL announced Kendrick Lamar as the Super Bowl halftime show performer in September, both his critics and fans expressed doubt that he would be up for the job. To naysayers, Lamar was too verbose, too political, too obscure for pop music’s biggest stage, which has typically featured culturally safe icons belting universally beloved anthems to the stadium rafters. Some instead clamored for New Orleans’s own Lil Wayne, a living embodiment of the raucous creativity and bacchanalia of the city hosting Super Bowl LIX.
Conversely, Lamar’s fans worried that the narrow confines of the televised gig would require him to compromise his artistry; that even the act of him performing on such a corporate stage was a sign of him selling out or renouncing his activist, anti-establishment roots. There seemed to be no way that Lamar could both win over the masses yearning for spectacle and his diehards hoping for a thunderbolt of Pulitzer-level genius.
But Lamar’s superpower has long been his unique ability to navigate this exact tension between message and reach: to tell stories of American pain and oppression without coming off as preachy; to challenge audiences lyrically and musically while widening his listenership. And on Sunday, this balancing act was on full display. Lamar delivered a Super Bowl performance wholly unlike any other before it, in which the aim was not to summon nostalgia or comfort but to demand full attention and active listening from his audience.
What Lamar lacked in singalongs, he made up for in narrative, visual stagecraft, and sly political commentary—while also slamming the casket on his rap feud with Drake for good. “The revolution ‘bout to be televised,” he warned his audience at the top of the show. “You picked the right time, but the wrong guy.”
Three days had passed since the 2024 presidential election and, like millions of other Americans, Devo co-founder/frontman Mark Mothersbaugh was baffled by the outcome. One of the masterminds behind the Postcards for Democracy art project, Mothersbaugh has been deeply interested in politics since the 1970s. Devo itself is short for “de-evolution,” the idea that mankind has stopped progressing and is instead now regressing.
With Donald Trump headed back to the White House, for half of the country it’s difficult to argue otherwise. But for now, Mothersbaugh is doing his best to embrace an alternate perspective.
“I’m just impressed with how many people could be attracted to the president that’s elected now,” Mothersbaugh tells SPIN with a sense of bewilderment. “He’s going to be our president next year. I’m just impressed because his techniques all seem like warning signs of reasons why not to honor him.
“I’m curious to see where it goes because over half the country seems to be approving. Maybe this is a year I learn something that I didn’t know before. I guess it’ll be interesting to see which things he was telling the truth about and which things he was lying about.”
Postcards for Democracy, launched alongside artist Beatie Wolfe in 2020, carries on Mothersbaugh’s tradition of making postcard art, something he did even before the early days of Devo. In fact, it was a postcard that brought Devo bassist Gerald “Jerry” Casale and Mothersbaugh together while studying art at Kent State University…
I recently saw A Complete Unknown. Bob Dylan is one of my favorite artists, and I actually got to meet and work with Pete Seeger (in fact I visited his log cabin that Dylan spends the night in early in the film, and I can attest that they got those details right) so I was excited to see those two icons acknowledged in our current popular culture and introduced to a new generation. Judging from reactions to the film on social media, the movie was a resounding success on that front (though Joan Baez seems to be the artist depicted in the film who’s really resonating with the younger generation.)
There is no such thing as a perfect biopic that will satisfy both the people who know the history going in and those for whom the film acts as an introduction to the subject. I knew the film would take liberties, and that my reaction would be colored by my own feeling of connection to the period and milieu it depicts. The movie opens in 1961, the year Dylan arrived in New York at age 19, and also the year I was born on Long Island approximately 35 miles east of Greenwich Village. 31 years later I moved to New York and I played at some of the same clubs Dylan played in and got to meet icons like Pete, and Alan Lomax, and Theodore Bikel. I figured that’s the world I would be obsessed with upon exiting the film.
But instead I left the film thinking about another artist I am obsessed with but had never previously associated with this universe: Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.
Actually I thought about TWO Mozarts: the real one and the one dreamed up by the demented Antonio Salieri in Peter Shaffer’s play and screenplay Amadeus.
Both Amadeus and A Complete Unknown are about immature genius savants who produce art that contains a deep well of wisdom and humanity completely lacking in their social personalities. The main characters are almost supporting players in their own stories, because what they’re really about are the people who try to connect with them but just can’t make sense of the profound disconnect between the sublime music and the selfish brats that produced it.
Bob Dylan’s journey from provincial Minnesota to exciting New York is remarkably similar to Mozart’s escaping Salzburg for Vienna. They were both young, hungry, probably on the neurodivergent spectrum, had a justified confidence in their own abilities that made them both impatient with those who didn’t “get” them and distrustful of those who did, craving attention but unwilling to follow the established protocols necessary to cultivate their reputation and status within the industry – though they intuited that their rebelliousness actually helped their celebrity status even as it aggravated those managing their careers…
In 1996 Smithsonian Folkways Recordings released That’s Why We’re Marching, a collection, mostly, of folk songs dating from the first half of the 1940’s.
Among the album’s trove of rare and seldom heard songs of both pro- and anti-war sentiment is one memorable spoken-word track: a story by Vincent “Jimmy” Longhi about his friend, a folk singer by the name of Woodrow Wilson Guthrie–better known to the world as Woody.
Attorney, playwright and author Longhi’s story is also recounted in his book Woody, Cisco, and Me: Seamen Three in the Merchant Marine, which chronicles his time traveling with convoys of troops during the Battle of the Atlantic with Guthrie and folk singer Cisco Houston.
The Guthrie song referenced in the story in its entirety:
…and another reminiscence from Longhi about the time their ship struck a mine in the Mediterranean, killing one person aboard:
Every Moment Has A Song 