Fox News Host ‘Didn’t Get’ Kendrick Lamar’s Super Bowl Halftime Show, And, Apparently, We’re Supposed To Care
Source: Kara Durrette / Getty
Look, whether you enjoyed Kendrick Lamar’s performance during the Super Bowl LIX halftime show or not, you have to admit that when K-Dot said, “You can’t fake influence,” he was proven right in the aftermath of his show. You might have noticed that, for the last three days, your news feed has been virtually all Kendrick all the time, with Black people and other Hip-Hop fans debating how good the 13-minute set was or wasn’t, as well as how deep the messaging was or wasn’t, and white people — well — for the most part, they just seem to be angry that they were not the target audience for the show.
This brings us to a particularly salty Fox News host who doesn’t understand why the 22 Grammy winner is so popular.
Jeanine Pirro, host of Fox News’ The Five, “didn’t get” Lamar’s performance, and, for whatever reason, she used her platform as a “journalist” to convey it, because, in her mind, salty whites being salty and white over Black culture is “news.”
From HuffPost:
“I want to talk about the halftime show,” Pirro said in a clip obtained by Mediaite. “Now, I got to tell you, what a nightmare. I kept sitting there saying, ‘You know, maybe I just don’t get this guy.’”
She continued, “Then I find out there’s this subplot, there’s this drama with Drake. And, you know, he can do a concert. This guy, Ken, um, uh, Kendall Lamar.”
“Kendrick,” Pirro’s co-host Jessica Tarlov interjected.But Pirro kept going without correcting her misidentification.
“And he won all these Grammars,” Pirro said, referring to the “Alright” rapper’s 22 Grammys, five of which he won earlier this month — and eliciting giggles from her fellow panelists for butchering the pronunciation of the prestigious award show.
“But, you know, we had Usher. We had The Weeknd, we had Beyoncé, and we had Rihanna. I mean, we had performers,” Pirro added. “I don’t know what the hell this guy was doing, but I didn’t get it.”
First of all, I don’t know why Pirro is even putting Beyoncé and Rihanna’s names in her mouth as if white conservatives didn’t largely react to both recording artists’ halftime shows the same way they’re reacting to Kendrick’s. Remember when President Donald Trump called Rihanna’s performance an “epic fail” just after her set was finished? In Beyoncé’s case, you don’t even have to go back that far. Less than two weeks ago, white country music fans across the nation were having a MAGA meltdown over the singer’s album “Cowboy Carter” winning the Grammy award for Best Country Album of the Year.
At the end of the day, Pirro had already answered her own concerns the second she said, “I didn’t get it.”
At some point, white people are just going to have to get used to no longer being the default target audience for everything that is mainstream.
Black people have spend generation after generation experiencing the systemic exclusion that white audiences are barely experiencing a fraction of now.
Get over it, because we’re not going back!
See the reactions to Lamar’s halftime performance below:
