Philadelphia Story: Kendrick, SZA, and The Human Flag

Stuck in Philly, I gave in and watched the halftime show. As I did, I felt something breaking inside: The humbling power of grief. We can resist it all we want, but it's the only way through.

It was the flag that did it.

I wasn’t prepared to be touched by a Super Bowl halftime show—least of all in a room full of strangers, far from home. But that Sunday in Philadelphia, I felt something coming undone. As that great human flag dissolved and came together, dissolved and came together, I finally allowed the grief of this moment to penetrate me. And I felt grateful, of all things, to have found punk.

I’d been dancing with my punk lineage for weeks, wondering what it’d be like being back on home turf. It had been an emotional journey already. Punks are natural feelers. Never mind the tough exteriors and the blazing guitars; we’re the sensitives, the ones who peeked behind the curtain and saw what we weren’t supposed to. And now that the systems we railed so long against finally appear to be crumbling, I think we just might know what to do next.

When I arrived in Philadelphia, the city looked roached.

From the moment I stepped off the train, I was impressed—if that’s the word—by the sheer volume of bodily fluids coating the walls and floors of the station. Unbelievably, stepping outside to the SEPTA light rail (even the name sounds like a disease!) only made it worse. The tram was nearly half an hour late, but after a few stops jammed into the filthy car—where many of my fellow passengers seemed to be in active crisis—I got off early and took my chances on foot. Just a few weeks into Trump II, I could hardly lay the blame at the administration’s feet. But it was sobering, and I shuddered to think what four more years might bring.

You may be wondering why I’d booked my Philadelphia appearance on Super Bowl Sunday. But when I’d scheduled the talk with Threshold Collective—a group that provides critical care to those facing life-ending or life-limiting diagnoses—the playoffs hadn’t even happened. Now that I’d agreed to go through with it, I had to laugh: As I sat and chatted with Threshold’s co-founders, Rebecca and Catherine, it quickly became clear that no one—literally, no one!—was coming to the event. Instead we talked and bonded, and then I tagged along to a Super Bowl party a few blocks away. As we walked through the darkening streets, Catherine gave me some context on the city’s dilapidated mass transit lines.

“Yeah, it’s awful,” she said, dodging potholes and piles of refuse dotting the sidewalk. “It’s really gone downhill in the last years; it’s become a kind of holding tank for people in addiction and crisis. It’s really, really sad.” When I mentioned how freaked out everyone in D.C. seemed, she nodded. “Philly relies on a lot of government checks too,” she said. “It’s hard to imagine what this”—the de facto federal shutdown—“is going to do here.”

We’d arrived at a sort of walled compound. As blasted as the streets outside seemed, inside was all warmth. Plates and platters lined the long kitchen counter, and I grabbed myself a bowl of pozole, found a seat at the giant dining table, and took stock.

Maybe two dozen figures from the neighborhood had gathered, people of seemingly every skin tone and accent and backstory. I chatted with a young Nigerian designer named Délé—taken by his winning smile and a woman from Andalusia named Marta. The mood was light, mostly, but the talk was blunt, too. Perhaps because the two had been born into such different political expectations than I had, there was no mincing of words. “It’s wild,” said Marta. “I mean, I grew up under Franco (Spain’s military dictator until 1975). I had no idea it could happen here.”

The hosts had wandered over. Paul—tall and stoop-shouldered behind a Moses-like beard—once played in Philly punk bands. “That photo of H.R. soaring above the crowd on the inside of I Against I? I’m in that shot!” he told me with quiet pride.” His partner, Lisa, had the purposeful bearing of the community activist and organizer she is—she’d also made the delicious soup. She sat down across from me, pausing for just a moment between the endless stirrings and setting out of platters.

When I asked how she was doing, she sighed. “It’s rough,” she said. “The last years here have been hard. I’m from West Virginia, where there was this live-and-let-live Methodist world for generations. But Bush II changed all that. They politicized all those little churches. Now I literally don’t recognize the place I came from.”

She paused to look around the room.

“I’m exhausted,” she said. “We all are.”

A blast of music erupted from the flat-screen TV against the far wall. I’d barely been tracking the game, but this was the halftime show. I gave into my curiosity and wandered over. The lights went down, out came the black Buick, and there he was, crouching on the hood: Kendrick Lamar, all 5’ 5” of him.

“Damn!” laughed Barry, towering a full head above me, coal-black skin catching the red, white, and blue lights. “Guess I’ll have to break out my boot cuts now, too!”

I don’t follow Lamar—though I admire him—but I felt swept up in the drama of the moment. The visuals, the precision of his delivery, all of it. And, of course, SZA. (I mean, come on.) But it was the flag that did it: As the giant banner of Black faces dissolved and reformed, over and over, I was surprised to feel tears forming in the corners of my eyes. Here, in a city that’s over one-third Black—also described as “the poorest big city in America”—the viciousness of the people we’ve voted into power felt personal and palpable. I thought back to one of my first memories of Philadelphia—the infamous MOVE bombing of 1985, when police dropped explosives on a house occupied by an armed militant group and then stood by as flames engulfed the neighborhood. Eleven people lost their lives, 61 homes were destroyed, and 250 people were left homeless. That was a lifetime ago, and yet it’s hard to feel like anything’s changed—except for the worse.

As the human flag formed and reformed, I felt myself fighting my tears—just like I always do. And then, with a gentle tug of relief, I set them free. I knew enough not to cling to false hopes, the promise that anyone’s coming to save us. I don’t have faith in the courts or the rule of law; my own family’s experience of fascism and socialism disabused me of that. What we’re being asked to feel is a bone-deep grief, the kind we punks have always known gives art and music its heartfelt edge. And while I doubt Kendrick would describe his art as “punk,” he’d touched a live wire, and I felt grateful. Walking back to my bunk for the night, I felt better than I had in weeks.

Later, it was a different music playing in my head: Portland’s quintessential punk band, Wipers.

I’ve always been fascinated by punk’s messianic edge, by slightly unhinged seers like Wipers’ mainspring Greg Sage. Sage is, objectively, too much: His lyrics drip with grievance and bone-deep moroseness. No wonder he was such a major influence on another Northwest kid: Kurt Cobain, who begged Sage to tour with Nirvana when the latter were arguably the hottest band on the planet (Sage refused).

Wipers made a number of great records, but the song stuck in my head was arguably their high point: Youth of America, written 45 years ago but a prescient glimpse into our dystopian present. “Rich get richer,” Sage growls. “Would you wanna be born here again? I don’t want to be born here again.” It’s a genuinely unsettling song—all 10 minutes 27 seconds of it—and I had to steel myself before putting it on.

But I’d totally forgotten what Sage sings at the end, after a churning, fractal guitar freakout. For all his high drama and his self-absorption, Sage sings the simplest—and maybe the truest—line any punk ever has regarding this great nation of ours. What he sings is:

It is time we rectify this now.

We’ve got to feel it now.

Got to feel it now, now, now.

He doesn’t sing “burn it down” or “smash it up” or even “fuck Ronald Reagan.” All he’s asking us to do is to feel the pent-up centuries of grief, to touch on all the glaring inequities of this big, beautiful, fucked-up country of ours.

Here’s the thing: Grief only feels impossible until it’s felt. Then it becomes something else: A portal; an invitation; maybe even something approaching a prayer. That’s what I felt watching Kendrick and SZA and the dancers express what words hadn’t been able to. It’s how I feel listening to Wipers and Bad Brains and all the other edge-walkers, the ones pushed to the margins for telling the truth.

Maybe it’s too late. Maybe the Great Harvesting taking place in Washington right now really is the end of America. And maybe feeling those painful feelings won’t change a thing—but I’m pretty sure it will. And I know this: Until we resolve to face the painful, walled-off feelings about the trouble we’ve landed ourselves in none of this is ever going to change.

We’ve got to feel this now.