Music as a Language of Politics: When Listening Becomes a Side

There was a time when the Super Bowl halftime show functioned as a shared cultural ritual—imperfect, commercial, often chaotic, but broadly understood as a moment where a fractured nation paused together. This year, that pause fractured further.

What should have been a single cultural moment became two: the official Super Bowl halftime performance, and a parallel counter-event organized by Turning Point USA in response. Two performances. Two audiences. Two interpretations of what counts as “American.” What was once a communal experience has now become a referendum.

This matters not because of who performed, but because of what the moment reveals.

Music—one of humanity’s oldest and most universal forms of communication—has been pulled fully into the political domain. What you listen to is no longer just taste. It is testimony. Alignment. Declaration.

And perhaps most troubling of all: a proxy for belonging.

When Music Becomes a Marker

In the wake of these events, the reaction was swift and familiar. One side accused the other of abandoning American values. The other responded with the same charge. Ironically, both performances centered cultural narratives that have long existed at the margins of American identity—each minority expressions in their own way—yet both were framed as threats to the other.

This is the paradox of the moment.

Different aesthetics. Different histories. Different languages.

Identical weaponization.

Music is no longer being asked to speak. It is being asked to signal.

Instead of listening, we are sorting. Instead of receiving, we are defending. Instead of allowing music to hold complexity, we demand that it confirm our prior conclusions.

When this happens, music ceases to function as art and begins to function as armor.

The Cost of Losing the Ear

Music does something that politics cannot. It allows contradiction to exist without resolution. It carries grief without assigning blame. It communicates across boundaries that language struggles to cross.

That power depends on listening.

Not passive hearing, but active receptivity—the willingness to encounter something unfamiliar without immediately translating it into threat or validation. Listening is how we recognize the humanity of someone whose life, culture, or story does not mirror our own.

When listening collapses, music is reduced to noise.

When music is reduced to noise, culture becomes brittle.

When culture becomes brittle, it fractures under pressure.

This is not merely an artistic concern. It is a human one.

To strip music of its capacity to be received is to strip people of their capacity to be known.

A Lament—and a Way Forward

It is worth lamenting that we have arrived at a point in American cultural history where even music—once a refuge from ideological warfare—has become a battleground. That a shared ritual now requires a side. That listening itself feels optional.

But lament is not resignation.

If we are willing to pause—truly pause—and listen beneath the slogans, the outrage, the rehearsed talking points, there is still something human sounding underneath. There is still breath. Still memory. Still longing. Still song.

The path forward does not require agreement. It requires attention.

Because when listening dies, our humanity erodes. And when humanity erodes, culture no longer forms—it disintegrates.

If we are to recover anything sacred in this moment, it will not be through louder arguments or better branding—but through the quiet, difficult, and necessary act of listening again.

Not to win.

Not to classify.

But to remember what it means to hear another human being.