You cannot say that in the $%@! Super Bowl halftime show!

If Kendrick Lamar plays his Drake diss track “Not Like Us” during Sunday’s Super Bowl halftime show – and why wouldn’t he? It just won five Grammys – then he’ll have to tone it way down to avoid running afoul of Federal Communications Commission standards.

This particular salvo in the long-running feud between rappers is 919 words long, and 38 of them probably wouldn’t fly on a family-friendly network broadcast. In addition to salty language, as well as including the n-word, the song also makes a disparaging suggestion about Drake. (The lyrics are the subject of a defamation suit.)

If Lamar opts to scrub a few key words and phrases from the song that has become an L.A.-power anthem, it wouldn’t be his first go-round with self-censorship for the sake of network television.

Cleaned-up hip-hop at Super Bowl

In 2022, Lamar was invited by Dr. Dre to perform in the 2022 halftime show, along with Snoop Dogg, Mary J. Blige, 50 Cent and Eminem.

Five of the six artists, including Lamar, altered around 100 words and phrases in their songs to be more family-friendly for the 14-minute show. Lamar’s two minutes, during which he sang parts of two songs, accounted for more than half of those changes.

There is no “naughty list” of words and phrases that absolutely must come out of a song, according to Clay Calvert, a nonresident senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute who focuses on broadcast regulations and the First Amendment.

“The FCC basically has three different sets of regulations that it could use to target content: obscenity, indecency and profanity,” he said.

Obscenity is not protected by the First Amendment, but the bar for it is very high and popular artists’ song lyrics rarely if ever cross it. That’s partly because the test for obscenity protects speech if it has serious artistic or political value. Indecency and profanity aren’t allowed on network TV before 10 p.m., but the definitions of those terms “are pretty vague,” Calvert said. “That makes it very problematic, because it’s hard to predict what language the FCC is going to consider to be profane.”

“Hip-hop’s language is intentional, whether poetic, confrontational or coded,” said Joycelyn Wilson, hip-hop studies professor at Georgia Tech, who is currently teaching a course on Lamar’s music. “Excessive censorship can weaken its cultural impact.”

“Censorship decisions aren’t just about language – they reveal what institutions like the NFL and broadcast networks are willing to tolerate in terms of political critique” Wilson said. But criticizing the police “would be protected speech. A political viewpoint about the police is going to be protected” Calvert said.

Even with “the n-word, for instance, the performer can say that it has artistic integrity in the context of a song,” Calvert said. Wilson added, “Language is fundamental to hip-hop’s identity – it is a tool for self-expression, cultural affirmation and political resistance.”

Snoop Dogg said in an interview on Tidal that Jay-Z, who runs the entertainment part of the NFL with his management company Roc Nation, threatened to end the deal before the show over the restrictions. So there is a negotiation about what to say or not say before the show.

What happens if bad word comes out?

It depends. The FCC cannot act before a performance, and it also can’t start a disciplinary process afterward without a complaint from the public. But complaints aren’t rare.

The FCC received 33 complaints after that 2022 show, mostly about the twerking and revealing costumes. It got 222 complaints after the 2012 halftime show when M.I.A. flipped the bird, and the NFL ended up suing the English singer for $16.6 million. No recent spasm of post-Super Bowl outrage comes even close to the 540,000 complaints after the infamous 2004 “wardrobe malfunction” involving Janet Jackson and Justin Timberlake.

The NFL has some reasons to be nervous this year. President Donald Trump will be attending the game, and the NFL announced that it will no longer decorate the field end zones with “End Racism” messaging. On the other hand, Lamar’s song “Alright” became a Black Lives Matter anthem years ago and he has always addressed the realities of Black life in America. Despite that, Wilson does not expect Trump “to balk at Lamar’s presence. In fact, given his history with hip-hop, he may not even perceive it as a direct challenge.”

“Lamar has a way of embedding political critique in layers of symbolism, metaphor and performance choices that often require deeper engagement to fully unpack. Trump – like many others – may very well miss those coded cues,” Wilson notes. “The real question is whether the NFL and its corporate sponsors will allow Lamar the space to include those messages at all, or if the performance will be curated to avoid controversy altogether.”

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Bonnie Berkowitz and Álvaro Valiño contributed to this report.

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