It's true, the halftime show is about the spectacle, the music, the star-power and the ability to keep people at the screen to see the high-cost commercials shown either side of it.

It's not a political rally, despite Beyonce's powerful statement on the rights of the oppressed during her performance of Formation last year.

But when Lady Gaga's core group of fans are as self-identified and eulogised by her as being the marginalised and ostracised, the people of colour and other orientation – not to mention that she is the descendent of an immigrant family who know what corporate fascism is all about – can she really put on a show without acknowledging that?

Yes. And sort of no.

Gaga began the 12-minute segment from atop the stadium quoting from God Bless America, Irving Berlin's simplistic patriotic moment of "land that I love, stand beside her and guide her through the night with the light from above". But she also brought in lines from Woody Guthrie's more defiant song of resistance This Land Is Your Land, with its reminder to the excluded that "this land was made for you and me".

Once Gaga in a harness dropped from the sky to the ground, initially on what might be a chrome-gloss version of a Mad Max landscape, and thereafter in a series of brightly designed, dance-focused, massed movement sets, the message was, at best, in the medium.

As she danced, changed outfits, played keytar and climbed – without losing breath or her place – Gaga left what commentary could be discerned to the text of her songs and the subtext of her presence. She told the millions watching that she was "here to make you feel good".

As she told the New York Times prior to the show, what comments she would make would be those she's always made, in her songs: "I believe in a passion for inclusion. I believe in the spirit of equality, and that the spirit of this country is one of love and compassion and kindness."

So there were "there's nothing wrong with loving who you are" and "don't be a drag, be a queen" in the unofficial LGBTI anthem Born This Way. There was the more oblique or arguable throw to a certain president in "you're giving me a million reasons to let you go… but baby I just need one good one to stay," from Million Reasons.

And maybe more credibly, if still tenuously, there was the suggestion that the 46 per cent who voted for Donald Trump could be caught in a Bad Romance: "I want your ugly, I want your disease/I want your everything as long as it's free."

But it hardly qualified as a roasting. Still the silver wrapping of the spectacle was shiny.

And before anyone complains, it's worth remembering that Beyoncé was not last year's headliner, rather a guest of the charitable, Meat Free Monday band Coldplay.