Recording artist The Weeknd speaks at the halftime show press conference ahead of the Super Bowl 55 football game, on Feb. 4, 2021, in Tampa, Fla.Perry Knotts/USA TODAY Sports via Reuters
For the first 25 years, nobody bothered to try doing anything cool with the Super Bowl halftime show.
It was a steady collection of marching bands, inspirational pop acts with a strong Sesame Street vibe and geriatrics looking for publicity. Eventually, the NFL noticed that it began bleeding viewers as soon as the football stopped and Up With People took over.
The eureka moment arrived in 1993. The league hired Michael Jackson – somewhere between his Bad days and his bad days – to perform.
Apparently, Jackson didn’t quite understand how the Super Bowl worked. Months before it was played, he kept asking who’d be in it. But he got the fact that it was broadcast live in more than 100 countries.
That year, competing networks had grown so bold that they’d begun counter-programming the halftime show. Jackson blew them out of the water. For the first time, ratings jumped during halftime. This was the point at which football became a bookend around the world’s biggest annual concert.
If you are a certain type of sports fan, it is imperative you treat Super Bowl halftime like a carnival act. They’re ruining the purity of the game, man.
Do I want to see Adam Levine take his shirt off? Nobody asked me if I wanted to see Adam Levine, full stop. I’m not totally clear on who Adam Levine is, and I like it that way. So, no. No, I don’t.
But this bleeding together of the kitschiest acts with the kitschiest sport has become the point. When people ask me my clearest memory of covering Super Bowls, it isn’t football. When you’re watching and writing it live, the football all seems the same. The thing I can picture most perfectly in my mind’s eye is Beyoncé.
The week before the Super Bowl goes on forever and ever. It takes two days to run through every player on either team saying the same things in the same rote tone using the same clichés. Then are you left to the poverty of your own journalistic imagination.
The NFL understands this, and so rams the week full of news conferences. The halftime act’s presser is a particular highlight.
On one side, you have a subject who would rather chew glass than speak off the cuff to unvetted journalists asking questions that have not been preapproved. On the other, you have a bunch of hungover hacks who are only here to laugh at everyone else, but mostly because they heard there would be sandwiches.
Beyoncé performed in 2013 in New Orleans at Super Bowl XLVII. Up until that point, the halftime act tended to be the sort you’d hear on classic radio – Springsteen, Madonna, the Rolling Stones. All big acts, but not particularly relevant to the moment.
Beyoncé was a level up. She was still just entering the midst of her stardom.
There was also a news hook to this presser. A minor kerfuffle broke out when it had been revealed Beyoncé lip synched the anthem at Barack Obama’s second inauguration, held a few weeks earlier. Beyoncé had not yet publicly addressed the issue.
That’s how blessed the world was then. Lip synching at the Capitol led to a crisis of faith in America.
My first impression of Beyoncé as she walked into the room was that she is big. Like, Amazonian. She looks like a human after God’s made some major design improvements.
She mounted the dais and said, “Please rise.”
Everyone got up. Then she sang the anthem to a room full of shlubby middle-aged men. The two on either side of me put their hands on their hearts.
You know how Beyoncé sounds good on the radio? Beyoncé-singing-in-person makes Beyoncé-singing-on-the-radio sound like machine noise. Her voice is so powerful and true, it makes you want to weep in appreciation for what the species is capable of.
Then she took questions. I don’t remember that part.
A couple of days later, Beyoncé performed. I also don’t remember that part because I was seated so far away from the stage, it could just as well have been Betty White up there gyrating. It was 15 minutes of being hit with pyrotechnics and a muddy wall of sound.
You couldn’t escape the chasm between what this performer was capable of, and what she was there to sell.
The halftime act isn’t about music. Instead, it’s a celebration of celebrity and consumerism. If the Super Bowl is the fullest expression of America’s self-image aimed at itself, the halftime show is the outreach portion of it.
For a few minutes once a year, the United States reasserts its cultural primacy in the world. You know how they talk about America’s decline? I’ll believe it’s happening when no one talks about the halftime act.
This year, the Super Bowl’s producers will extend the ambition of their adventures in capitalism. The performer is Toronto’s Abel Tesfaye, better known as The Weeknd.
Rather than buy an ad, Pepsi has funnelled its marketing dollars into him. The production budget of the 13-minute show is US$9-million.
According to his management, The Weeknd has funnelled another US$7-million of his own money into it. He’ll head out in early 2022 on a 104-city tour sponsored by Verizon.
Will the show be any good? Who cares. All these shows are the same. Same effects, same hired crowd, same medleys, same manufactured excitement. The point of them isn’t entertaining their audience. It is overwhelming them with American bombast. And it works.
Ten years from now, no one will remember the game. Maybe one play will stand out.
But people will remember the show. That’s what America understands better than everyone else, reaching back to Washington crossing the Delaware. There’s no point in hosting a war if you don’t give people a little razzle dazzle to make it special.
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