In 1992, before it had secured football rights, Fox decided to counterprogram the Super Bowl. Not the whole thing. Just the halftime show.
Up until then, the game’s midpoint was heavy on salutes – to Duke Ellington, to the Caribbean, to Motown – and light on production value. That year, they did a salute to the 1992 Winter Olympics. It was dreary, high-school stuff.
Fox heavily promoted its sketch-comedy show, In Living Color. Fox called it Halftime Party. In some markets, it stole a third of the NFL’s audience. That was the end of football’s Up With People era.
The next year, Michael Jackson was the halftime act. Over the course of 20 minutes, he did two things. He brought live performance back to prime time television, and made it okay for musical royalty to hawk product.
Sunday’s Super Bowl will feature Kendrick Lamar and guests in New Orleans. I was at the last Super Bowl held in that city.
I remember two things about it. The power failed and I wondered for a moment if all of us were getting out of there alive, and Beyoncé performed.
I think I know who won the game, but I couldn’t say for certain. I am very sure I saw Beyoncé. In the stadium, you couldn’t hear her all that well. Because the live performance and the sound system were out of whack, nothing was in sync. She was a speck on the field’s horizon bopping out of time.
But even as it happened, it was clear that was the part of the evening people would remember. It used to be that the halftime show complemented the football game. Now it works the other way around.
For decades, the cold fusion of sports is finding a way to intermingle the ancient continuity of games with the transient hype of show business, creating a totally right-now super entertainment whose appeal radiates 360 degrees. It’s for the kids who don’t know the rules, and the adults who haven’t bought a record in 20 years, and everyone in between.
Most non-North Americans don’t get football. I’ve watched the Super Bowl in a few foreign bars, and the crowd was most likely to cheer the kickoff. They watch because they want to see Prince, or Bruce Springsteen, or U2.
The simultaneous atomization and flattening of our entertainments – every show is kind of the same (right now it’s glossy spy thrillers) and every singer sounds alike – make it near impossible to stage major events like this any more.
Squid Game is the biggest show in the world right now. If someone were to ask you about it, you wouldn’t feel the least bit weird about not having seen it. Because it’s not new. Even when it was new, it wasn’t new. It was The Prisoner meets Battle Royale, set in South Korea. We haven’t made or liked new things in a while. You can’t miss out on something that’s old.
This is the cost of an easy-sipping global omniculture in which people are as likely to watch Indian soap operas and Brazilian dystopias as they are anything made at home. All of it is good enough, and none of it matters. It’s unsustainable because it’s boring, but in the interim outfits such as the NFL make hay.
I come from an ancient culture in which you didn’t want to see your favourite artists performing between Howie breaking down the game so far and FanDuel’s parlay picks for the second half. It now seems bizarre to me that I have never seen many of my favourite musical acts perform live on television. In videos, sure. Live, yes. But not on TV. The opposite would be true for today’s contemporary music fan. I like my way better.
You know who wouldn’t play a Super Bowl? Bob Dylan. Because he’s already got money and it didn’t cost him his dignity to get it.
The Super Bowl halftime show is a wonderful expression of the spirit of our age – get more.
Already got a ton of money? You can always get more. You can join the other immortals – such as Maroon 5 and The Black Eyed Peas – who’ve traded credibility for exposure.
In the fullness of time, seeing a performer from a bygone era shaking on a temporary stage over a football field is going to elicit the same feelings a previous generation got watching tapes of Phyllis Diller on Hollywood Squares. It’s sad when a legend debases themselves for a little more applause.
Right now, no one can resist that pull – neither the performers nor the audience.
Lamar represents a high-water mark in terms of guest – he’s a major player now; he’s got Pulitzer Prize credibility; and everybody wants to see if he’s going to say or do something even more horrible to Drake than he already has. Short of Taylor Swift, it couldn’t get any bigger.
Lamar has spent years threading the needle as an insider who feels like an outsider. That all goes out the window on Sunday. This is his second appearance at a Super Bowl – he backed up Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg a few years ago. Now he’s just another guy looking for synergies.
His goal is a memeable moment. Justin Timberlake’s disrobing of Janet Jackson 20 years ago was an early skirmish in the coming culture war, and it hooked the NFL on the idea of a big reveal. It can’t just be rock ’n’ roll. There has to be some sort of talker buried within the medley. That gives the show a longer tail.
Football can’t guarantee big moments because no sporting event can. The game might be terrible. It could be highlight free.
But the halftime is choreographed. You’ve got a few minutes to make a memory. Then we swing back to the studio and JB says something like, “What a show, folks.”
It’s not Altamont or Live Aid, but it’s what we’re comfortable with now. Safe entertainments that everyone’s signed off on. Ones that are guaranteed to sell ads. A few shocks, but no one leaves shaken.
It must all end, of course. Nothing that burns this hot can survive for long. Eventually, a new zeitgeist will take over and the biggest ticket around will become the squarest. That is a guarantee.
But for now, the Super Bowl halftime show stands astride the landscape, king of the entertainments. The day you stop being interested in how it went is the day we’re headed back to the marching band.