Skip to content

At the Super Bowl, a demonstration of the philosophy of half-time.

THE CURRENT London Lecture Series on ‘Philosophy and Sport’, sponsored by the Royal Institute of Philosophy, makes little mention of the Super Bowl, American football’s annual championship contest. That may be because the focus on the game is a distraction from the phenomenon staged in the middle of the contest. The sequence is game-show-game. But even outnumbered two-to-one, it’s the show that matters most. After all, which detail is most remembered from, say, Super Bowl XXXVIII? The show of Janet Jackson’s nipple? Or the final score of the game?

By SASHA FRERE-JONES  [The New Yorker] – Masses of gladiators enter, dragging a winged thing that Zhang Yimou didn’t use in the 2008 Olympics. Madonna emerges in a gold lame shower curtain as “Vogue” starts playing. She moves from a golden throne to a pan-heliocentric dominatrix outfit while “Vogue,” the song, is retro-branded to involve Vogue, the magazine. Madonna is dancing lightly and slowly, but who cares? America is looking at pure camp, and Frankensteined “Project Runway” castoffs. Who needs more?

The stage is, it turns out, an enormous screen pointing up. A late period hit, “Music,” begins. Happy to hear this in any setting, and the presentation is great. Breakdancers are leaping about on lit-up bleachers. This is incoherent but entirely fun. (“Music” means “dancing” in Madonna’s dictionary, so who’s counting.) Now here is (maybe?) Will Ferrell neutering himself by yo-yoing, crotch first, on a rubber band. Madonna, I appreciate your commitment to this alleged “wow factor.” But. Oh. LMFAO appear as d.j.s and sing the hook from “Party Rock,” which needs to end very quickly or I am going to stop loving humans. It’s like Jar Jar Binks showing up in a Ciara video.

The new song, “Give Me,” comes back with cheerleaders, including M.I.A. and Nicki Minaj. This song instantly sounds like more fun. I no longer believe that this performance contains any live singing, nor do I care. The song is better than I thought, now it seems as happy as it should have, maybe because of the positive pressure of live performance. Minaj’s hyperactivity reads well live. Maya looks—objectification alert—incredibly good. And she flips America the finger. Perhaps unprofessional, but a crush that goes back seven years has returned.

We segue we into a marching band and hey, here’s Cee-Lo Green and—objectivity failure alert—my favorite Madonna song ever, “Open Your Heart,” is playing. Unless they kill a dog…

Continued at The New Yorker | An anthology of Super Bowl advertisements | More Chronicle & Notices.

Subscribe
Notify of
guest

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

0 Comments
Inline Feedbacks
View all comments
0
Would love your thoughts, please comment.x
()
x