The National Anthem
I usually comment on this ritual just to pooh-pooh it. Because I invariably measure each performance against the rousing rendition Whitney Houston gave at Super Bowl XXV in 1991. No performer has ever measured up. And I doubt any ever will.
Which brings me to Gladys Knight. No doubt she posed the most formidable challenge to Whitney yet. And she acquitted her “Midnight-Train-to-Georgia” style well.
But there was nothing soaring or hair-raising about her rendition. She impressed no more than I suspect Garth Brooks would have.
Incidentally, do you think this “Empress of Soul” resented the “Queen of Soul” being celebrated and honored in ways she felt more entitled to – as one accorded a higher rank? I mean, forget that Aretha won more than three times as many Grammys.
Because Aretha was also the first woman inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame; she was a Kennedy Center Honoree; she won the Presidential Medal of Freedom; Harvard, Yale, Princeton, the University of Pennsylvania, Berklee (and too many others to name) awarded her honorary degrees and doctorates; two presidents asked her to perform at their inauguration ceremonies; and NASA even named an Asteroid for her.
By contrast, the only comparable honors Gladys can cite is that she won the Essence Award for Career Achievement, the BET Inaugural Living Legend Award, and an honorary doctorate from Shaw University.
In any event, in recent years, the national anthem at NFL games has been more about players kneeling in (Kaepernick-style) protest than singers rising to the occasion. In fact, it became such a spectacle that President Trump thought this was yet another issue on which his habit of inflaming passions would finally redound to his political benefit.
President Trump on Sunday morning renewed his demand that NFL owners fire or suspend players who kneel during the national anthem in protest, again urging that fans should boycott the sport to force change.
(The Washington Post, September 24, 2017)
Unsurprisingly, nobody heeded his call. In fact, the NFL enjoyed record ratings this season:
So far this season, NFL games have accounted for 19 of the top 20 and 46 of the top 50 most-watched shows on television. …
The rise in 2018 ratings can be attributed in part to what has been the most prolific stretch of offensive football in the league’s history.
(ESPN, November 28, 2018)
Frankly, Americans have shown time and again that they are ultimately impervious to efforts to inject politics or social causes into their favorite sports. And it clearly does not matter if those efforts stem from players kneeling during the anthem or Trump exploiting this for political gain.
The Halftime Show
Like the overhyped and overplayed commercials, this show was just too anticlimactic. This, because it came after the NFL spent months desperately seeking a performer to headline it. Frankly, its PR humiliation was surpassed only by the Academy’s, which is still desperately seeking a comic to host the Oscars.
The NFL’s unusual predicament stemmed from artists like Jay-Z and Rihanna making a show of not only rejecting invitations to perform but lobbying others to reject them too. Here’s why:
The controversy around [Colin] Kaepernick began when the then-San Francisco 49ers QB started kneeling during the national anthem in 2016 in protest of racial inequality in the U.S. Kaepernick hasn’t played professionally since March 2017 and he filed a grievance against the league and its owners last fall for conspiring to not hire him.
(Billboard, October 22, 2018)
Soon artists the NFL never even solicited were making a show of boycotting this show – such is the zeitgeist of outrage over the way the NFL is blackballing Kaepernick. But the millions of dollars in exposure those rejecting invitations gave up is nothing to sneeze at.
That said, I am not particularly interested in what possessed Maroon 5 to buck this trend. But I feel compelled to denounce its lead singer, Adam Levine, for his duplicity and cravenness. Because he tried to stem the inevitable backlash by hinting that he would kneel during the band’s performance to “stand with Kap.”
Except that the whole point of the protest is to kneel during the national anthem because of what that song is supposed to represent. Doing so in the midst of his own performance would have been narcissistic and insulting in equal measure.
Instead, Levine ended up paying homage to Kaepernick with some moronic message of “one love,” which I suspect only the members of his band got. Yet he seems to think that this, as well as having it announced that he’s donating $500,000 to underprivileged children, will redeem his reputation in the increasingly Afrocentric music industry. Nope. Dope.
Meanwhile, Maroon 5 sounded like a band that couldn’t even make it to the Battle Round on The Voice? (For you cultural illiterates, this is a singing competition – a la American Idol – on which Levine judges and coaches wannabe stars. But, after this performance, having him continue in those roles would seem like a friggin’ joke.)
And don’t get me started on all the other performers who used Levine’s stunt as cover to break this boycott. The rappers who performed are especially worthy of dishonor in this context. Because Jay-Z set the right example. He knows that rappers have a special duty to boycott the NFL for blackballing Kaepernick given the way the music industry blackballed rappers for so many years.
Not to mention the spectacle of the NFL overcompensating for its blackballing backlash by enlisting so many Z-list blacks, their performances came across like Amateur Night at the Apollo.
As it turned out, Maroon 5’s churchy, folksy songs and the rappers’ profanity-laced raps made for an unwitting juxtaposition of white and black performers … of good and evil forces. But it seems a form of poetic justice that they performed the least exciting halftime show ever!
Still, A-listers like Cardi B and Chance the Rapper have some splainin’ to do. Because it’s hypocritical to stand with Kap by boycotting the halftime show only to star in commercials during the game. If you’re going to stand with Kap, stand with Kap!
Finally, apropos of rappers making a spectacle of themselves, there’s this courtesy of 21 Savage:
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrested rapper 21 Savage [real name Sha Yaa Bin Abraham-Joseph] early Sunday morning [in the midst of Super Bowl day revelry], claiming that he is actually from the United Kingdom and overstayed his visa. …
Abraham-Joseph, 26, has claimed to be from Atlanta and has long been considered a local act.
(Atlanta Journal-Constitution, February 3, 2019)
If you know you’re an illegal immigrant, it’s probably tempting fate to pursue a career as a gangsta rapper – complete with felony convictions to boost your street cred.
But, truth be told, this arrest looks a little too selective and spiteful. Even so, I will not spare an ounce of sympathy over the deportation of this wannabe … “savage.”
The Commercials
Talk about anticlimactic; I could not have been less interested. Not to mention this abiding lament, which I first sounded in “NFL Conference Championship Sunday: Hail, Broncos! Hail, Panthers!” January 25, 2016:
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I would be remiss not to comment on the annual hype surrounding Super Bowl commercials — for which companies are paying $5 million for a 30-second spot this year. Frankly, we are treated to so many previews that, by game time, they hold about as much interest as those eye-rolling commercials for erectile dysfunction.
I gather that companies release them early to become trending topics online. Except that, like most topics on social media, people suck them up and spit them out in a viral flash.
Not so long ago, even die-hard fans waited with bated breath to see them air during the game; and the best ones trended, in real life, for days and weeks thereafter. These days, most people just see them as opportunities to go to the toilet.
Which raises the question: Why pay millions to run a commercial on TV during the Super Bowl, only to have people ignore it, when you can pay pittance to release it online during Super Bowl week, and generate viral interest? Surely it’s only a matter of time before this fact dawns on companies.
Then, of course, there’s this: I have watched many funny, even interesting Super Bowl commercials over the years. But none has ever moved me to purchase the product being advertised. You?
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The Game
This was easily the most boring Super Bowl game in NFL history. The New York Times summed up just how boring it was with this pithy headline:
How boring was the Super Bowl? The punts got exciting.
Granted, I probably wouldn’t feel this way if the Rams had won.
But, hell, not even Tony “Romostradamus” Romo could have predicted that the score would be 3-3 halfway into the fourth quarter. After all, these were two of the top-scoring offenses in the NFL this season. Yet they ended up playing the lowest-scoring game in Super Bowl history.
But I knew the Rams were fated to lose when the Patriots held possession for nearly 20 of the 30 minutes in the first half. Because this suggested not only that the Rams were completely out of sorts (they managed only 57 total yards in the first half), but that it was only a matter of time before the Patriots’ domineering possession resulted in game-clinching points.
There was also this prevailing truth from Halftime Report analyst Boomer Esiason:
The Patriots have always been a second-half team. Always!
(CBS, February 3, 2019)
Given all that, this was inevitable:
For the sixth time since 2001, Bill Belichick and Tom Brady secured a Super Bowl victory for the New England football franchise.
This one was unlike the others, it defense was the story of the day. But in the end, Tom Brady’s offense did more than Jared Goff’s, and the Patriots won 13-3 in Super Bowl LIII.
(CBS Boston, February 3, 2019)
This only makes me hate Brady more. Many are hailing him as the GOAT. But I think he’s just the LOAT (luckiest of all time).
Congratulations, Patriots!
[Note: It was self-evident that the hype about him predicting plays gave Romo performance anxiety. Because he spent much of the game hedging. And, when he dared to predict, he was so wrong that Jim Nantz, his co-commentator, rushed to cover up his flub.
Nothing betrayed Romo’s anxiety quite like his refusal to predict the next play when the Patriots were facing 4th and inches with 1:16 left in the game, and leading 10-3. Even I did not hesitate to predict they would kick a field goal, which they did to seal the victory.]
Related commentaries:
Romostradamus…
Conference championship…
* This commentary was originally published on Sunday at 10:52 p.m.