Will the NFL, Rihanna and Apple Music think that I’m being critical when I call the halftime show at Sunday’s Super Bowl LVII one of the most cohesive in the game’s history?
Nobody thinks of “cohesive” as being an especially effusive adjective, nor has the Super Bowl halftime show ever really aspired to cohesion. You know why? Because cohesion doesn’t move the needle. Cohesion is uniform and consistent, and the Super Bowl halftime show is usually all about the moments that stem from “Holy crap!” deviations.
That’s why most of the more recent halftime spectaculars have had a headliner, and then they’ve had surprising or unsurprising guest stars, sometimes from completely incompatible genres or with head-scratching disparities in star power. Like, I know it was the 50th Super Bowl, but how the blazes did we have a year in which Coldplay was the top of the bill and then Beyoncé and Bruno Mars were just lending support?
Sometimes the orchestrated chaos of the halftime show doesn’t require a guest or 10. Sometimes it can involve a huge mid-performance stage change or influx of new background singers or dancers. Sometimes it can include a dynamic costume change (or failed costume change) or a wild stunt or technological innovation.
Orchestrated chaos is a good way of making everybody in the year’s largest TV audience feel invested, of working as many genres as possible into one 10-minute performance. And sometimes it’s just fun.
Last year’s halftime show, which featured five headliners — Dr. Dre, Snoop, Eminem, Mary J. Blige and Kendrick Lamar, plus guest appearances by 50 Cent and Anderson .Paak — entailed rearranging pieces of the stage and ushering in and out different groups of dancers, and then there was whatever was happening with 50 Cent’s entrance. It was ambitious and all over the place to the degree that I constantly felt like I was pitting one act against the others, as if there would be a winner crowned at the end of the performance.
The winner at the end of Rihanna’s halftime performance was … anybody at home who wanted to watch a 10-minute snippet from a Rihanna concert, a wholly reasonable desire given that Rihanna hasn’t done a live performance in over five years. The pervasive narrative leading up to the Super Bowl was about this being her “comeback,” with secondary narratives relating to which of her myriad collaborators would make the trip to Arizona to offer onstage support. Some of the speculation made sense and some was just delirious wish-casting. What were REALLY the odds that Tom Holland would show up to dance along to “Umbrella” in homage to his eternally viral lip-synching cover of the song? Low! But would it have made people happy? Some! More importantly, would it have contributed directly to a spike in social media responses to the show? Heck yes.
This was not that kind of show.
There were no guest stars. Zero. That means no unexpected chorus of children and no Kanye West when Rihanna sang “All of the Lights.” I believe we can all be eternally grateful for the latter. Given how many of the songs Rihanna performed had some collaborative element, this was still probably a minor surprise.
Rihanna only wore one costume, a red number with a shiny rubber or plastic bustle, designed I have to assume by the same tailors who made the very similar Imperial Royal Guard outfits from Return of the Jedi. (Disclaimer: I am not a music critic or a fashion critic, but I am a geek.) It was a versatile outfit, capable of hiding a support cable and of causing roughly 85 percent of viewers to Google “Is Rihanna pregnant again?” (It turns out she is.)
That question probably had tongues wagging, as did Rihanna’s entrance on one of several unidentified floating objects that we should all be relieved the military didn’t shoot down. But if anybody was wondering, “OK, so now how will she top that?” the answer was, “She really didn’t.”
What Rihanna did was work her way through a catalog that’s pretty absurdly full, especially for a singer who’s only 34 and hasn’t realized an album of new material in years. She started with “Bitch Better Have My Money” — the jauntily threatening classic that lost its edge by being upstaged by the lowering of those floating platforms — and “Only Girl” and then closed with powerhouse chunks of “Work,” “All of the Lights,” “Run This Town,” “Umbrella” and Diamonds.”
She was surrounded by the same troupe of dancers throughout, a remarkably synchronized ensemble that stretched across much of the field, even if we inevitably spent most of our time looking at the couple dozen dancers in white-hooded tracksuits who were surrounding Rihanna throughout. They obscured the reality that while she was moving, she wasn’t exactly doing much choreography herself.
What Rihanna was doing, in addition to sometimes singing and sometimes leaning on the backing track, was emoting directly to the camera like the ultra-charismatic star and actress — You say, “Battleship!” I say, “Bates Motel!” — she is. From the first second of the performance to the last, Rihanna was consistently conscious of the cameras and of her angles. And while that seems like the most obvious thing possible for a performer to do, that is definitely not true of your typical Super Bowl halftime show, where there’s so much happening that the directors are mostly attempting to keep up, to make sure that every artist gets their couple of seconds of screen time, that every ultra-expensive augmentation of the stage or expanded use of the field gets attention.
Mostly, the camera was just on Rihanna. Her band got a couple of close-ups. Were they actually playing anything live? Dunno. But they were there! The dancers got a showcase but, rather than highlighting individual pockets of greatness, the emphasis was on showing how uniform — or “cohesive” — the dancing was. The result might have been less of that sense of crazy spectacle that you can sometimes get from a halftime show. As the performance moved toward its climax, there were fireworks and people in the crowd had glowsticks or something, but there really wasn’t much awe generated. No “Oh cool!” No “How did they do that?”
Instead, what impressed me was primarily how the camera was always in the right place at the right time — a precision that you don’t normally get from live shows of this scale. The overall choreography — not just the dancers, but where everything was taking place within the multiple platforms of the stages — was so superb that you could get occasional flourishes like the moment the camera pulled back from Rihanna and did a full-scale loop-the-loop, going upside down and soaring up into the air. We’ve had a couple of years in a row in which the direction of the halftime show has leaned so heavily into drone-fu that it was a huge relief to see either that the drones have achieved enough proficiency not to draw attention to themselves or that more of the camerawork is driven by wires and cranes and smooth Steadicam.
One song built to the next and then built to the next. There wasn’t one micro-performance that I found especially remarkable, nor was there one that was such a dud that I got angry she didn’t do… dunno… “What’s My Name?” instead.
So you might have wanted Tom Holland or Jay-Z. You might have craved a surprise debut of a new song. You might have hoped to see something you’d never seen before in a sports-adjacent performance (the floating platform stuff was pretty neat). You might have craved something that felt spontaneous and unplanned, though sometimes that leads to decades of controversies and threats of FCC action. This was not that.
I don’t require or reward “smooth” and “precise” and “cohesive” all the time. But tonight, I had no objections.
Source: Hollywood
