Me On The Super Bowl Halftime Show, from the Column That Wasn't

[Plaid Adder]

Eudora ate my first draft, Earthlink swallowed my second. Here's the chunk I had devoted to the Super Bowl halftime show, reconstructed as best I can. Enjoy.
***************
Understand, I am a marching band veteran. I know that the halftime show as a genre is never going to be the subject of a retrospective at the Met. One time long ago I was having lunch with an English friend of my father's and I tried to explain to him what marching bands do. I managed to convey that basically a bunch of people get tricked out in insane uniforms and walk around making interesting geometric patterns on the field while playing popular tunes that acquire a weird kind of gigantism after they have been arranged for 20 trumpets, a dozen sousaphones, a drumline 30 yards long and 150 flutes and clarinets that you STILL can't hear as a gaggle of twirlers, tumblers, and flingers of things cavort around them. He looked at me and said, "Why?" And of course there is no answer.

Halftime has always been about pure, pointless spectacle. But it used to be that the Super Bowl halftime show's main problem was an overload of wholesomeness. They'd truck in some group like "Up With (Perky White) People!" and do something unbearably cheesy and have a lot of people flip colored placards around on the field and eventually call it a day. But as the Super Bowl bloats on advertising revenues, the halftime show has also ballooned to a monstrous size, and now dorkiness is not enough. MTV has come to the halftime show, and the results are not pretty.



Then we moved to the rap segment of the program, and Kid Rock came bounding out wearing the American flag as a poncho. Doesn't anyone else see a problem with 'honoring' the flag by sweating into it? Do people really feel that Kid Rock's pit stains ennoble this inspiring symbol of American freedom? Is the idea that he's showing his respect for the flag by enriching it with his precious bodily fluids? In any case, we were all worried, as the jets of flame leaped higher behind him, that the poncho would catch fire. We could see the headlines: "KID ROCK SUPER BOWL TRAGEDY FUELS PUSH FOR FLAG-BURNING AMENDMENT."

And then there was Janet.

Back in the day, the video for "Rhythm Nation" made Janet one of the founding mothers of hip-hop. It made it all the more depressing to see what MTV did to it after spending 10-15 years refining its aesthetic of titillation. Basically, I think the music industry has been pushing its more-is-more, raunchier-is-better treatment of sex so aggressively that its audience is suffering a giant case of T&A fatigue. I blame Britney for much of this; she has really been working on emulating and even surpassing Madonna's sleaziness without incorporating any of the intelligence and creativity that used to drive it. So now, the unison step-show-esque choreography that made the original "Rhythm Nation" video so important has been transformed into a chaotic mess of writhing limbs and simulated sex performed by a harem of nubile young things who are all dressed as if they are the sales staff of Mad Max's Postapocalyptic Fetish Shop And Bordello. By the time Miss Jackson (if you're nasty) shows up, she's surrounded by so many nearly-naked bodies that you can't even focus on anything long enough to figure out what the hell is going on, let alone be aroused by it.

So by the time Justin Timberlake rips off half of Janet's bustier, why is anyone surprised? Tasteless? Prurient? Represents women as fetishized sex toys who can be violated at will for male pleasure? Hasn't that boat already sailed?

After all the skin they've already shown in this broadcast--from the gratuitous shots of the navel-baring cheerleaders to the army of tanned and toned blonde women who were climbing around on those wooden horses during Toby Keith's number to the harem of backup dancers--CBS is going to do the Puritan thing over one revealed breast? And why pick on the breast, anyway? It's OK for P. Diddy to perform his number with one hand on the family jewels at all time, but people can't handle Janet's breast? What are we, Ashcroft?

After all, there are things that are a lot more obscene than Janet Jackson's naked breast. A $1 trillion deficit, for instance.
********************
C ya,

The Plaid Adder

[trumad]

1. And 500 plus dead soldiers!

Great Piece Plaid ...

[bubblesby2002]

2. Thank you

You put my thoughts into words. I was really disappointed with the entire spectacle. I almost turned the television off, after the four helicopters flew over the stadium during the national anthem. What the f**k.:wtf:

[Breezy du Nord]

3. Hey, I wasn't under a rock!

I just can't watch TV (school project) I really didn't care to have Janet Jackson flash me and I hate Toby Keith, Kid Rock, and Justin Timberlake, so I wasn't real disappointed.

Good column, btw.

:hi: Breezy