I cannot wait for the Super Bowl halftime show!
Really! I love seeing the acts that middle America agrees on take the stage! As everybody who’s ever looked at a list of best-selling books can tell you, there’s no better gauge of quality than popular taste.
And I love seeing disparate performers trying to find a moment of musical togetherness! Coldplay and Beyonce at Sunday’s halftime? Perfect. Maybe, as they transition from one act to the next, they’ll do Sonny and Cher’s “I Got You Babe” together. Or some old Motown. Everybody likes old Motown.
Or maybe they’ll just ignore each other, as Beyonce rises up out of a shell or something and Coldplay descends via a parachute. And when will Bruno Mars show up on a hoverboard? Will Bruno Mars show up on a hoverboard? I’ll love that too!
With Beyonce and Coldplay and maybe Bruno, this show is going to be a lot like a festival, like Lollapalooza or Coachella, except it’ll all happen on one stage, and we won’t have to leave our homes or encounter any bands we’ve never heard of before. Awesome!
I love the Super Bowl halftime show because regular stadium concerts are too intimate and too modestly staged! They need dancing girls and boys (and sharks!) and pyrotechnics, one move or explosion for virtually every note in the song. The singers need to do abundant moves, too, because that is the essence of music. Their choreography is often so well-rehearsed that it includes the lip movements they make as their song plays. Wow!
I really love the superfans the producers always find to put in the front rows at the halftime shows! Those people are super-enthusiastic, and they know every word and dance and sing and keep their hands in the air the whole time! It is really comforting to know that so many other people love the Super Bowl halftime show as much as I do.
Not all of us can get to Las Vegas, and that’s one of the other things that makes the Super Bowl halftime show so great! It brings Las Vegas production values to the middle of a football field in February and, by extension, to the entire country. As the saying goes, what happens in Las Vegas, Nevada, doesn’t have to stay in Las Vegas, Nevada! Am I right?
I love the Super Bowl halftime show because there’s no greater musical experience than hearing performers jam their four biggest hits into the narrow available time window! Nobody wants musical surprises at concerts or new songs. Just play the hits, singer boy, like a jukebox! If you can turn them into a medley so much the better. Medleys are awesome because you get to hear so many more songs, boiled down to their one-verse-one-chorus essences!
At halftime, I will already be on a high, of course, from having watched Lady Gaga deliver the National Anthem before the game. The NFL always gives us a pop performer, and this is terrific, because the National Anthem should be sung as a slow-jam love ballad (to the country). Just because it was composed during a battle doesn’t mean the way opera singer Jim Cornelison does it before Chicago Blackhawks games is correct. Sure, you can sing it as a heroic tune of strength and defiance, but slow-jam love ballad, with lots and lots of extra notes layered in, is definitely better!
Some people watch the Super Bowl for the football. Some watch it for the ads. But I watch it for America’s greatest musical spectacle. I cannot wait for the 2016 Super Bowl halftime show!