managed to upstage an entire queenly Madonna extravaganza with one raised middle finger in 2012. They also learned to play to the big invisible audience behind the camera, not the mere tens of thousands at the game. Super Bowl performers have come to understand that the imperfections of their live performances will be online forever they have calculated more and canned more of the music. 11 attacks was still palpable, U2 turned the halftime show into a national memorial and healing ritual, playing “Where the Streets Have No Name” as the long, long list of victims scrolled behind the band - pop culture at its most redemptive. This century has been better, or at least more rational, for the Super Bowl halftime. Family entertainment was set aside.īono, the lead singer of U2, at the Super Bowl halftime show in New Orleans in 2002.
And the 1997 “Blues Brothers Bash” - with a vital, dynamic James Brown billed below the vocally challenged “Blues Brothers” actors - was a study in white privilege and (as ZZ Top sang “Tush” and “Legs”) female objectification. The “Indiana Jones”-themed show of 1995 was some kind of hardworking kitsch apotheosis the Motown tribute of 1998 (including Smokey Robinson, Martha Reeves, Boyz II Men and Queen Latifah) earnestly mingled nostalgia and contemporaneity. But the halftime show still flailed through the 1990s, trying to merge the rock stadium concert, the Las Vegas revue, the drill-team competition and the oldies medley, mixing the boffo and the surreal. It was one template for the Super Bowl shows that eventually followed: a superstar, big hits, a cast of thousands and graphics for blimps to photograph from above. Then he danced up a storm and enlisted the entire stadium - people in formations on the field, the Rose Bowl audience holding placards - as he called for compassion and, surrounded by children, beamed through “Heal the World.” He stood there for more than a minute, tensed and silent, while applause washed over him for nearly 10 percent of his airtime. His halftime show started with the most radical Super Bowl gambit of all: dead air. Estefan would be back in 1999, with Stevie Wonder, for a gloriously out-of-the-blue Super Bowl funk festival.) Then, in 1993, came the sea change: Michael Jackson, just over 10 years after the release of “Thriller” and unquestionably the King of Pop. A full-fledged pop star, Gloria Estefan, shared the halftime with Olympic figure skaters in 1992.