D2 and I watched the halftime show away from the crowds at the party we attended (there were multiple tv’s). D2 is 30 and a huge fan of Lamar and has seen him several times in concert. I can appreciate his music and thought his performance and what it represented were amazing. I turn 65 next month and I love all kinds of music and have always kept up listening to current music as well as the music I loved growing up.
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I actually didn’t have parents like that. I followed the arc of hip-hop/rap from Rappers Delight to Empire State of Mind. I loved the whole spectrum, from KRS-One to Tribe Called Quest, Big Daddy Kane to Public Enemy and N.W.A. to Eminem. I’m going to guess most people here have never listened to EPMD or The D.O.C. LOL!
I started tuning out a few years after Tupac got shot at the Tyson fight and then Biggie was gunned down in LA. By the mid-2000’s I was following the moguls rather than the up and comers.
I find, since my younger son started listening to rap, that I dislike the cadence of the new songs. It feels like artists get paid by the word. They’re taking Eminem’s staccato flow to the extreme, but with a whinier sound than him, and they also mumble more. It’s just unappealing to my ear.
I can appreciate the production value of this year’s halftime show. I loved the GNX clown car opening. I’ve seen the “secret meaning” articles. I guess I enjoyed rap when they just said what they meant and didn’t overproduce their music. My 21 year old Kendrick Lamar fan son gave me a one word answer when I asked what he thought about the performance…“meh.” I still say Prince was the pinnacle of Super Bowl halftime shows.
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Well, yeah. I mean … Prince. I saw Prince early in his career, and it’s still the best show I’ve ever seen (and I have been to many).
Adding: My D absolutely didn’t get it when I said that he was really sexy in concert. Of course, she also didn’t understand when I said that I really hoped to run into George Clooney when we were in a small city where he was filming!
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I love Dre and Snoop, but their halftime show was uninspiring.
It is actually somewhat remarkable just what Lamar pulled off with no less than DJT in the stadium. (Although it sounds like he didn’t watch the performance)
A show that revolved around imagery of America being built on the back of Black labor and incarceration? During a game in a sport that is also built off the labor and strength of Black men?
An MC who melded Uncle Tom and Uncle Sam and instructed Lamar to not be so “ghetto”?
An entire stadium of football fans uniting across their sport and political differences to chant “a minoooooooor”?
It was both highly entertaining and highly subversive. And the think pieces that are still coming out seem to underscore that. In that respect the performance gives me hope that art and culture will be re-energized by our current situation.
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My aforementioned music son also didn’t love it the first time, but he was at a party and couldn’t hear the Uncle Sam commentary. He had a couple of other reasons, but i can’t get into them here. But he rewatched yesterday a couple of times when he wasn’t distracted and liked it more.
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And more reading yields this very interesting article - apparently Crip walking originated with this man Henry Heard, and not the gang, who later appropriated it.
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I think the performance can be considered a success when you look at the number of posts, podcasts, articles, TikTok videos etc that have been generated in the aftermath - not just saying “I was wow’d!” but instead “wow, I learned something deeper”.
Much of the intent of this kind of music.
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I respect KL for repping Compton because he was born and raised there, had a hustler father, and wound up involved in the gang culture.
Here’s a movie about the Crip walk. NSFW.
I rarely watch SB Halftime shows. I’ll typically go out and run at halftime. But this year I watched and listened, because I enjoy his music.
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The kid with cancer commercial? An acquaintance has a young son fighting for his life because of brain cancer. He shared that this commercial references eight drug trials currently underway … but not one of them is for childhood cancer. He just wants everyone to know that the use of children in this ad was misleading (at best).
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I’m so sorry about your friend’s child. Brain cancer is the scariest diagnosis… and generally prognosis is grim.
I wouldn’t call the ad misleading. The company already has FDA-approved treatments for certain pediatric cancers.
So the young boy pictured could be a patient helped by an existing drug.
The trials of a new cancer drug generally start in adult patients who failed at least one previous treatment. Typically, these are patients who have no options left. There are some arguments that many cancer drug failures stem from this requirement, and more drugs would be found efficacious if they were studied as a frontline treatment. But we can’t experiment with people’s lives; giving them a compound of unknown risks when there are approved treatments that might even cure them is unethical. Only when the drug is well-studied, it can be studied to be used as a frontline treatment. Pediatric trials usually start when the drug has been studied in adults, so that extends the timeframe even further. So among those eight trials, some might eventually result in pediatric treatments. I really wish this process could be sped up, but human body is way more complex than the most complex AI algorithms. The lack of biotech funding and the current attitudes towards science definitely don’t help.
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This was such a compassionate, thoughtful and thorough response that answered a lot of questions I had
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