I made it a point to avoid watching any of the Super Bowl festivities on TV yesterday. But I did accidentally pass through the local NBC affiliate while channel surfing. I landed during the half-time show and experienced a jarring moment of what I can only describe as cultural synesthesia. For those of you who may have missed it, the show was staged on an enormous set erected at mid-field, a structure so elaborate that I had no idea how they assembled it there in the brief time they had available (I missed the start of the performance, I came in while it was already underway).
What I witnessed was so bizarre and other worldly that at first I suspected I had accidentally materialized into one of the legendary Super Bowl Sunday commercials; that it was all a complex gag, computer graphics and animation generated purely for comic relief. Not only was the stage/set completely unreal and magical, indeed, impossible, but the performers and outrageous costumes prancing about on it were straight outta Dante.
Hey don’t get me wrong, I don’t want to distress any of my woke friends who may be reading this. I love jazz, rock, soul, R&B, Motown, even Gospel music. But I despise hip-hop. I feel the same way about it as I do about Country and Western and 1950s pop, but for different reasons: It is absolutely loathsome to my Early Boomer esthetic sensibility. Not only is the “music” laughable, but the iconography, content, and performance is offensive to me. That goes for gestures, costumes, dance, as well. I am no prude, but I also find its sexual explicitness deeply disturbing, along with its misogyny and violence.
The 1/2 time show was no exception. At first I thought it was watching a toxic parody of hip-hop, something conceived of by some white supremacist cabal and put together with CGI to ridicule, or even insult, African American culture. I briefly wondered if this glittery, twerking obscenity was part of some elaborate satire generated to sell pick-up trucks or beer. But soon enough it dawned on me, no, this was for real. I took me about a half minute to realize I was actually watching the half-time show. And although I must give credit for the awesome production values, the sheer skill and technical expertise required to stage this in mid-field during a short time-window, it eventually dawned on me that no, this was just 21st century bread and circuses.
OK, I must concede I was also disappointed by the quintessential Boomer half time spectacle, The Who in 2010. But the boys were just past their prime. This show was different. It made me feel lost, adrift, out of touch with my own culture, lost in space, a stranger in a strange land. And mostly, old. Very old.
And apparently, I’m not the only one who felt this way.
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/entertainment/gen-xers-millennials-got-weirdest-092544338.html