Why the Super Bowl is not about sport

This weekend, it’s not just about the Patriots v Seahawks in the Super Bowl. It’s also the return of the spectacle that brought us Janet Jackson’s ‘Nipplegate’, MIA’s raised middle finger and The Rolling Stones’ censored lyrics.

For decades, the Super Bowl was all about the football game. Half-time used to be an excuse to visit the beer stand if you were at the stadium, or refresh the nachos if you were at home. If you watched, you yawned while college marching bands strutted around doing brassy versions of musty pop hits or Up With People staged another costume extravaganza.

But today, the Super Bowl half-time is about ratings and big business, a music-industry showcase for powerhouse acts such as Beyoncé, The Rolling Stones, Prince, Bruce Springsteen and Madonna. On Sunday, it’ll be top-40 princess Katy Perry and Lenny Kravitz packing as many hits and glitzy costumes as they can into 12 minutes while commandeering the 50 yard-line. Once an afterthought, the game’s half-time has become a coveted headline gig. Some heavy hitters consider it the highest profile music event of the year, with a national television audience topping 100 million viewers.

And the Super Bowl is not the only non-musical spectacle that has embraced contemporary pop and rock in recent years. Music’s now a big part of such global events as the World Cup, the Olympics and even the US presidential inauguration. 

As these events commanded bigger and bigger fees from TV networks, the airtime became more precious. The mega sport happenings sell prime-time slots to advertisers for millions of dollars. That means every second of programming is calculated to keep viewers glued, with no down time allowed.

One moment in time

A turning point arrived at the Summer Olympics in 1988, when Whitney Houston blasted One Moment in Time to the heavens at the opening ceremony in Seoul, South Korea. Whitney asked for “One moment in time when I’m racing with destiny… I will feel eternity.” She was one of the biggest pop singers on the planet performing to a TV audience estimated in the billions. Little wonder One Moment in Time became one of the bigger hits of her career, cracking the top five in the US and going to number one in the UK.

Three years later, New Kids on the Block - remember them? - made history of sorts: the boy band was the first contemporary pop act to perform at the Super Bowl. It wasn't a particularly memorable set, but it registered on the pop-culture buzz metre in a way that such predecessors as Carol Channing and The Rockettes couldn’t match.

There were a few train wrecks ahead, though. Somebody thought putting together Patti LaBelle, Tony Bennett, Arturo Sandoval and Miami Sound Machine to recast Indiana Jones as a musical was a good idea at the 1995 Super Bowl. And the National Football League also hired the second and third incarnations of The Blues Brothers – the ones without John Belushi – to entertain in 1997. Yet by the late ‘90s, just about everyone wanted in, speaking of the Super Bowl half-time show like the biggest break any band could ever receive.

Amid the brief swing-band craze of the late ‘90s, Big Bad Voodoo Daddy actually got a few seconds of airtime at the ’99 Super Bowl. “We’re going to be the first thing people see after they watch Steven Spielberg’s commercial,” singer Scotty Morris told me a few days before the event. “Hopefully, that will legitimize the band’s existence by introducing us to a whole different audience.” Spoken like a true brand-savvy professional in tune with the new something-for-everybody Super Bowl culture. 

Eddie Micone, executive producer of some of the Super Bowl half-times, saw the music as a way to pull in fans who normally wouldn’t go near a football game. The Super Bowl, he said, “became an event with two attractions – the game and the half-time show, and the entertainers started to see it as a great marketing tool.” 

Talking points

The Super Bowl half-time turned into a must-watch event when it started pulling in stadium-level talent such as U2 in 2001 and Paul McCartney in 2005. The overblown ‘Nipplegate’ wardrobe malfunction involving Janet Jackson and Justin Timberlake in 2004 became a bigger talking point in the weeks after than the game itself.

By then, the World Cup – with an audience several times the size of the Super Bowl worldwide – was pulling in A-list entertainers as well. Ricky Martin’s official 1998 World Cup song, The Cup of Life, topped the charts in a number of countries, and R Kelly gave the sole live performance of his Sign of Victory anthem with a South African choir at the Cup kick-off concert in Soweto in 2010.

Even the normally solemn presidential inauguration added a significant musical spin during Barack Obama’s reign. At his 2009 ceremony, Aretha Franklin sang, and in 2013, James Taylor, Kelly Clarkson and Beyoncé gave stirring performances.

Of course, most of these ‘live’ events aren’t really live. The dirty little non-secret of these televised extravaganzas is that the performances are pre-recorded, and with the exception of some vocals, everything you hear is canned. As one Super Bowl producer said, “It’s too big an event to risk something going wrong.”