On Super Bowl Sunday, like many of you I’m sure, I ventured out to a packed bar to watch the spectacle.
The game was fine. It was close and entertaining. Not an instant classic like some of the games leading up to the end-all be-all of the NFL season, but I had a good time. Pair the football with drinks, friends, and the Los Angeles Rams winning in … well, Los Angeles, and you get the recipe for a fun night out.
But while I enjoyed the Super Bowl for what it was, it was tougher to discern what it wasn’t.
Time and time again, I’ve seen the game’s half-time show lauded as a bastion of progressiveness and acceptance — both for hip hop and, more tacitly, being Black in both the United States and the NFL.
Incredible, right? In front of 112 million viewers, here is the NFL — firmly entrenched in Americana to a genuinely immovable extent, no matter how much we should actually be worrying about concussions, CTE or discriminatory practices — finally propping up Black excellence at a time when Black Americans are more under assault by the state and their fellow countrymen than ever.
Except that’s not what happened, and this is coming from someone who greatly enjoyed the show.
I had a blast seeing and listening to Dr. Dre, Mary J. Blige, Snoop Dogg, Eminem, and Kendrick Lamar. I’m a big hip-hop fan, and it just felt right that all of these artists would have the spotlight on them in Inglewood, about a half-hour drive from where Dr. Dre and Lamar made their bones in Compton, and from Snoop Dogg’s stomping grounds in Long Beach.
The global stage turned local with the stars paying homage to Tam’s Burgers, Dale’s Donuts and Eve After Dark — Compton’s finest. I knew all the songs and popped for 50 Cent and Anderson Paak’s surprise cameos, even if almost no one at my bar understood why 50 Cent entered the scene upside down (a real shame that somehow made me feel ancient at 22-years-old). There was even a nod to lowriders and L.A.’s infamous road grids.
The glitz and the glamor inside SoFi, the most expensive stadium in American sports history was spectacular, but that was par for the course. Super Bowl productions are always tremendous, regardless of how you feel about the actual music.
What I never noticed, though, was anything tangible. Was any of what I saw truly consequential or was it just a momentary satisfaction, propped up by musicians who regularly feature in my Spotify playlists?
In 2018, Jay-Z rapped, “I said no to the Super Bowl, you need me, I don’t need you.”
He was right.
Football needed Jay-Z — not him really, but what he represents — for a multitude of reasons. One year after he uttered those words on “APESHIT,” the NFL got their man, when Roc Nation, the entertainment company founded by the Brooklyn rapper, entered an agreement with the league. As part of this deal, Roc Nation would assist with the Super Bowl half-time show.
The NFL has long felt the pressure to project or at least market itself as an apolitical, aracial entity. Maybe, they think, this can be achieved through figures like Jay-Z, Dr. Dre or Snoop Dogg.
Because despite its interminable popularity, the NFL is under social stress.
This is a sport — really, a product (the NFL made about $10 billion in national revenue in its 2020 season) — that primarily hinges on young Black men. Yet, the league is entirely controlled by old, wealthy, and typically conservative white men.
This figure tells the whole story: more than 70 percent of NFL athletes are Black, compared to zero NFL franchise owners.
This idea extends beyond the field and into the sidelines, as well. On the first day of Black History Month this year, former Miami Dolphins head coach Brian Flores (who is Black) sued the league for discriminatory hiring practices.
“The NFL remains rife with racism,” Flores wrote.
He alleges that the Denver Broncos and New York Giants conducted sham hiring interviews with him to satisfy the Rooney Rule, a policy through which teams are required to “interview at least one or more diverse candidates” for positions such as head coach. Through all this, it is also important to remember that Miami fired Flores despite back-to-back winning seasons, something the Dolphins had not achieved since 2003.
Flores goes on to write that the NFL and its teams “have been given every chance to do the right thing” and nothing has changed. “In fact, the racial discrimination has only been made worse by the NFL’s disingenuous commitment to social equity,” he adds.
Clearly, no musical performance can solve this, so to be transparent, I am not pinning any of my unhappiness over the half-time show on its performers. They were great, inspirational, and there’s certainly a reason why so many people feel like the show did move the needle in some way, even if not in regards to the NFL’s problems.
Snoop Dogg, the poster child for pot when it was persistently persecuted, saw the Internet rush to his defense when the New York Post pointed out that he’d puffed on a joint before hopping on stage. The Long Beach icon even donned an entirely blue bandanna-themed ensemble and busted out a Crip Walk mid-medley, something that would’ve been unimaginable when he was up-and-coming.
The N.W.A. and their depictions of street life drew the ire of conservative America in their heyday, but there was Dr. Dre at the Super Bowl, bringing West Coast gangsta rap to millions nation- and worldwide.
While the show rightfully meant a lot for many people, especially those who grew up with hip hop being shunned, insulted or mocked, it’s hard to suggest that it meant as much for the NFL.
Would the league have been okay with Dr. Dre, now 56, headlining at his apex? Definitely not. The same goes for Blige, now 51; Snoop Dogg, now 50; Eminem, now 49; and 50 Cent, now 46.
The NFL finally showcased hip hop, but that’s all it did. It’s tough to say it embraced it or empowered it.
The real surprise for our younger generation should be that featuring the genre took this long. In 2022, hip hop’s place in pop culture appears secure.The genre is frequently featured across other sports leagues, such as the NBA, whose own reckoning with hip hop came about two decades ago. Hip hop is also used prominently in video games and cinema.
But hip hop’s shift from counterculture to mainstream was a marathon and, even now, it will continue to face shades of the same opposition it has always encountered. At its core, hip hop has always embodied counterculture. It is gritty and in your face, but it’s also beautiful and lyrical in how it speaks to the issues — police brutality, racism, promiscuity — often swept under the rug by the establishment.
We saw glimpses of hip hop’s subversiveness at the Super Bowl.
50 Cent debriefed us on how he’s into having sex, rather than making love. Dr. Dre reportedly went against the NFL by keeping his “still not loving police” line from his hit “Still D.R.E.” Lamar performed his social justice anthem “Alright,” although its unmistakable “And we hate po-po” lyric was omitted for reasons that remain unknown (you can take a swing at a solid guess, though).
The NFL’s long standing reticence to hip hop is not shocking, though.
Most of the same wealthy, white men who control the league are content to reap the benefits of the mostly Black athletes that risk their well-beings every time they grace the gridiron but that’s about as far as they’ll go.
This is the same league that in 2001 featured Nelly in a half-time show dubbed “The Kings of Rock and Pop” for a grand total of 18 seconds. Fast forward about a decade and you get the NFL suing British rapper M.I.A. for $16 million after she flipped off the camera during the 2012 half-time show.
In light of all this, how can we buy that there’s been authentic change?
Even this year, Eminem had people talking when he took a knee during his performance. In theory, this was meant to be a massive no-no. In practice, the NFL later came out and said that this was always the Detroit rapper’s plan.
That’s quite a contrast for the same league which agreed in 2018 to fine players for taking a knee during the American anthem. Their concern? That protesting injustice through kneeling would give off the impression that “NFL players were unpatriotic.”
The catalyst for this sanction was Colin Kaepernick, who was essentially blacklisted from the league for protesting against police brutality and socio-racial injustice by taking a knee.
So while the half-time show and its performers deserve plaudits for a genuinely enjoyable performance, the NFL does not warrant that same treatment.
The optics were certainly very good, maybe even as much as the songs played, and the NFL looked like it was on the right side of history for once. But was it all bells and whistles?
What truly matters is what the league does from here.
Maybe Flores’ lawsuit will lead to some sort of league-wide reflection, although that appears unlikely.
Maybe people like the Washington Commanders’ Jason Wright, the first Black president of an NFL team in history, will overcome the odds and blaze a trail for others to follow. Except that it’s already 2022, so we should really be asking ourselves why a trail needs to be set.
Or maybe, like Flores wrote in his lawsuit, nothing will change yet again.