Half-to-Half: Rihanna's Halftime Show embodies her ambivalence toward her music career
Hits are hits, but there wasn't much being said on music's biggest stage
The Super Bowl Halftime Show is three different things in one.
The first is, obviously, a concert. The second and third, though, are more complicated. On the one hand, it’s a televised spectacle, designed to exist beyond the artist performing to the ever-expanding expectations of the single-most-watched broadcast of any given year. On the other hand, though, it is still a critical ritual for the artist in question, a “statement” about their place in the music industry and their career.
Depending on the artist in question, the balance between these elements will naturally shift. There is no one, single idea of what a Halftime Show is supposed to be, or what it can be. Let’s take Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band as an example.1 Put simply, Bruce was never going to generate a life-changing concert spectacle: his whole identity is built around being a hard-working performer, and so he simply went out and slightly elevated his existing showmanship with an extra-long knee slide, a choir, and the requisite fireworks.
Compare this to Katy Perry, who—with all due respect to her record of hits—is not someone you see in concert for her musicianship. In her case, her 12-minute Halftime Show effectively recreated her approach to spectacle-driven live shows: every song has its own aesthetic, there’s two special guests, and there’s four different outfits.
The best Halftime Shows, I would argue, are those that manage to function both as a concert and as a spectacle while still capturing the artist in question. Prince and Beyonce are the two most-cited “favorite” Super Bowl performances in part because they deliver on the expected spectacle but in ways that embody their respective place in music history. Prince’s Super Bowl performance may have taken place almost a decade before his tragic death, but it ended up defining the later period of his career in ways that make it critical to his legacy. Beyonce’s, meanwhile, captured the essence of the first decade of her solo career into a single performance, which she then shed gradually over the next decade as her self-titled album later that year signaled the start of a new era.
This, of course, brings us to Rihanna. Part of why I lay out this categorization is that my ambivalence toward this performance stems from the fact it wasn’t interested in doing…any of these things. This doesn’t mean the performance was bad, because Rihanna has a catalog filled with bangers, and seeing them performed with some fun choreography and a dynamic set of moving platforms is not a bad way to spend 13 minutes. But it was also a fairly empty way to spend 13 minutes, in a way that directly contradicts what this performance has historically aimed for: it wasn’t a particularly thrilling concert, it offered little of what we’ve come to expect in terms of spectacle (guest stars, costume changes, etc.), and beyond “I have a lot of hits,” to say it tries to define Rihanna as a musical artist would be a stretch.
To be clear, though, I don’t think it was that they tried and failed to do these things. The simple truth is that Rihanna has shown very little interest in playing “the game” of the music industry for a while now—as you no doubt know if you’re on social media, it’s been seven years since she released a studio album, and although many presumed her choice to take on this gig indicated that new music would be on the way, it was notably absent from her setlist. And while her now-confirmed pregnancy might have led to her delivering a more low-impact performance, choreography-wise, the (relatively) minimalist staging choices contributed to an overall vibe that she didn’t feel like she had anything to prove. She wasn’t defining her legacy. She wasn’t planting her flag in music history. She wasn’t trying to launch an album. She was just playing her hits for a much-larger audience than usual.
There’s power in this statement. It’s the power of being a billionaire based largely on your beauty line, with the music career—most recently in the form of an Oscar nomination for her work on Black Panther: Wakanda Forever—becoming a side project. In her press conference ahead of the performance, Rihanna was quoted saying that “it’s going to be a celebration of my catalog in the best way,” but I found the whole affair to be atemporal. It didn’t take us on a coherent journey through her career, or reimagine her past success through a new lens. It was just a 13-minute reminder that she has a lot of hits, which is objectively true and not taking full advantage of what a Halftime Show can do for an artist.
Given that artists aren’t paid to do the Halftime Show, Rihanna doesn’t owe us more: she can do whatever limited choreography she feels like, pregnant or not, much as she has every right to never make another album if she so chooses. But considering her choice to reemerge from hiatus with this performance was taken as a signal of a new “era” of her career, this performance was doing less than I had imagined. Given her pregnancy and the mid-performance touch-up with Fenty products, it absolutely serves her larger brand as a cultural entity, ensuring that the headlines and social media buzz will come through. But on music’s biggest stage, she chose to tell us very little about herself as a musician while also forgoing all-out spectacle, confounding expectations in ways that assert her authority over her identity, just not in ways that delivered a top-tier Halftime Show at the same time.
Episodic Observations
I wasn’t shocked to see her end on “Diamonds,” which successfully fulfills the “end on a ballad” pattern, but not having an outright “slow song” did make the whole thing blend together a bit without clearer scene changes. Something like “Stay” or “Love on the Brain” would have been a clearer change of pace, and maybe helped to create clearer “acts” in the performance overall.
It’s not unprecedented for artists to perform the Halftime Show without playing any new material, for the record—Prince and Beyonce both didn’t, for instance. But I do think that it’s a bit different when your lack of new music is an internet-wide meme.
In thinking about past Halftime Shows, it’s interesting to me that Lady Gaga is absolutely someone who really tried to do The Most with her Halftime Show, but because she’s done The Most so consistently in her career, it didn’t register the same way it did for other artists? It’s absolutely above your Justin Timberlakes and Bruno Marses, but it doesn’t seem as much like she “elevated” for the occasion.
Mars and The Weeknd really are the aberration in the Halftime Show’s pop era, given that they were playing hits only spanning 4- and 6-year careers at that point. (Yes, The Weeknd included some of his 2010 mixtape in there, but that doesn’t really count).
Coldplay’s Halftime Show confounds categorization because by choosing to bring in Bruno/Beyonce and doing that random “tribute to past Super Bowl performances,” they effectively gave up the idea it was about their own history as a band, erasing themselves from the narrative. A weird choice, albeit one that brought us the much more iconic “Formation” performance.
Fox got a really nice back-and-forth game that really lost all momentum in the last few minutes, huh? It was an edge-of-one’s seat experience, especially in the second half, but it’s a pity that there wasn’t a stronger end point.
I’ve had some limited time for TV catchup on an interlude in L.A. on my way home from overseas, and I chose to focus on Poker Face, so I could drop in on the comments on Josh’s most recent review. I’ve also been watching Netflix’s Physical: 100, which I’m enjoying but which has a serious case of Reality TV’s repetitive editing, both in terms of instant replays and each episode starting with the last 90 seconds of the previous one even when they’re auto-playing. I’ll be catching up on The Last of Us when I return home, and am excited to join in the lively discussion threads happening on Zack’s reviews.
I’d love to embed these videos but the NFL has restricted playback on other sites for all of them, even the ones that they didn’t post themselves but simply claimed copyright of.
Perfectly sums up my reaction to the half-time show. It felt fundamentally uninterested in being interesting, not even attempting to make each song feel distinct in performance, costuming or choreography.
It's a remarkable display of confidence to say that the songs by themselves are enough and they don't need surrounding with spectacle.
This is a fair assessment. What popped into my head while watching Rihanna’s performance was that it looked like the opening ceremony for the Winter Olympics. Aesthetically pleasing and a nice string of hits.
Musically I felt the patriotic songs before the game were more interesting. Yes they’re all standards but I really enjoyed Sheryl Lee Ralph and Chris Stapleton. Maybe because the performance instead of choreography was the focus.