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.
As someone who is there for the football, I thought her performance was fine. I enjoyed the dancing, and the white/red contrast was cool. I also thought they did a nice job with the cameras such as when they had the parting of the dancers to finally zoom in on Rihanna. The songs were good, but I also didn't hear anything that made me necessarily want to hear more, either.
My reaction was pretty similar to Myles's. She competently performed a medley for her many hits, most of which I love, and it was impressive to see her do it obviously pregnant and the staging was really impressive as well, but at the same time the whole thing felt a little bit cold. Like Myles said she was just kind of rattling off the hits with no changes in the staging (as elaborate as it was) or guest stars and with the choice to do so many mid-tempo songs everything seemed to run together at times. I would've liked to see her do one of the songs that Myles mentioned or even her ballad for "Wakanda Forever" to vary things a bit. And the latter would've added some new material
As someone (who was then turning 40) who sat up and noticed when I heard "SOS" 17 years ago, and subsequently didn't really care much about any of her subsequent output, I was unsurprisingly pretty bored by her performance. Yeah, she has a lot of hits, and I recognized at least 2/3 of them (how could one not?) but hearing them all back to back like that underscored how samey they all sounded.
My 15 year old son (who is so far outside her demographic it shouldn't matter anyway, but does have a wide range of genres he likes) shouted from across the house "This performance is pretty mid".
My main critique (besides the glaring omission of SOS) was that she had a frowning, haughty, "look at me" demeanor on throughout the performance. I wonder if this was tied to the omission of my favorite song: her brand is not dissimilar from Beyonce's, in that she's supposed to be a agency-filled mover & shaker. Her later catalog (to my rather shallow reading) also reflects this. But SOS is a classic "I'm so horny for you" dance song (which have been sung by performers of all genders and orientations), so is it that she wants to put that part of her career behind her, and just project the image of "Mistress of the Universe?"
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.
As someone who is there for the football, I thought her performance was fine. I enjoyed the dancing, and the white/red contrast was cool. I also thought they did a nice job with the cameras such as when they had the parting of the dancers to finally zoom in on Rihanna. The songs were good, but I also didn't hear anything that made me necessarily want to hear more, either.
My reaction was pretty similar to Myles's. She competently performed a medley for her many hits, most of which I love, and it was impressive to see her do it obviously pregnant and the staging was really impressive as well, but at the same time the whole thing felt a little bit cold. Like Myles said she was just kind of rattling off the hits with no changes in the staging (as elaborate as it was) or guest stars and with the choice to do so many mid-tempo songs everything seemed to run together at times. I would've liked to see her do one of the songs that Myles mentioned or even her ballad for "Wakanda Forever" to vary things a bit. And the latter would've added some new material
As someone (who was then turning 40) who sat up and noticed when I heard "SOS" 17 years ago, and subsequently didn't really care much about any of her subsequent output, I was unsurprisingly pretty bored by her performance. Yeah, she has a lot of hits, and I recognized at least 2/3 of them (how could one not?) but hearing them all back to back like that underscored how samey they all sounded.
My 15 year old son (who is so far outside her demographic it shouldn't matter anyway, but does have a wide range of genres he likes) shouted from across the house "This performance is pretty mid".
My main critique (besides the glaring omission of SOS) was that she had a frowning, haughty, "look at me" demeanor on throughout the performance. I wonder if this was tied to the omission of my favorite song: her brand is not dissimilar from Beyonce's, in that she's supposed to be a agency-filled mover & shaker. Her later catalog (to my rather shallow reading) also reflects this. But SOS is a classic "I'm so horny for you" dance song (which have been sung by performers of all genders and orientations), so is it that she wants to put that part of her career behind her, and just project the image of "Mistress of the Universe?"