So you're scared and you're thinking
That maybe we ain't that young anymore
--Bruce Springsteen, "Thunder Road"
All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women merely players:
They have their exits and their entrances;
--As You Like It, Act 2, Sc. 7
Let's stress, they have their exits. Namely, they need to get the hell off stage and make way for someone new. As Pete Townshend recently put it, The Who is a brand, not a band.
Recently, the NFL treated us to one of its better Super Bowls, dragged down only by the lame, middle-age guy halftime act. This has become a tradition for the Super Bowl, boring its audience to sleep during halftime with its 21st Century version of Muzak. Recent Super Bowl halftime acts have included way-way-way-far-over-the-hill-and-still-mostly-in-post-rehab-funk Bruce Springsteen, Aerosmith, Paul McCartney, Prince, U2, Sting, the Rolling Stones, and Tom Petty. Sponsorship costs? I'd kill for the Ensure concession at these things. Hey, 1975 called, it wants its music back. Who's next? I mean, as long as we're going for cultural relevance, how about Blue Oyster Cult? Or Frankie Avalon. Frankie could sing a medley of Grease hits, like "Beauty School Dropout," while guest star Patrick Swayze could sing his immortal "She's Like the Wind" from Dirty Dancing. Maybe special halftime guest host Barbara Walters could show a teary tribute to Patrick's fight against cancer (with customary soft lighting and flattering camera angles, of course). It would be a tribute to the 70s and 80s. Anything's got to be better than that Night of the Living Rock Dead the NFL wheelchairs up to the stage stumbling, coughing, drooling, and bumming cigarettes from groupies every year.
Question: why can't the most important and widely watched performance of the year include someone even faintly relevant to the 21st Century music scene? The one time when the NFL even remotely tried for an edge, it resulted in a national emergency due to the 9/16 of a second flash of one partially obscured 40 year old nipple. TV can nightly feature rape, murder, incest, and American Idol and no one bats an eyelash, but one fleeting glimpse of a breast apparently heralds the Apocalypse. Every year, the Super Bowl is the most-watched American television show. Outside of a 9/11-style event or a presidential election, its just about the last thing that the country truly comes together for. Just as the game is meant to showcase the greatest teams in the most popular American sport, the entertainment portion should likewise showcase the greatest American musicians in the prime of their careers and and their peak of creativity. Fifty years ago, similar proportions of the country watched the old Ed Sullivan show every Sunday night, and while veteran stars played the show, Sullivan always featured cutting edge artists as the biggest draws. Although Sullivan had a mass audience, he thrived by showing the latest and most important acts, and didn't try to get by on trotting out Judy Garland for the hundredth time. And it worked. Elvis, the Beatles, and the Stones hit big because they were on Sullivan. So why can't the biggest program on TV feature the greatest current stars? You know, whoever the Clash or Sex Pistols of the 2000s is.
Answer: because everyone has the wrong idea about what the Super Bowl really is. The NFL exists for the sole purpose of making money. Nothing else. Its not a charity, its not Masterpiece Theatre, and its not a public institution. Most NFL teams sell most of their game tickets, and certainly the Super Bowl is always a sellout, but by far the NFL's most lucrative revenue is its TV contract, which includes the Super Bowl on a rotating basis. The last TV contract between the NFL and the four networks (ESPN, Fox, CBS, and NBC) resulted in $21.4 billion in revenues, and that's not even counting revenues from the NFL Network, and various satellite packages such as Direct TV. The Super Bowl of course is the cherry on the cake of the NFL season, and therefore, of NFL programming. The most recent game had a 42.0 rating and a 64 share, meaning 64 percent of those watching television were watching the game, and 42 percent of those with TVs were watching. Past games have drawn as high as a 49 rating and 73 share (1987 game, SF vs. Cincinnati). But 98 million people watched, making it the second most watched television program in history.
The demographics, however, are critical to this enterprise. Among adults age 18-49, which are the ones considered to have the most spending power, the game had a 33 rating and 66 share. For adults aged 18-34, the ratings were the highest in 10 years. So the core audience is in the 30-50 age range, and is disproportionately male.
So the whole thing gets programmed that way. Anyone notice the prevalence of Danica Patrick/Go Daddy and beer commercials? Or in past years, the epic Ali Landry Doritos commercial or those of similar ilk? That's no coincidence. This may be a faulty strategy, though, as reports are that this last Super Bowl was watched by more women than any television program in 15 years.
The halftime show fits into that strategy. The NFL doesn't want its 30-50 year old male core audience leaving the show for 30 minutes and risking lower ad revenues for that break. So it goes out of its way to appeal to middle-age man, sitting in his recliner at his boss' party while the women gossip about the new trampy-looking secretary the boss just hired. You know, the guy with beer stains on the Tommy Bahama shirt his wife made him wear, looking for something to wipe the cheetoes residue from his fingers (his wife gets upset when he licks it off his fingers, which is patently unreasonable but that's for another day). 40 year old guy typically isn't interested in the latest thing, but can be persuaded to check out the Boss for the millionth time. The halftime show becomes the TV equivalent of the Summer of George from Seinfeld.
Unfortunately, that strategy deals out a huge portion of the viewing audience. The rednecks don't typically have any interest in Aerosmith or Prince (although in all fairness, they did trot out Faith Hill before the game to lip synch America the Beautiful-they should have just had her stand there for us to watch so the microphone wouldn't have obstructed our view). The brothers aren't so much into U2 or ZZ Top (go figure). Hispanics may have enjoyed Gloria Estafan, but that's about all they've had. Basically its been Up With People in different form or fashion for the entire run. Young people can't have been interested in any of these acts. Let's face it, the average 18 year old has never heard of Tom Petty, or if he has its because its in Dad's CD collection (or Grandpa's album collection).
There's another thing about this that makes no sense. For some bizarre reason, the NFL seems to feel its totally normal to find about 10,000 screaming teenagers, get them hopped up on nyquil and red bull, send them down on the field at halftime with glowsticks, and tell them to jump around like the rave scene in Matrix Reloaded til the music's over. Part of me was looking for the pig's head on a stick. What is going on there?
Happily, though, the NFL has managed to spare us some utter crap in the process. Left to their own devices, it would surely have trotted out Ashlee Simpson, fresh off her Orange Bowl success, or Clay Aiken or Pink or the Jonas Sisters or someone of similar high quality. Maybe on the whole, its better to watch a rocker with a rocker than one of these fine acts.
So maybe having the constant stream of 1970s album rock gods isn't such a bad thing after all. What channel is the Lingerie Bowl on?
Next-STEROIDS!!!
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