Super Bowl, The Jacksons and Man Boobs

superbowlSunday is Super Bowl Sunday — the game that’s more than a game.  I love the Super Bowl.  I assemble all the “that-stuff-will-kill-you” faux food I can find, chill the sugary beverages, realign my ass groove on the sofa and settle in to watch what usually turns out to be just an average game — because every year the Super Bowl is never as good as the month of playoffs that precede it.  Oh, well!  The Super Bowl is still the biggest sporting event in the world.  Sure, piles more people watch World Cup and the Tour de France or even some cricket championship in India, but that doesn’t matter.  The Super Bowl is Numero Uno, the Big Kahuna*.  The one everybody talks about.  But it wasn’t always that way.  It took a lot of refining to turn an ordinary winner-take-all championship game (which wasn’t even taped the first time) into a worldwide phenomenon where over half the people watching don’t even understand the rules.

The history of the Super Bowl can be divided into four distinct eras.

Squeaky Clean Disney — In the beginning, the Super Bowl wasn’t actually all that super.  It was a championship game but no big deal beyond its domestic fan base – boys to men.  There was lots of advertising, but mainly for the regular man stuff like cars and razorblades and aftershave.  The halftime show was based on the college bowl game model — Disney kids and marching bands.  Every once in a while, a recognizable name got thrown in there, but most fans took the halftime opportunity to go to the bathroom or the fridge for more beer.  That was it, and it stayed that way until 1993 when Michael Jackson showed up.

Michael Jackson and Friends — The news that Michael Jackson would perform at Super Bowl XXVII shot the expected TV ratings through the stratosphere.  Suddenly, everybody wanted their advertising front and centre, and they weren’t about to waste that placement on some lame old commercial.  Unique Super Bowl ads had been around for a while, but Michael turned them into an art form.  And he didn’t disappoint: Super Bowl XXVII was one of the most watched events in television history.

For the next ten years, the Super Bowl halftime show read like a Who’s Who from Billboard — Tony Bennett, Britney Spears, Stevie Wonder, Phil Collins etc. etc.  Even U2 did a solo concert!  The domestic TV audience began reaching for 100 million, and worldwide it went off the charts.  Ads became bolder, flashier and funnier as modern Mad Men went after this audience.  In 2003, The Dixie Chicks sang the National Anthem, the Tampa Bay Buccaneers knocked the snot out of the Raiders 48-21, and Shania Twain and Sting entertained everybody in sight.  Market share and ad revenues were the largest in history.  All was well with the world — or so it seemed.

Janet Jackson and “Man Boobs” — In 2004, Super Bowl XXXVIII threatened to be a complete snooze.  New England was clearly a better team than Carolina.  And the halftime show featured Janet Jackson, the aging sister of a spooky superstar, and Justin Timberlake, the lead singer of the non-threatening boy band ‘N Sync.  However, as Gomer Pyle used to say; “Surprise! Surprise! Surprise!”  Not only did the game turn into one of the best in history, but Janet and Justin put on a bit of a show themselves.  Does the term “wardrobe malfunction” mean anything to you?  Janet and Justin’s halftime presentation of Janet’s 38-year-old breast shocked a lot of people and scared the crap out of the NFL, CBS and the American federal government.  Family entertainment had been assaulted; those two crazy kids had put billions of ad dollars in jeopardy.  OOPS!  The boys down at Super Bowl Central needed to fix things without going back to boring old “squeaky clean Disney,” but which contemporary entertainer could they trust?  Hip Hop?  Rappers?  Not a chance!  They came up with a brilliant solution – man boobs!  They got male entertainers so old they wouldn’t dare take their clothes off!

For the next six years, Super Bowl fans were subjected to some of the greatest names in Geriatric Rock.  The list is impressive: from Paul McCartney (who was born two years before D Day) to The Who (where half the original band was already dead.)  Even Prince, the youngest of the crowd, was pushing fifty so hard he could see the pension plan from there.  Combine that with Springsteen, The Stones and Tom Petty, and it looked like the nursing homes of Cleveland were having a 2-for-1 sale. But here’s the deal.  It worked!  The audience grew.  It’s amazing how nostalgia and half-naked Go Daddy ads can prop up a mediocre sporting event.  Then Madonna came along.

Safe Sex —  Madonna may have been everybody’s bad girl at some point, but in 2012, chances were good she’d at least keep her clothes on.  After all, she was old enough to be Tom Brady’s m-m-m — older sister.  Unfortunately, nobody vouched for M.I.A., Madonna’s on-stage buddy, who gave over a billion people the finger during, “Give Me All Your Luvin’.”  This time, the NFL went through the roof and sued M.I.A. for something in the neighbourhood of 16 million dollars.  Ouch!

These days, the Super Bowl halftime show might show a lot of skin and have a few suggestive gestures, but with the NFL lawyers standing guard, it pretty much sticks to the safe sex of Bruno Mars and Katy Perry dancing with awkward sharks.  Even Beyonce kept it clean enough to get invited back.  And this is the way it’s going to be for the foreseeable future.

*Just to show you what a big deal the Super Bowl is, notice I didn’t mention “football” once!

Groundhog Day (not the movie)

groundhogToday, in North America, it’s Groundhog Day.  For the uninitiated, Groundhog Day is one of those folksy occasions when everybody from Malibu to Manhattan pretends we all still live in villages.  The irony is it’s almost exclusively a mass media event, and although some of us might see it on TV, the vast majority mostly miss it and literally nobody I’ve ever even heard of has participated in person.  Here’s the deal.

There’s no heavy tradition behind Groundhog Day.  It was born and raised in the mind of Clymer H. Freas, a newspaper editor in Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania.  Sometime in the 1880s, he cobbled together some German folklore into a midwinter event that would bring local people into his town to spend money.  From there, it swept across North America until it became woven into the fabric of our society.  That’s it!

So, on February 2nd, all over the continent, various local notables trot out a groundhog or a reasonable facsimile (Alaska uses a marmot: New Orleans, a coypu.) the cameras roll and everybody waits to see what happens.  According the Groundhog Day rules, if the groundhog sees his shadow (a sunny day) he will be frightened, go back into his den (cage) and there will be six more weeks of winter.  However, if he doesn’t see his shadow (a cloudy day) he’ll hang out for a while and spring is on the way.  There is absolute no mention of hordes of people scaring the crap out of him, or what happens if he’s a tough little bastard and shadows don’t scare him.  Meteorology by rodent is obviously not an exact science.

However, trying to explain the apathetic popularity of Groundhog Day to someone who didn’t grow up with it is like trying to explain baseball to a Borneo head hunter or McDonalds to the French.  They look at you like a Labrador puppy trying to figure out “Fetch!” (It’s the head tilt.)

But, despite the fact that virtually nobody in North America really cares about Groundhog Day — nobody wishes anybody “Happy Groundhog Day,” nobody marks it on the calendar (as in, “I don’t want to miss that action!”) or even makes any effort to attend the various ceremonies — we all still know about it, talk about it, and understand it.  It’s like Kim Kardashian’s bum: it exists in our collective consciousness, but for no apparent reason.  And that’s the magic of North American culture: most of it simply exists, without explanation, and Groundhog Day is a perfect example.

What A Week!

statueWow!  For a regular, low sun, mid winter, stay-at-home-and-eat-soup week, a lot of stuff happened in the world.

It turns out Vladimir Putin, the guy who does mean bastard even in his sleep, was accused of accumulating (“stealing” is such a hard word) tons of money — billions, apparently.  Think about it!  “Russian Oligarchy” has been a cliché for ruthless corruption ever since Boris Yeltsin discovered Smirnoff, and this is news?  I don’t think so!  If it was reported Putin was actually poor and was doing all his various vicious dictator stuff for free — that would be news.

Barbie now has three new sizes: curvy, petite and tall.  Excellent marketing ploy by Mattel. Now little girls will be able to understand the total frustration of not being able to buy any cool clothes — that actually fit — long before they have to face that for real, as adults.

The world has gotten just a little grumpier.  Facebook decided that we don’t have to automatically “Like” everything we set our eyes on, anymore.  Apparently, Mark Zuckerberg thinks his customers are now mature enough to handle a few other emotions.  They are (or will be) Love, Haha, Wow, Sad, and Angry.  When journalists asked when these new emotions will be available (as in, “Are we there, yet?”)  Zuckerberg answered, “Preettty soooon!”

And finally:

When it comes to WTF moments, nothing beats the Italian government covering up nude statues because the Iranian leader, Hassan Rouhani, showed up in Rome for a visit.  It seems Iranian politicos don’t like what goes on under our clothes, so the Italians chose to accommodate them.  It’s like saying, “Yeah, we had this thing called the Renaissance, but if it bothers you, we’ll just shut up about it.”  No big deal, really.  After all, the Iranians have promised they don’t want to nuke us anymore, and besides, the last time Europe took a Moslem threat seriously was the Battle of Lepanto in 1571.  The thing that blows me away, though, is there was no media outcry, no blogosphere explosion, no #ain’titawful on Twitter and not one arts organization — from the Ural Mountains to the Atlantic Ocean — got up on its hind legs and said, “Hold it!  That’s the foundation of Western culture you’re messing with.”  So much for artistic integrity!

What a week!  I’m sure glad tomorrow’s Saturday.