We Won Halftime
For what it’s worth, which isn’t nothing.
The Super Bowl was a boring blowout. The Halftime Bowl was a glorious one. Bad Bunny’s show had people fired up, and is expected to have attracted over 130 million viewers. Turning Point USA’s “All American Halftime Show”, headlined by Kid Rock, had about 6 million concurrent views on YouTube.
To put this in context, when the sketch comedy show In Living Color did an alternative halftime show in 1992, they drew over 22 million viewers–one fourth of the total viewers of the Super Bowl. This was also a rebellion against the mainstream culture being celebrated at America’s most watched event. In Living Color was a pioneering Black-led sketch comedy show (featuring a young Jim Carey), while early 90s halftime shows were unbelievably old-timey. Per Wikipedia’s description, the 1992 show:
was titled “Winter Magic”, and featured a celebration to the winter season and the Winter Olympics…The show featured drill teams, professional dancers (including ballroom dancing couples), the 60-piece Minnesota Youth Symphonies, color guards and drill teams from area high schools, and rollerbladers. In addition, Pride of Minnesota marching band performed…
Here’s a video of the show. You don’t have to watch the whole thing (although you should!) but you absolutely have to watch the not-so-tight choreography in the opening 15 seconds, the Frosty the Snowman “rap” at the 5 minute mark.
I’ll wait.
All this is to say that Sunday’s halftime showdown further illustrates the yawning gap between American politics and culture. The hard-right has infiltrated and now fully captured all three branches of federal government, and has been running roughshod over civil liberties and civil society. It has forced Ivy League schools, multi-billion hospital chains, and white shoe law firms to bend the knee. But it still can’t attract even B-list cultural figures. And vice versa for the left.
Am I about to make some wild over-generalizations about the nature of politics and culture? Of course, that’s the whole point of having a Subtack! So here goes.
American culture plays to the strengths of the left in a way that American politics clearly don’t. One reason for this is flattering: artists tend to be creative and sensitive free-thinkers; politicians are shallow and sychophantic dipshits. Another reason is less so: culture is shaped by hipster in-groups and subcultures, where exclusivity isn’t a barrier to success the way it is in politics but actually makes more people desperate to find a way into the new trend. Then there’s the fact that US mass culture is relentlessly youth-oriented, which is kind of shitty as you get older, but on the whole probably makes it left-leaning. Right wing culture, by contrast, is relentlessly nostalgic and resentful, which works much better in rants than songs.
The left-wing politicians who have had the most success have done so as much as cultural figures as political ones. Faced with a system that’s more oligarchy than democracy, Bernie, Ilhan, and AOC have been far less impactful as elected officials than as memes of different expressions of resistance and solidarity. I don’t mean that as an indictment, but some would. These are the leftists who think we are too focused on culture. They correctly note that the left has culture cachet without political power, but conclude that we should ignore our strength without having a credible solution to the structure problems that underlie our weakness.
Let’s take seriously how seriously the Right takes its lack of cultural clout. It really bothers them that most Americans don’t like the culture they like, because it gives lie to their political claim of representing the silent and suppressed White majority. They are much better than us at worming their way into power, through decades of strategic alliances and well-funded plotting, but they still haven’t figured out how to translate this into cultural hegemony.
The most popular artist in the world right now is from a small island colony of the US that has been ravaged by people allied with TPUSA. He sang about it at halftime on Sunday. His musical genre comes from the ska and reggae of neighboring island that was a colony of the previous world hegemon. Like Bob Marley for earlier generations, Bad Bunny’s music is now celebrated around the world, resonating with millions who don’t understand most of his lyrics. That’s horrifying to the fascist worldview.
Lastly, the lines between politics and culture are permeable. The nationwide resistance to ICE has not won political power or even significantly slowed down deportations and detentions, but it has certainly reversed this government’s momentum. We know that from polls, from Democrats being slightly less pathetic, and from our own slightly lifted spirits. The Chapo Trap House guys were speculating on why TPUSA couldn’t get anyone with more cultural relevance to perform at their show. If the Super Bowl took place last September, maybe they could have had Kanye West or Nikki Minaj. That would have sucked right?
By the time you read this, something seriously terrible will have happened, and some people will post how stupid we were for being happy about something as trivial as a halftime show. They’ll be wrong.
We talked about the halftime show in my language studies class this morning! I gave them a prompt about the discourse of Bad Bunny being an "un-American" choice, and then they (with not much resistance) talked me into us watching the whole show so we could also talk about how the show itself engages with the discussions about language & racism
The 1992 SuperBowl show is right out of SCTV…believe me, it was dated even in 1992! But—kudos to those high school orchestral musicians. They are phenomenal!