Rap Takes Over Super Bowl Halftime, Balancing Celebration and Protest

Main as much as Sunday’s Tremendous Bowl halftime present, a lot ado was revamped the truth that this might be the primary yr that hip-hop occupied the center of the concert. It was advertising and marketing copy that missed the obvious lateness of the achievement — that rap was lastly getting the highlight in maybe the 20-somethingth yr of hip-hop occupying the middle of American pop music. Does progress this delayed nonetheless rely as a breakthrough?

After a number of years of grappling with an assortment of racial controversies, the N.F.L. seemingly wished credit score for showcasing Black music — particularly hip-hop, the lingua franca of American popular culture — this prominently. What would a few of rap music’s generational superstars — Dr. Dre, Eminem, Snoop Dogg, Kendrick Lamar — titans with little concern for his or her reputations, do with this most seen of platforms?

The tales informed on the SoFi Stadium subject Sunday night time have been multilayered, a dynamic efficiency sprawling atop a moat of potential political land mines. In the principle, there was exuberant leisure, a medley of hits so central to American pop that it virtually warded off dissent.

Dr. Dre opened up the efficiency behind a mock mixing board, a nod to the foundation of his superstar: the flexibility to mastermind sound. For the following 12 minutes, vivid and thumping hits adopted, together with “The Subsequent Episode,” a wiry collaboration between Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg, carrying a blue bandanna-themed sweatsuit; “California Love” (mercifully, delivered and not using a hologram of Tupac Shakur, as some had rumored); Eminem’s stadium-shaking “Lose Your self”; Lamar’s pugnacious and proud “Alright”; and a pair of songs from Mary J. Blige, the lone singer on the invoice.

50 Cent, hanging the wrong way up from the ceiling of the set, was an unannounced visitor, performing his breakout hit “In Da Membership,” certainly one of Dr. Dre’s seminal productions. (This was virtually actually essentially the most bleeped halftime present ever.)

The performances have been virtually uniformly wonderful. Lamar was gorgeous — ecstatically liquid in circulation, transferring his physique with jagged vigor. Snoop Dogg was assured past measure, a veteran of high-pressure consolation. Eminem, insular as ever, nonetheless emanated strong rigidity. Blige was commanding, serving to to convey the center section of the present into sluggish focus with a joyous “Household Affair” and “No Extra Drama,” wealthy with purple ache. And Dr. Dre beamed all through, a maestro surveying the spoils of the many years he spent reorchestrating the form and texture of pop.

However the true battles of this halftime present have been between enthusiasm and cynicism, censorship and protest, the amplification of Black performers on this stage and the stifling of Black voices in numerous levels of protest in opposition to the N.F.L. Simply a few weeks in the past, the N.F.L. was sued by the former Miami Dolphins head coach Brian Flores who stated he had confronted discriminatory hiring practices.

This halftime present, which scanned as an oasis of racial comity if not fairly progressivism, was the third orchestrated as a part of a partnership between the N.F.L. and Jay-Z’s leisure and sports activities firm, Roc Nation, that was struck within the wake of the kneeling protests spawned by Colin Kaepernick in 2016.

“It’s loopy that it took all of this time for us to be acknowledged,” Dr. Dre stated on the recreation’s official information convention final week, underscoring that the N.F.L. basically selected to attend till hip-hop had turn into oldies music — aside from Lamar, all of the artists Sunday had their business and artistic peaks greater than a decade in the past — to be able to grant it full rein on its largest stage.

The N.F.L. is notoriously protecting of its territory, and mishaps on the halftime present — Janet Jackson’s wardrobe malfunction, M.I.A.’s center finger — have tended to trigger outsized public brouhahas. Halftime could be one of many final levels on this nation the place hip-hop nonetheless seems like outsider music, amplifying the sense that the pursuits of the league and of the performers won’t have been totally aligned.

This yr’s occasion additionally passed off in Inglewood, simply 20 minutes west of Compton, the place Dr. Dre was a founding father of N.W.A, one of the necessary hip-hop teams of all time, godfathers of gangster rap and agit-pop legends. Compton was embedded into the stage setup: the buildings included indicators for its numerous landmarks, together with Tam’s Burgers, Dale’s Donuts, and the nightclub Eve After Darkish, the place Dr. Dre used to carry out along with his first group, World Class Wreckin’ Cru. The dances, from Crip-walking to krumping, have been Los Angeles particular. Three classic Chevrolet Impalas served as visible nods to lowrider tradition. Lamar carried out his section atop an enormous aerial {photograph} of town.

Every of these nods felt salient and potent, a approach to make this impossibly world occasion really feel deeply native. But it surely wasn’t clear if the renegade political spirit that was a hip-hop hallmark when Dr. Dre was nonetheless a member of N.W.A would additionally make an look in the course of the present.

A number of hours earlier than the sport started, Puck Information reported that Eminem, the present’s lone white performer, had proposed taking a knee in the course of the set, and was denied by the N.F.L. It had the texture of a pre-manufactured controversy, the form of leak engineered merely to be refuted.

And so there was Eminem, rapping “Alternative comes as soon as in a lifetime” on the finish of “Lose Your self,” placing his proper hand to his head, and dropping down on his left knee whereas Dr. Dre sat at a white piano and tapped out a melody acquainted from Tupac’s “I Ain’t Mad at Cha” — a flash of radicalism and a jolt of class, a pushback and an embrace, an implicit raised fist and a wink. And after the present was over, an N.F.L. spokesman said that the league knew all alongside that Eminem would kneel. Is it nonetheless protest if it’s been signed off on and authorized?