By Austin Perry
Copyright outkick
If you’re a football fan over the age of 25, there’s a good chance the words “Super Bowl Halftime Performance” mean something to you. Just the mere phrase should evoke memories of brilliant artists bringing down the house in Super Bowls past. Who could forget such legendary halftime shows as Prince melting faces in Miami during a torrential downpour? Or when thousands of fans belted out Bruce Springsteen’s anthemic catalog? Hell, even when the performances weren’t remembered for their musical content, we still had plenty of memorable moments to draw from (see: Justin Timberlake and Janet Jackson’s infamous 2004 wardrobe malfunction). The Super Bowl Halftime Show used to feature artists that were either at the height of the cultural zeitgeist or were legends in their own right and were offered the spot as a sort of “lifetime achievement award.” In the past several years though, the Halftime Shows have gone downhill like a refrigerator on wheels, with snoozefest-worthy performances from “artists” such as Maroon 5 and Kendrick Lamar. This year’s announcement takes the cake for phoning it in, however. Really? Bad Bunny? The guy from those God-awful Corona commercials with Snoop Dogg that were all over our TVs a few years back. Not only is Bad Bunny a massive lib and professed Trump hater (as is everyone in show business these days), but he’s also about the last guy I would expect to headline a show this big. At the risk of sounding like a boomer, there wasn’t anyone else they could have found that would have appealed to their audience? I know Taylor Swift turned the NFL down, which I would still have hated but at least understood, but there are so many legendary bands that are probably licking their chops to play the Super Bowl. The NFL missed a golden opportunity to have arguably the biggest band still touring in Metallica play the Super Bowl in the city where it all started for them (San Francisco). With Eddie Van Halen passing a few years back, I will never achieve my dream of seeing Van Halen play the Halftime Show at the Super Bowl, but Metallica would be the next best thing, in my opinion. If they wanted to keep things contemporary, fine, but you could’ve picked anyone besides Bad Bunny. For Christ’s sake, Sabrina Carpenter is about as hot as it gets right now! Was she not available for 18 minutes in early February? You can clown on me for being an old man all you want, but I’m not alone in expressing these opinions. The NFL has really been dropping the ball with regard to their Halftime Show selections lately, but I think Bad Bunny represents a new low. At least Kendrick Lamar was relevant while he was beefing with Drake during this past Super Bowl. And before you try to educate me on how big Bad Bunny is outside the United States and how this is the NFL trying to reach a wider audience, let me just stop you right there. I am so sick and tired of the NFL “broadening its horizons” at the expense of alienating its core fanbase. Stop it with the globalization of football. This is an American sport, by Americans, for Americans. We don’t need four games in Brazil and six games in Europe, and we damn sure don’t need Bad Bunny bringing in more eyeballs that couldn’t care less about football. On the bright side, this will be yet another halftime where I can run out and grab some snacks for the second half and not miss anything important, just as I’ve been doing for a decade plus now. Sometimes you have to find the silver lining in things, folks!
