Was three seconds of Janet Jackson’s breast really that offensive? That’s what I kept asking myself on Sunday as I watched one of the two or three most important bands of my musical development put on the most pathetic Super Bowl halftime show I’ve ever seen. I know that the NFL and CBS have been trying to play it safe since Janet’s “wardrobe malfunction” in 2004, but it’s gotten to the point where enough is enough. These boomer-centric halftime shows play to the worst aspects of football fandom—they’re almost the musical equivalent of the 50-year-old guy at your Super Bowl party who never let go of his high-school football glory and still makes sure everybody at the party is made aware of the fact that he could throw the ball better than Peyton Manning even at his age.
Look, I like the Who as much as anybody. I took up the drums when I was 11 because my dad played me Who’s Next and Tommy and I was blown away by Keith Moon. I love Quadrophenia and The Who Sell Out and the early, “My Generation”-era material. For my money, there wasn’t a better or more consistent rock band working in the late 1960s. I get, at least in theory, why they were picked to play the Super Bowl. Like U2, Paul McCartney, the Rolling Stones, Prince, Tom Petty, and Bruce Springsteen, the Who have a handful of songs that the majority of the billion-or-so people who watch this game worldwide will actually know. Two of the songs they played last night have been “CSI” theme songs. The scream at the end of “Won’t Get Fooled Again” sounds great in network promos leading up to the game. The idea of the Who playing this show is a perfectly reasonable one, on paper.
I’m not even going to hold the whole two-original-members-are-dead thing against Roger Daltrey and Pete Townshend either. Sure, Keith Moon and John Entwhistle are probably the best rhythm section in rock history, but bassists and drummers can be replaced more easily than lead singers. It’s not like they tried to replace Jim Morrison with the guy from the Cult. Remember when the Doors tried to reunite and actually had to change their name to Riders on the Storm because of legal issues? The Who haven’t quite sunk to that level yet. But their Super Bowl performance gave them a hard push in that direction.
The show was bad enough that it somehow offset the considerable awesomeness of the LED-lighted stage. I was actually in physical pain watching Roger Daltrey, quite possibly my favorite rock vocalist of all time, barely get through “Baba O’Riley” and “Who Are You,” and I had to physically restrain myself from walking out of the room to avoid hearing him attempt the “Won’t Get Fooled Again” scream. I swear his voice wasn’t completely shot when I saw them three years ago. One of the drawbacks of having two members of your band be replaced by sidemen is that the two remaining original members have to carry the show by themselves. If Entwhistle were still alive, they could have at least pretended that this was a real band. But when all the focus is on Pete and Roger, there’s nothing to hide the fact that they just don’t have it anymore.
But as sad as this display was, I wouldn’t be this mad about it if it weren’t part of a bigger problem. Namely, how much longer is the NFL going to keep doing this? At this point they’ve used up most of the A-list classic-rock names. The only major one I can think of that still hasn’t played the Super Bowl yet is AC/DC (which, by the way, I wouldn’t be against in the slightest). Are they really going to try to trot out the Eagles, or Journey and their YouTube replacement singer? In a way, the league’s reaction to Nipplegate did the service of moving the format of the halftime show back to a rock-oriented single-band performance. But the part I don’t get is why the bands they book are required to have AARP memberships. I recently watched the entire 2004 halftime show on YouTube, and even the more pathetic performances of the dinosaur-rock renaissance (meaning the Who and the Stones) are more enjoyable than the non-Janet stuff from that year—I could do without hearing Nelly and Kid Rock performing one-minute versions of their hits in any future halftime shows. But can we please get some younger bands? Certainly Muse would be up to the task. Green Day is probably too politically risky to ever happen, but they’d be a great fit as well. The NFL ran a terrific ad during the game featuring “Wake Up”—is there any reason at all why Arcade Fire couldn’t pull this gig off? The most qualified person to do it right now is Lady Gaga, but Roger Goodell would sooner let Kanye West and Taylor Swift on his stage together than book anyone with Gaga’s potential for a PR disaster.
Roger, Janet’s nipple had that star thing over it! And it was on TV for literally two seconds. You can see way worse stuff any night of the week on network TV. So now might be the time to stop pretending to take the moral high ground and not put us through another performance like this one.
