{"id":551245,"date":"2023-02-13T07:07:33","date_gmt":"2023-02-13T04:07:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/en.buradabiliyorum.com\/critics-notebook-in-super-bowl-halftime-performance-rihanna-opts-for-cohesiveness-over-chaos\/"},"modified":"2023-02-13T07:07:33","modified_gmt":"2023-02-13T04:07:33","slug":"critics-notebook-in-super-bowl-halftime-performance-rihanna-opts-for-cohesiveness-over-chaos","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/critics-notebook-in-super-bowl-halftime-performance-rihanna-opts-for-cohesiveness-over-chaos\/","title":{"rendered":"#Critic\u2019s Notebook: In Super Bowl Halftime Performance, Rihanna Opts for Cohesiveness Over Chaos"},"content":{"rendered":"<div id=\"ez-toc-container\" class=\"ez-toc-v2_0_85 counter-hierarchy ez-toc-counter ez-toc-custom ez-toc-container-direction\">\n<p class=\"ez-toc-title\" style=\"cursor:inherit\">Table of Contents<\/p>\n<label for=\"ez-toc-cssicon-toggle-item-6a4dfd3b9bf27\" class=\"ez-toc-cssicon-toggle-label\"><span class=\"\"><span class=\"eztoc-hide\" style=\"display:none;\">Toggle<\/span><span class=\"ez-toc-icon-toggle-span\"><svg style=\"fill: #dd3333;color:#dd3333\" xmlns=\"http:\/\/www.w3.org\/2000\/svg\" class=\"list-377408\" width=\"20px\" height=\"20px\" viewBox=\"0 0 24 24\" fill=\"none\"><path d=\"M6 6H4v2h2V6zm14 0H8v2h12V6zM4 11h2v2H4v-2zm16 0H8v2h12v-2zM4 16h2v2H4v-2zm16 0H8v2h12v-2z\" fill=\"currentColor\"><\/path><\/svg><svg style=\"fill: #dd3333;color:#dd3333\" class=\"arrow-unsorted-368013\" xmlns=\"http:\/\/www.w3.org\/2000\/svg\" width=\"10px\" height=\"10px\" viewBox=\"0 0 24 24\" version=\"1.2\" baseProfile=\"tiny\"><path d=\"M18.2 9.3l-6.2-6.3-6.2 6.3c-.2.2-.3.4-.3.7s.1.5.3.7c.2.2.4.3.7.3h11c.3 0 .5-.1.7-.3.2-.2.3-.5.3-.7s-.1-.5-.3-.7zM5.8 14.7l6.2 6.3 6.2-6.3c.2-.2.3-.5.3-.7s-.1-.5-.3-.7c-.2-.2-.4-.3-.7-.3h-11c-.3 0-.5.1-.7.3-.2.2-.3.5-.3.7s.1.5.3.7z\"\/><\/svg><\/span><\/span><\/label><input type=\"checkbox\"  id=\"ez-toc-cssicon-toggle-item-6a4dfd3b9bf27\" checked aria-label=\"Toggle\" \/><nav><ul class='ez-toc-list ez-toc-list-level-1 ' ><li class='ez-toc-page-1 ez-toc-heading-level-1'><a class=\"ez-toc-link ez-toc-heading-1\" href=\"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/critics-notebook-in-super-bowl-halftime-performance-rihanna-opts-for-cohesiveness-over-chaos\/#Critics_Notebook_In_Super_Bowl_Halftime_Performance_Rihanna_Opts_for_Cohesiveness_Over_Chaos\" >Critic\u2019s Notebook: In Super Bowl Halftime Performance, Rihanna Opts for Cohesiveness Over Chaos<\/a><\/li><\/ul><\/nav><\/div>\n<h1><span class=\"ez-toc-section\" id=\"Critics_Notebook_In_Super_Bowl_Halftime_Performance_Rihanna_Opts_for_Cohesiveness_Over_Chaos\"><\/span>Critic\u2019s Notebook: In Super Bowl Halftime Performance, Rihanna Opts for Cohesiveness Over Chaos<span class=\"ez-toc-section-end\"><\/span><\/h1>\n<div>\n<p class=\"paragraph larva \/\/  a-font-body-m     \">\n    Will the NFL, Rihanna and <a href=\"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/category\/download-scripts-themes-apps\/\" data-internallinksmanager029f6b8e52c=\"9\" title=\"Download Scripts &amp; Themes &amp; Apps\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">App<\/a>le Music think that I\u2019m being critical when I call the halftime show at Sunday\u2019s Super Bowl LVII one of the most cohesive in the <a href=\"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/category\/game\/\" data-internallinksmanager029f6b8e52c=\"7\" title=\"Game\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">game<\/a>\u2019s history?<\/p>\n<p class=\"paragraph larva \/\/  a-font-body-m     \">\n    Nobody thinks of \u201ccohesive\u201d as being an especially effusive adjective, nor has the Super Bowl halftime show ever really aspired to cohesion. You know why? Because cohesion doesn\u2019t move the needle. Cohesion is uniform and consistent, and the Super Bowl halftime show is usually all about the moments that stem from \u201cHoly crap!\u201d deviations.<\/p>\n<p class=\"paragraph larva \/\/  a-font-body-m     \">\n    That\u2019s why most of the more recent halftime spectaculars have had a headliner, and then they\u2019ve had surprising or unsurprising guest stars, sometimes from completely incompatible genres or with head-scratching disparities in star power. Like, I know it was the 50th Super Bowl, but how the blazes did we have a year in which Coldplay was the top of the bill and then Beyonc\u00e9 and Bruno Mars were just lending support?<\/p>\n<p class=\"paragraph larva \/\/  a-font-body-m     \">\n    Sometimes the orchestrated chaos of the halftime show doesn\u2019t require a guest or 10. Sometimes it can involve a huge mid-performance stage change or influx of new background singers or dancers. Sometimes it can include a dynamic costume change (or failed costume change) or a wild stunt or technological innovation.<\/p>\n<p class=\"paragraph larva \/\/  a-font-body-m     \">\n    Orchestrated chaos is a good way of making everybody in the year\u2019s largest TV audience feel invested, of working as many genres as possible into one 10-minute performance. And sometimes it\u2019s just fun.<\/p>\n<p class=\"paragraph larva \/\/  a-font-body-m     \">\n    Last year\u2019s halftime show, which featured five headliners \u2014 Dr. Dre, Snoop, Eminem, Mary J. Blige and Kendrick Lamar, plus guest appearances by 50 Cent and Anderson .Paak \u2014 entailed rearranging pieces of the stage and ushering in and out different groups of dancers, and then there was whatever was happening with 50 Cent\u2019s entrance. It was ambitious and all over the place to the degree that I constantly felt like I was pitting one act against the others, as if there would be a winner crowned at the end of the performance.<\/p>\n<p class=\"paragraph larva \/\/  a-font-body-m     \">\n    The winner at the end of Rihanna\u2019s halftime performance was \u2026 anybody at home who wanted to watch a 10-minute snippet from a Rihanna concert, a wholly reasonable desire given that Rihanna hasn\u2019t done a live performance in over five years. The pervasive narrative leading up to the Super Bowl was about this being her \u201ccomeback,\u201d with secondary narratives relating to which of her myriad collaborators would make the <a href=\"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/category\/trip-and-travel\/\" data-internallinksmanager029f6b8e52c=\"10\" title=\"Trip &amp; Travel\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">trip<\/a> to Arizona to offer onstage support. Some of the speculation made sense and some was just delirious wish-casting. What were REALLY the odds that Tom Holland would show up to dance along to \u201cUmbrella\u201d in homage to his eternally viral lip-synching cover of the song? Low! But would it have made people happy? Some! More importantly, would it have contributed directly to a spike in <a href=\"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/category\/social-mediaa\/\" data-internallinksmanager029f6b8e52c=\"1\" title=\"Social Media\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">social media<\/a> responses to the show? Heck yes.<\/p>\n<p class=\"paragraph larva \/\/  a-font-body-m     \">\n    This was not that kind of show.<\/p>\n<p class=\"paragraph larva \/\/  a-font-body-m     \">\n    There were no guest stars. Zero. That means no unexpected chorus of children and no Kanye West when Rihanna sang \u201cAll of the Lights.\u201d I believe we can all be eternally grateful for the latter. Given how many of the songs Rihanna performed had some collaborative element, this was still probably a minor surprise.<\/p>\n<p class=\"paragraph larva \/\/  a-font-body-m     \">\n    Rihanna only wore one costume, a red number with a shiny rubber or plastic bustle, designed I have to assume by the same tailors who made the very similar Imperial Royal Guard outfits from <em>Return of the Jedi<\/em>. (Disclaimer: I am not a music critic or a fashion critic, but I am a geek.) It was a versatile outfit, capable of hiding a support cable and of causing roughly 85 percent of viewers to Google \u201cIs Rihanna pregnant again?\u201d (It turns out she is.)<\/p>\n<p class=\"paragraph larva \/\/  a-font-body-m     \">\n    That question probably had tongues wagging, as did Rihanna\u2019s entrance on one of several unidentified floating objects that we should all be relieved the military didn\u2019t shoot down. But if anybody was wondering, \u201cOK, so now how will she top that?\u201d the answer was, \u201cShe really didn\u2019t.\u201d<\/p>\n<p class=\"paragraph larva \/\/  a-font-body-m     \">\n    What Rihanna did was work her way through a catalog that\u2019s pretty absurdly full, especially for a singer who\u2019s only 34 and hasn\u2019t realized an album of new material in years. She started with \u201cBitch Better Have My Money\u201d \u2014 the jauntily threatening classic that lost its edge by being upstaged by the lowering of those floating platforms \u2014 and \u201cOnly Girl\u201d and then closed with powerhouse chunks of \u201cWork,\u201d \u201cAll of the Lights,\u201d \u201cRun This Town,\u201d \u201cUmbrella\u201d and Diamonds.\u201d<\/p>\n<p class=\"paragraph larva \/\/  a-font-body-m     \">\n    She was surrounded by the same troupe of dancers throughout, a remarkably synchronized ensemble that stretched across much of the field, even if we inevitably spent most of our time looking at the couple dozen dancers in white-hooded tracksuits who were surrounding Rihanna throughout. They obscured the reality that while she was moving, she wasn\u2019t exactly doing much choreography herself.<\/p>\n<p class=\"paragraph larva \/\/  a-font-body-m     \">\n    What Rihanna was doing, in addition to sometimes singing and sometimes leaning on the backing track, was emoting directly to the camera like the ultra-charismatic star and actress \u2014 You say, \u201c<em>Battleship<\/em>!\u201d I say, \u201c<em>Bates Motel<\/em>!\u201d \u2014 she is. From the first second of the performance to the last, Rihanna was consistently conscious of the cameras and of her angles. And while that seems like the most obvious thing possible for a performer to do, that is definitely not true of your typical Super Bowl halftime show, where there\u2019s so much happening that the directors are mostly attempting to keep up, to make sure that every artist gets their couple of seconds of screen time, that every ultra-expensive augmentation of the stage or expanded use of the field gets attention.<\/p>\n<p class=\"paragraph larva \/\/  a-font-body-m     \">\n    Mostly, the camera was just on Rihanna. Her band got a couple of close-ups. Were they actually playing anything live? Dunno. But they were there! The dancers got a showcase but, rather than highlighting individual pockets of greatness, the emphasis was on showing how uniform \u2014 or \u201ccohesive\u201d \u2014 the dancing was. The result might have been less of that sense of crazy spectacle that you can sometimes get from a halftime show. As the performance moved toward its climax, there were fireworks and people in the crowd had glowsticks or something, but there really wasn\u2019t much awe generated. No \u201cOh cool!\u201d No \u201cHow did they do that?\u201d<\/p>\n<p class=\"paragraph larva \/\/  a-font-body-m     \">\n    Instead, what impressed me was primarily how the camera was always in the right place at the right time \u2014 a precision that you don\u2019t normally get from live shows of this scale. The overall choreography \u2014 not just the dancers, but where everything was taking place within the multiple platforms of the stages \u2014 was so superb that you could get occasional flourishes like the moment the camera pulled back from Rihanna and did a full-scale loop-the-loop, going upside down and soaring up into the air. We\u2019ve had a couple of years in a row in which the direction of the halftime show has leaned so heavily into drone-fu that it was a huge relief to see either that the drones have achieved enough proficiency not to draw attention to themselves or that more of the camerawork is driven by wires and cranes and smooth Steadicam.<\/p>\n<p class=\"paragraph larva \/\/  a-font-body-m     \">\n    One song built to the next and then built to the next. There wasn\u2019t one micro-performance that I found especially remarkable, nor was there one that was such a dud that I got angry she didn\u2019t do\u2026 dunno\u2026 \u201cWhat\u2019s My Name?\u201d instead.<\/p>\n<p class=\"paragraph larva \/\/  a-font-body-m     \">\n    So you might have wanted Tom Holland or Jay-Z. You might have craved a surprise debut of a new song. You might have hoped to see something you\u2019d never seen before in a sports-adjacent performance (the floating platform stuff was pretty neat). You might have craved something that felt spontaneous and unplanned, though sometimes that leads to decades of controversies and threats of FCC action. This was not that.<\/p>\n<p class=\"paragraph larva \/\/  a-font-body-m     \">\n    I don\u2019t require or reward \u201csmooth\u201d and \u201cprecise\u201d and \u201ccohesive\u201d all the time. But tonight, I had no objections.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<p><script type=\"text\/plain\" class=\"optanon-category-C0004\">\n!function(f, b, e, v, n, t, s) {\nif (f.fbq) return;\nn = f.fbq = function() {n.callMethod ? n.callMethod.apply(n, arguments) : n.queue.push(arguments);};\nif (!f._fbq) f._fbq = n;\nn.push = n;\nn.loaded = !0;\nn.version = '2.0';\nn.queue = [];\nt = b.createElement(e);\nt.async = !0;\nt.src = v;\ns = b.getElementsByTagName(e)[0];\ns.parentNode.insertBefore(t, s);\n}(window, document, 'script', 'https:\/\/connect.facebook.net\/en_US\/fbevents.js');\nfbq('init', '352999048212581');\nfbq('track', 'PageView');\n<\/script><\/p>\n<blockquote><p><strong><span style=\"color: #ff6600;\">If you liked the article, do not forget to share it with your friends. Follow us on\u00a0<span style=\"color: #ff0000;\"><a style=\"color: #ff0000;\" href=\"https:\/\/news.google.com\/publications\/CAAqBwgKMLG0nwswvr63Aw\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow noopener noreferrer\">Google News<\/a><\/span>\u00a0too, click on the star and choose us from your favorites.<\/span><\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<blockquote>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\">For forums sites go to <span style=\"color: #ff9900;\"><a style=\"color: #ff9900;\" href=\"https:\/\/forum.buradabiliyorum.com\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Forum.BuradaBiliyorum.Com<\/a><\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<blockquote>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><strong>If you want to read more Like this articles, you can visit our <span style=\"color: #ff9900;\"><a style=\"color: #ff9900;\" href=\"https:\/\/en.buradabiliyorum.com\/social-media\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Social Media category.<\/a><\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p><span style=\"color: black;\"><a style=\"color: #ff9900;\" href=\"https:\/\/www.hollywoodreporter.com\/tv\/tv-reviews\/rihanna-super-bowl-halftime-show-review-1235323415\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Source<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Critic\u2019s Notebook: In Super Bowl Halftime Performance, Rihanna Opts for Cohesiveness Over Chaos Will the NFL, Rihanna and Apple Music think that I\u2019m being critical when I call the halftime show at Sunday\u2019s Super Bowl LVII one of the most cohesive in the game\u2019s history? Nobody thinks of \u201ccohesive\u201d as being an especially effusive adjective,&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":551246,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/www.hollywoodreporter.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/02\/GettyImages-1465428184.jpg?w=1024","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[17],"tags":[70876,139168,139810,139169],"class_list":["post-551245","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-social-mediaa","tag-rihanna","tag-super-bowl-2023","tag-super-bowl-halftime-show","tag-super-bowl-lvii"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/551245","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=551245"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/551245\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/551246"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=551245"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=551245"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=551245"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}