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Super sundaes
U2 spread a little love at the big game
BY MATT ASHARE

Baseball may be America’s pastime. But everybody knows that football sells more hot dogs and Chevrolets. And so, with each passing year, the Super Bowl gets grander and gaudier and less like a mere sporting contest than an unabashedly narcissistic, all-consuming celebration of our power, wealth, and dominance as a nation. That includes everything from "The Star Spangled Banner" to the unofficial contest to debut the cleverest, slickest, most memorable and outrageous advertisement; and from the pre-game entertainment (this year by our own Boston Pops led by boyish beefcake conductor Keith Lockhart) to the heavily hyped halftime show (the days of the Cal State marching band playing "Yankee Doodle Dandy" while forming an American flag amid baton-twirling bathing-suited beauties are long gone) to the suspense leading up to which player will get to say those million-dollar words "I’m going to Disney World." It’s all pure, unadulterated spectacle of a magnitude that would give Guy Debord a bigger self-satisfied grin than the one Tom Brady wore on his way to the winners’ podium. "The spectacle is capital accumulated to the point where it becomes image," Debord wrote in his treatise The Society of the Spectacle. And, though I still can’t explain what that means, give me a tape of the Super Bowl and I’ll show you.

When it comes to music — and pop music has become as integral to the Super Bowl as the celebrity coin toss — this year’s game delivered. There’s no such thing as overkill when you’re dealing with the Super Bowl, and so we got Sir Paul McCartney, not just singing his freedom song but palling around with Terry Bradshaw in the pre-game booth, where they broke into an impromptu "A Hard Day’s Night." Mary J. Blige and Marc Anthony offered a "stirring tribute to America" by performing "America the Beautiful" with the help of Lockhart and his cohort. But it was an elegantly attired Mariah Carey who stole the show with a radical interpretation of our National Anthem that had more twists and turns than a Marshall Faulk touchdown run, reaching its peak with a note that must have sent dogs running for cover in living rooms across the country. Seriously, I never knew "The Star Spangled Banner" had that many notes.

Not to minimize the action of the game, but after all the preliminary dramatics, you had to figure U2 would have something major planned for halftime. U2 may be one of the savviest bands ever to have played the rock-and-roll game, not just in terms of image awareness and media manipulation but in their deep understanding of the socio-economic forces at work beneath the veneer of large-scale entertainment spectacles. They’ve seen the wizard behind the curtain, and they know they’re not in Dublin anymore. I believe it was John Madden who paternalistically referred to them as a bunch of "good Irish boys," and I’m sure his warm sentiments reflected those of the regular football-watching public — i.e., he was just happy Bono didn’t try any controversial stunts like ripping up a picture of the pope. For his part, Bono knows he’s not going to get Third World debt relief by embarrassing or attacking the powers that be — he’s more likely to succeed by coming across as a "good Irish boy" with an enormous amount of celebrity clout.

So U2 played it straight in what turned out to be a very odd set of circumstances. A Super Bowl halftime show in New Orleans featuring a rock band from Ireland was deemed to be the ideal venue for a tribute to victims of the September 11 terrorist attacks, even though one thing had little or no connection to the other. In fact, the whole halftime show was a commercial for a company called E*Trade, whose logo appeared at the bottom left of the TV screen during U2’s performance. Of course, it was also an ad for U2 the rock band, and Bono and company acquitted themselves admirably on the same heart-shaped stage they toured with, and with a pair of songs ("Beautiful Day" and "Where the Streets Have No Name") performed to a group of mostly young, good-looking women who’d obviously been hand-picked to gather about the stage. And, really, that was the source of my only disappointment. Yeah, the Patriots won, U2 sounded great, and my pets all survived Carey’s assault. But I was hoping to see Bono croon "It’s a beautiful day" to some shirtless, grease-painted football slob with a beer in one hand and a hot dog in the other. I guess that would have been a little too much reality for everyone involved.

Issue Date: February 7 - 14, 2002
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