Rap Takes Center Stage at the 2022 Super Bowl Halftime Show

Sunday night’s performance—featuring Dr. Dre, Snoop Dogg, Mary J. Blige, Eminem, and Kendrick Lamar—was one of the best in recent memory.
Kendrick Lamar Eminem Dr. Dre 50 Cent Mary J. Blige and Snoop Dogg perform during the Pepsi Super Bowl LVI Halftime Show...
It took far too long for the N.F.L. to emphasize rap, but it’s hard to think of a better or more influential group of musicians to represent the genre.Photograph by Ronald Martinez / Getty

Ah, the National Football League—an organization long admired for its progressive, scrupulous, and moralistic approach to race, money, player safety, public health, and popular music. Not! When this year’s halftime show was announced, with Dr. Dre, Snoop Dogg, Mary J. Blige, Eminem, and Kendrick Lamar performing, the lineup felt both thrilling—each artist is a titan—and deeply strange. Why hadn’t this—a halftime show centered on rap—happened already? Instead it was arriving years after rap had established itself as the most commercially dominant force in American music, and right in the midst of several racially fraught years for the N.F.L., during which the league has been repeatedly called to account for its mistreatment of Black players and coaches.

For all of the halftime show’s absurdity—and it is unfailingly absurd, a feral and frenzied twelve to fifteen minutes in which a beloved performer often lip-synchs, receives guests, performs a feverish medley of every hit they’ve ever produced, changes clothes, cues pyrotechnics, and occasionally straps into a harness and catches a crystal-covered football—it can still feel like a kind of cultural X-ray, revealing various fissures and biases in the way that we think about music and celebrity. This was perhaps most obvious in 2004, when Janet Jackson was mercilessly pilloried for briefly exposing a small part of her breast. What is considered obscene or beyond the pale in a performance context can change in ways that are hard to predict, but the pearl-clutching over Jackson’s so-called wardrobe malfunction felt especially preposterous and cruel. Les Moonves, a C.E.O. at Viacom, banned Jackson’s work from its many media properties (including CBS, VH1, and MTV). She was disinvited to appear at the Grammys. A statue of Mickey Mouse wearing Jackson’s iconic all-black outfit from the “Rhythm Nation” video was removed from Disney World. (Ironically, YouTube was apparently founded when Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, and Jawed Karim couldn’t easily locate footage of the incident online; as Jackson languished, a multibillion-dollar empire was born.)

But which artists are forced to go through the morality wringer and suffer endlessly for it? Several of the members of this year’s lineup have a history of lyrics promoting misogyny and homophobia. In 1991, Dr. Dre attacked the hip-hop journalist Dee Barnes, reportedly grabbing her hair and slamming her against a wall; he was cavalier about the incident in an interview with Rolling Stone, telling the writer Alan Light, “I just did it, you know. Ain’t nothing you can do now by talking about it. Besides, it ain’t no big thing—I just threw her through a door.” The ghastliness of that quote has haunted Dre, who has repeatedly and earnestly apologized—but, unlike Jackson’s brief and seemingly unintentional flash of skin, it did very little to derail his career.

Since 2019, Roc Nation, an entertainment company founded by the rapper Jay-Z, has co-produced the halftime show; the partnership, announced some time after Colin Kaepernick was shunned by the N.F.L. for kneeling during the national anthem, caused some consternation. Desiree Perez, the C.E.O. of Roc Nation, recently told the L.A. Times that the company felt it could better facilitate progress by working directly with the league. “As long as we can go in and do things they would not normally do—if we can reach people that we normally wouldn’t reach with a message—then that for us is success,” she said. This is not an uncommon justification, and perhaps it’s even a reasonable one, but the stance does recall the title of the writer and activist Audre Lorde’s 1981 essay “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House.”

This year’s game was held at SoFi Stadium, in Inglewood, California, a city known for its proximity to Los Angeles International Airport, for its giant concrete doughnut, for having a mayor named Butts, and for having its name lovingly shouted out in rap songs. (On Dr. Dre’s “The Next Episode,” which also features Snoop Dogg, Dre gleefully announces his regional affiliations, for anyone who somehow hadn’t picked up on them already: “Compton, Long Beach, Inglewood!”) Dre, Snoop, and Lamar were all brought up nearby (Snoop in Long Beach, Lamar and Dre in Compton), and, at an N.F.L. press conference a few days before the game, Dre told reporters, “Keeping it all the way real, I’m not trying to be egotistical or anything like that, but who else could do this show here in L.A.?” Snoop reiterated the idea that hip-hop at the Super Bowl is itself a radical act: “We appreciate the N.F.L. for even entertaining hip-hop because we know a lot of people that won’t,” he said. “But we’re here now, and there ain’t nothing you can do about it.”

At the 2020 halftime show, an enormous fuss was made about the age of the performers (Jennifer Lopez, who was fifty, and Shakira, who was forty-three), so let us not fail, this year, to first salute the utter erudition of Dr. Dre (fifty-six), Snoop Dogg (fifty), Eminem (forty-nine), Lamar (a comparably pubescent thirty-four), and Blige (ageless). Between them, they have forty-four Grammy Awards and one Pulitzer Prize. Dre and Snoop, who arrived musically in the late eighties and early nineties, were foundational to the development of West Coast gangsta rap; Lamar and Eminem, protégés of sorts, both write wordy, caustic, cerebral raps that move faster than any mind or mouth should. Blige is frequently considered the most powerful R. & B. vocalist of the post-Aretha era. The skill on display felt almost uncanny, and, unsurprisingly, the show was one of the best in recent memory: relaxed, joyful, breathless, potent, dynamic, and propulsive. The vibe was chatty, convivial, and most of all crowded—a pointed rejoinder to last year’s lonesome, COVID-era solo performance by the Weeknd.

The field was laid out to resemble the Compton city grid, with an all-white set including Tam’s Burgers, the night club Eve After Dark, and a sculptural recreation of the M.L.K. memorial that sits in front of the Compton courthouse. Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg appeared—Dre, a legendary producer, rose from a chair behind an enormous replica of a studio board—opening with a medley of “The Next Episode” and Tupac Shakur’s immense 1995 hit “California Love,” which was produced by and features Dre. The halftime show is an almost inconceivably high-pressure moment for a musician, yet Snoop and Dre seemed chill and happy. (Chalk it up to good weed, maybe, but I found their smiles pure.) Was it surreal to watch Snoop Crip Walk at the Super Bowl? Sure. Was it also surreal to watch 50 Cent (age forty-six), the first unannounced guest, unfurl himself from the ceiling, wearing a white forehead sweatband, biceps swollen, and begin performing “In Da Club,” a hit from 2003? Yes. Blige strode out in thigh-high boots and cascading blond hair, and performed “A Family Affair” and “No More Drama,” both forceful anthems of self-preservation (“No one’s gonna make me hurt again,” she promises on that track). Her appearance was both artful and vigorous; at one point she dissolved into a primal scream.

Next up was Lamar, who arrived in a scrum of backup dancers wearing green “Dre Day” sashes and black suits; he performed parts of “m.A.A.d. City” and “Alright” with his regular amount of intensity and precision. He introduced Eminem with a few bars of “Forgot About Dre,” a track from Dr. Dre’s album “2001.” Then there was Eminem himself doing—what else?—a spry and spirited version of “Lose Yourself,” with a beaming Anderson.Paak seated behind the drum kit, pounding away, merrily mouthing the “Mom’s spaghetti” part. At the end of the song, Eminem took a knee, an obvious homage to Kaepernick, and a purposeful slight to the N.F.L.

The show closed with “Still D.R.E.,” a single from 1999 with a chorus that suddenly felt germane, if not profound: “I’m representing for them gangstas all across the world,” Dre rapped. (There were rumors that the N.F.L. had asked Dre not to perform the line “still not loving police,” from the song’s first verse, but he rapped it anyway.) It feels silly that it took so long for the N.F.L. to emphasize rap—so long, in fact, that it ended up booking a bunch of legacy acts—but it’s hard to think of a better or more influential group of musicians to represent the genre. Though the evening was rooted in nostalgia (Dr. Dre has not released a new album since 2015), it nonetheless felt electrifying, a whirlwind of deft, virtuosic performances. In the end, the N.F.L.’s resistance to hip-hop merely made the music feel dangerous again.