Rihanna’s Super Bowl halftime show was a whole lot of issues, clearly. Her first public show in seven years. The most-watched being pregnant announcement in world historical past. Well-received total, however not with out its detractors.
And, in fact, it was the top of the multi-platinum artist’s years-long holdout from music’s largest stage over the NFL’s remedy of Colin Kaepernick.
Rihanna made headlines in 2019 when it was reported she had turned the league down due to Kaepernick. She later confirmed her stance in an interview with Vogue, taking a high-profile torch to the league:
I ask Rihanna if we are able to focus on politics. “How deep you wanna get?” she says. “However deep you’re willing to go,” I say. She indicators that I’ll proceed, and I ask if it’s true that she turned down the Super Bowl halftime show in solidarity with Colin Kaepernick. “Absolutely,” she says. “I couldn’t dare do that. For what? Who gains from that? Not my people. I just couldn’t be a sellout. I couldn’t be an enabler. There’s things within that organization that I do not agree with at all, and I was not about to go and be of service to them in any way.”
Rihanna wasn’t alone in doing so, as Jay-Z was believed to have turned the NFL down for comparable causes up till he signed a partnership with the league and began working as a producer for the halftime show.
So what occurred to make Rihanna go from “I was not about to go and be of service to them in any way” to posting an enormous soccer on her social media in September?
It’s onerous to think about Jay-Z, who gave Rihanna her begin on his Def Jam document label, did not play a task in Rihanna’s resolution, however the singer went into element in an interview with British Vogue printed Wednesday. Simply put, she stated she believed the impression of a singer like her performing the halftime show outweighed the impression of her holdout, and could not deny she was intrigued by the problem:
So what modified? “There’s still a lot of mending to be done in my eyes,” she says now, “but it’s powerful to break those doors, and have representation at such a high, high level and a consistent level.” This final level is vital for her. “Two Super Bowls back-to-back,” she says, referring to final 12 months’s headliners, Dr Dre, Snoop Dogg, Eminem, Mary J Blige and Kendrick Lamar, “you know, representing the urban community, globally. It is powerful. It sends a really strong message.” There’s one other key distinction this time as properly. “Of course,” she says, turning into visibly moved by this thought, “raising a young Black man is one of the scariest responsibilities in life.” It’s made her re-evaluate the whole lot. “You’re like, ‘What am I leaving my kids to? This is the planet they’re gonna be living on?’” She shakes her head. “All of those things really start to hit differently.”
On high of the duty, she felt emboldened by motherhood too. “It’s this knowing that you can do anything,” she explains, “even things that seem the craziest, like, ‘I’m going to say yes to the Super Bowl in the middle of postpartum?’” She nonetheless can’t consider she agreed. “What the heck am I thinking? But you’re geeked on a challenge like that because you know what your body just did. You feel this sense of ‘Nothing is impossible.’” Not that the nerves aren’t jangling; in fact, she had no clue when she accepted that she could be pregnant once more by the point of the efficiency. “It was almost like an out-of-body experience,” she says of the day it was introduced. “I have not been on stage in seven years,” she says. “Seven years! From zero to Super Bowl? That’s mental.”
Rihanna additionally reportedly stated she was approached a number of weeks earlier than she was introduced because the performer, however she truly missed the deadline to just accept the gig. Given her star energy and the impression of her saying “yes,” you possibly can see why the NFL did not make it a tough deadline.
The finish outcome was a show outlined by Rihanna’s bulging catalog of No. 1 hits, a vertigo-inducing set of rising platforms and a small military of dancers (“So. Many. Dancers.” as Rihanna put it to Vogue). Rihanna additionally broke custom by not bringing out a single visitor star, because the “surprise guest” she hinted at earlier than the Super Bowl turned out to be child No. 2 with her companion ASAP Rocky.
Discussion about this post