Kendrick, NFL vs. New Orleans

Kendrick Lamar, by pgLang

New Orleanians wonder why Kendrick Lamar and not local musicians will play the Super Bowl halftime show in the Super Bowl. The reasons have little to do with music.

The Super Bowl is bigger than its host cities. They make changes to accommodate the Super Bowl, not the other way around. We jammed up traffic all summer on the Crescent City Connection to light it up for a game that is four months away. The host city only factors in the telecast of the game to the extent that weather affects the game or, in 2013 a brief blackout in the Superdome made New Orleans part of the story.

The Super Bowl is the NFL’s biggest entertainment event, and it’s a celebration of the NFL’s place in American culture. I’m careful about calling it a football game because, while one is certainly played, tickets are so expensive that the teams’ fan bases and their energy find themselves priced out. It’s a game for gawkers, whether rich ones in the building and casual ones there for the spectacle at parties at home.

That logic extends to the Super Bowl halftime show. The NFL has long done what it could to make it a singular moment, and Jay-Z’s Roc Nation produces it with little concern for the game’s site. Since Roc Nation took over, the halftime show featured Shakira and Jennifer Lopez in 2020 in Miami, The Weeknd in Tampa, a 50-year anniversary tribute to hip-hop in Los Angeles, and Rihanna in the Phoenix area. You could argue that Shakira and Lopez gave the show a connection to Miami’s Latinx community or hip-hop made sense in L.A., but nothing connects the Canadian The Weeknd to Florida or Rihanna to Arizona. With that in mind, it’s no surprise that Roc Nation booked Kendrick Lamar this year.

Like the previous acts booked by Roc Nation, Lamar has a specific kind of cultural caché as an arena artist with some kind of cultural credibility that has entered the public consciousness to such a degree that casual fans will want to see what he’ll do.

Not surprisingly, New Orleanians lost their shit on social media with the announcement of Lamar on Sunday. Some are outraged that the NFL will bring in Lamar instead of booking long time Jazz Fest favorites like Irma Thomas or Kermit Ruffins or Rebirth Brass Band to play halftime in New Orleans, overlooking the fact that New Orleans doesn’t have any arena artists right now. The Jazz Fest regulars around the country might receive the news that one of their favorites was booked to play the Super Bowl with excitement, but far more Americans would more likely ask, “Who?”

People who recognize hip-hop’s currency in the marketplace advocated for Juvenile and particularly Lil Wayne, but you have to have been paying attention for the last decade for Weezy to not be a case of Oughts nostalgia. We’re 15 years since Tha Carter III, and while he has continued to chart and perform, his national profile dropped precipitously after he went to prison for eight months in 2010 shortly after the release of the rock-oriented, less successful Rebirth. It’s also to Lil Wayne’s aesthetic credit that he remains a wildcard and unpredictable. He never became so reliable that the Grammys, for instance, featured him regularly the way they did Kendrick for a while. He has the same untamed cred he has always had, but major corporations are typically risk-averse and would hand a live mic over to someone as mercurial as Lil Wayne on national TV with great reluctance.

That said, it probably doesn’t help Lil Wayne has had a complicated relationship with Jay-Z and Roc Nation. He claimed that Jay-Z offered to sign him for a paltry (by his standards) $175,000 early on, and Weezy turned it into the track “Wayne Explains His Deal” on 2005’s Dedication 1. In 2017 during his wilderness years while Wayne was beefing with Young Money, he claimed onstage during a show that he had signed to Roc Nation, a claim that turned out to be false. That doesn’t mean they’re feuding, though. Jay-Z also helped Lil Wayne pay more than $14 million in unpaid taxes. It sounds like their relationship is, like I said, complicated.

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One fascinating/discouraging part of the furor that accompanied the announcement is how quickly it became part of an ambient thread that runs through life in New Orleans. One was the idea that the NFL, the mayor, and/or some mysterious powers-that-be chose the halftime star and snubbed local talent, and local talent always gets overlooked or taken for granted, and it’s a sign that “they” don’t love New Orleans and its culture. It is very unlikely that Mayor Latoya Cantrell had any say about who will play the halftime show, and if she or her office did, I’m sure it was presented as a done deal.

None of this should be taken as a disparagement of the talents of an New Orleans artist because talent only factors into the equation in the form of whatever talent you have to have to be big enough to play arenas. You can argue with the NFL shouldn’t have those values and that talent should matter, but you’d be arguing with 70 or 80 years of pop and rock music history in the process.

To be fair, Mayor Latoya Cantrell gave New Orleanians a reason to think things might be different when she named Master P—Percy Miller—as New Orleans’ “entertainment ambassador” for Super Bowl LIX. Nothing in her Facebook post announcing the position said how it would work or what Miller could do, but it gave New Orleanians a reason to believe that the city had a say in places where it doesn’t.

Hopefully P can work some magic because if the last Super Bowl in New Orleans in 2013 gives us an idea of what will happen this year, New Orleans bands will play in the clubs where they would usually play, but the high profile positions will go to national acts. That year I covered corporate parties with sets by Janelle Monae, Pitbull, Justin Timberlake, and The Roots, and I don’t remember any of the opening acts being local. Again, companies trying to impress guests and draw attention to their brands want big names more than local talents.

There will almost certainly be a band featured during the lengthy pre-game show, but even that slot will likely go to a national act that will prompt fans to tune in early. Maybe Lil Wayne could get it, but if I was placing bets, I’d figure that we’ll only see New Orleans musicians as local color going into and out of commercials, and as opening acts if there are any Super Bowl-related shows that are open to the public.

The bottom line is that the NFL and Roc Nation could put New Orleans acts on the halftime show and that would be great for the city and its bands, but that’s not what the Super Bowl or its halftime show is for. It’s about mobilizing eyeballs, full stop. It’s hard to get that kind of attention from Frenchmen Street or Tipitina’s, but that doesn’t make it any less frustrating to have the opportunity for exposure that the Super Bowl could bring not be available to people who could really use it.

That said, who’s in a position to really benefit from that kind of attention? In 2024, how would Irma or Kermit or Rebirth or Lil Wayne or Juvenile capitalize on the attention that a Super Bowl halftime show would bring? Who is in a position to parlay a few million pairs of eyes into something that will last longer of a week of buzz? As fans and New Orleanians, do we want this for them, or do we want it for us to feel like our city and musical preferences are validated?