The Small Fries

During Super Bowl 50s Halftime this past Sunday, Coldplay, Bruno Mars and Beyoncé celebrated the many great musical acts that have graced the Super Bowl stadium over the past fifty years. In the spirit of that theme, I’m highlighting my Top Five Super Bowl Halftime Performances.

5) Janet Jackson and Justin Timberlake

Okay, hear me out. I’m putting this on here for a couple of reasons. First of all, the performance was actually amazing. Janet is an incredible performer and it shows all over this 10-minute concert. However, the main reason this is going on the list is because of how it put the Halftime show on the map. Granted, it sparked a ton of controversy, and it unjustly ruined Janet Jackson’s career, but it was ALL anybody talked about for perhaps that entire year. If that doesn’t strike you as being Top 5 material, I don’t know what does.

4) Aerosmith, NSYNC and Britney Spears

This Superbowl performance was the only one I truly remember from my childhood, and for good reason. It had the ingredients to catch the eye of every kid in the early 2000s: a funny opening skit, the dreamy and talented guys of NSYNC, and of course Britney Spears. Aerosmith put on an amazing show, and the collaboration between all of the artists involved looked like a ton of fun.

3) Beyoncé

Beyonce is undoubtedly the best performer of our generation, and it SHOWS here. Her vocal prowess and choreography are unmatched and her showmanship is unrivaled. She even put together a little Destiny’s Child reunion as a treat!

2) Michael Jackson

Of course, the King of Pop himself has to be on this list. This performance has all the hallmarks and scale of a Michael Jackson concert. Everything is big and epic from his entrance to the audience participation at the end.

1) Prince

Man, this was ICONIC. This was the one area in which Prince one-upped Michael Jackson: he simply had a better Super Bowl performance. He performed all of his hits, had solid dancers, and his guitar freestyling was out of this world.

BONUS: Indiana Jones?!

That’s right, in 1995 Disney was opening a new Indiana Jones ride at Disneyland. Patti Labelle teamed up with Disney and put on this bizarre Indiana Jones-themes halftime performance. Check out the weirdness here:

--Julie

Three cute British guys, acoustic guitars, and beautiful harmonies. No, I’m not talking about One Direction’s new opening act. I’m talking about BBMak, the brilliant but overlooked band from the early 2000s. Anyone who watched Princess Diaries or Even Stevens might be familiar with their music. However, beyond the kids who grew up listening to Radio Disney, many people don’t know who they are today. And that’s a shame.

By the early 2000s, the teen pop scene was dying down. Both the Backstreet Boys and  NSYNC were releasing their last albums and Britney Spears was trying to market herself to a  slightly older demographic. However, the music industry was in stasis. Record labels were trying  to replicate the golden days of mid-to-late 90s pop, so they were rolling out boy bands such as Dream Street and girl groups such as Play to attempt to fill that gap. The trio of Mark Barry, Christian Burns, and Stephen McNally were attempting to break into the music business at the same time.

Once crossing over to a United States audience, BBMak had songs featured on soundtracks for The Princess Diaries, Treasure Planet, and On the Line. Their debut single “Back Here” reached number 13 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart. However, by the time of their peak popularity, record labels started to give up on recreating successful boy bands. Between a lack of publicity and their unique sound, BBMak called it quits in 2003 after two albums.

I would venture to guess that if BBMak had become popular just a few years later than they did, they would have been much more successful. Their guitar and vocal based sound was slightly ahead of their time. You can hear remnants of their sound in the Jonas Brother a few years later, and even the acoustic-folk pop that is popular today. By no means did BBMak invent the wheel, but they were definitely a predecessor for some of today’s popular music.

--Julie

To Pimp a Butterfly, the third studio album by Kendrick Lamar, is representative of many things. It’s a concept album about the state of black America, but it also reveals Kendrick’s personal struggle with his newfound fame and the identity crisis that goes along with it. The record is filled with many contradictions going on in Lamar’s head, but it’s not messy in doing so.

On Butterfly, Kendrick utilizes the historical imagery of slavery and the civil rights movement to shed light on what is happening in present-day America. He struggles with the fact that he is now the voice of his hometown of Compton while people are dying of gang violence and he is accepting awards. Kendrick draws comparisons of himself to great leaders like Nelson Mandela and Martin Luther King Jr., but there is simultaneously a feeling of self-loathing, especially demonstrated on the track “u”. Throughout the album, the confusion and reluctance of being a voice of power gives way to a begrudging acceptance of his new responsibility and a call for action. Lamar was inspired by a trip to South Africa as evidenced by many of the songs on the record. He draws parallels between the ghetto and a post-apartheid Johannesburg, showing that they are extremely different and similar at the same time.

Lamar does not want to be a puppet of the entertainment industry, a sentiment he expresses through his lyrics many times throughout the album. Perhaps an even more telling example of this is that none of the tracks sound like radio-friendly singles. This was definitely a strategy on his part, a challenge to the mainstream media to see if they will play these songs with messages that it is trying desperately to avoid. Not only is Kendrick criticizing racism in media, but also the standards of the hip-hop industry itself. Lamar finishes what he started on his controversial “Control” verse on this album, lamenting about the lowered standards of rap and the bling culture surrounding it.

With so many different ideas and concepts going into a 16-track album, one would think that the result would be muddled and hard to follow. However, Lamar avoids this by tying a large percentage of the tracks together by reciting sections of an original poem at the end, of which he reads the entirety of on the closing track “Mortal Man” in a fictional interview he has with deceased rapper Tupac Shakur. Clips from a 1994 radio interview with Tupac are expertly weaved in with Kendrick asking the rap legend questions about what he thinks of the state of today’s society. It’s haunting how much light Shakur sheds on the topic of racism in America and it shows just how little things have changed even twenty-two years after the Rodney King riots. In the era of Ferguson and Trayvon Martin, To Pimp a Butterfly is the thought-provoking album we need.

A portrayal of Tupac Shakur and Kendrick Lamar

--Julie