Nearly every major cultural event arrives with an asterisk these days—some pandemic-related compromise that distinguishes it from past occurrences. As absurd as these spectacles often feel—“Why would you have an awards show in the middle of a pandemic? No, seriously, I’m asking,” Jimmy Kimmel joked, during his opening monologue at last year’s (remote) Emmy telecast—I suppose insisting on certain traditions can still be seen as an act of hope, or at least a desperate attempt to cling to normalcy.
The main asterisk at this year’s Super Bowl was the size of the live audience: the Raymond James Stadium in Tampa was only one-third full. (Seventy-five hundred of those twenty-five thousand occupied seats were reserved for vaccinated health-care workers, who attended as guests of the league; thirty thousand of the remaining seats were occupied by cardboard cutouts, which the N.F.L. sold in advance for a hundred dollars a pop.) The halftime show featured just a single artist—Abel Tesfaye, who performs as the Weeknd—and no additional guests.
Tesfaye, who is thirty, was born in Toronto, to Ethiopian immigrants, and has sold more than seventy-five million records since he began self-releasing mixtapes a decade ago. He has always been somewhat inscrutable to the public: his first singles were posted online anonymously, he quickly took to obscuring his face in photographs, and he still doesn’t confess much in interviews, on the rare occasion that he consents to one. Since last January, when Tesfaye débuted the video for “Blinding Lights,” a throbbing, luminous single from “After Hours,” his fourth record, he has been appearing as the Character—a bloodied, bruised, sometimes elaborately bandaged figure in a red sports coat and black leather gloves. Tesfaye recently told Variety that the Character is a commentary on vapidity, hedonism, and pride: “The significance of the entire head bandages is reflecting on the absurd culture of Hollywood celebrity and people manipulating themselves for superficial reasons to please and be validated,” he said. Tesfaye is often compared to Michael Jackson, but where Jackson was sentimental Tesfaye is resolutely cynical and self-loathing; his aesthetic is lewd, dark, drug-obsessed, and obscure.
All that made him an especially interesting choice for the 2021 Pepsi Super Bowl LV Halftime Show: a furtive nihilist prone to oblivion, who comfortably sings lyrics such as “But if I O.D., I want you to O.D. right beside me.” The halftime show is usually exultant, swaggering, goofy; it was hard to imagine how the Weeknd’s brooding, eighties-inspired R. & B. (which nods to Duran Duran and Flock of Seagulls, with just a touch of the Smiths’ boundless melancholy, and echoes of Prince’s sly coyness) might translate to such a broad stage. Tesfaye’s two favorite lyrical tropes are unfeeling sex and drug abuse. “I only love it when you touch me, not feel me / When I’m fucked up, that’s the real me,” he sings, on “The Hills.”
Tesfaye’s performance was subdued, at least by the Super Bowl’s (generally psychotic) standards. It was set in a Vegas-y cityscape, with Tesfaye backed by a sizable robot choir turned human choir turned string section. He wore the red blazer—sequinned this time—and the leather gloves, but his face was fully visible, unmarred by fake blood or gauze. He was, however, joined at various points by a small army of fully bandaged and blazered dancers—first in a mirrored, neon-lit hallway of sorts, and then directly on the field, for “Blinding Lights,” which closed his eight-song medley. The bandages, the lyrics, the lighting—it all felt very macabre, which itself felt apropos. (Even the Weeknd’s most beloved hits are about finding solace in annihilation: “I can’t feel my face when I’m with you / But I love it,” he admits.) He is not a dancer, exactly, but he moved through the stands and across the field with elegance. In a small but meaningful gesture to longtime fans, Tesfaye briefly incorporated a bit of “House of Balloons/Glass Table Girls,” which samples “Happy House,” by Siouxsie and the Banshees, and which appeared on the Weeknd’s first mixtape, from 2011. When fireworks exploded above Tampa at the end of his show, in a resolute display of cheerfulness, I couldn’t help but laugh.
Performing at halftime usually means losing money—Tesfaye supposedly sunk seven million dollars from his own fortune into the show—and getting relentlessly clowned on Twitter, regardless of what you do. For me, most of Tesfaye’s choices were expert and felt true to the motifs of his music—which I also found to be a relief. It did not seem like the right year for another left shark.
Beyond the halftime show, music was still a significant part of the evening. Two commercials incited chatter and consternation before they aired. “The Middle,” an advertisement for Jeep starring Bruce Spingsteen, occupied an entire two-minute commercial break. Springsteen does not endorse products, and the spot was filmed just a week ago, which perhaps suggests some zero-hour equivocation on his part. “This is the triumph of perseverance and stubbornness,” Olivier Francois, the chief marketing officer of Stellantis, the multinational automotive company that owns Jeep, recently told Variety. He had been pitching Springsteen’s manager, Jon Landau, for a decade, with little success. “Bruce is not for sale. He’s not even for rent,” Francois said.
Springsteen composed the soft, droning score with the producer Rob Aniello. (Many of Springsteen’s own songs are explicitly about cars, but, of course, he has also enthusiastically called them “suicide machines.”) The commercial is thoughtfully shot, and mercifully low on glamour shots of Jeeps. Springsteen circles the Center Chapel—adorned with a cross, it’s not quite ideologically neutral territory—near Lebanon, Kansas, at the precise geographic center of the contiguous United States. (“Lebanon has souvenirs,” a wooden sign notes.) The metaphorical significance of the location is not subtle, and neither is the commercial’s deployment of well-worn patriotic iconography: a roadside diner, a thermos of hot coffee on a wintry eve, flags, more crosses, a horse. An empty stretch of two-lane highway. Springsteen meditatively letting a pinch of American dirt slip through his fingers. Springsteen did not write the commercial’s script, but its particular cadences do suit his voice, and recall his recent forays into professional storytelling: “All are more than welcome to come meet here, in the middle,” he narrates. “It’s no secret: the middle has been a hard place to get to lately, between red and blue, between servant and citizen, between our freedom and our fear.” The commercial’s message is reconciliation: consider forgiveness, Springsteen implores.
“Right,” you might be saying to yourself. “O.K. But what about just thirty-two days ago, when a mob of insurrectionists, supported by elected Republicans, invaded and debased the Capitol, while threatening to execute the Vice-President and others?” Whether or not the Jeep commercial inflates your sense of national unity will likely have something to do with whether or not you’ve fully metabolized that event and have somehow—bless you—already arrived at a place of magnanimity and healing. There is, at least, something exquisitely and singularly American about a message of political unity being delivered by a rich and cloistered celebrity who has long been positioned as an everyman savior, while he is simultaneously selling cars, partway through a football game being held before a not insignificant crowd in the midst of a global pandemic.
Meanwhile, Dolly Parton, another hugely beloved musical icon, recorded a new version of her hit “9 to 5,” for the Web-hosting company Squarespace. Much like “The Middle,” the commercial caused many to wonder what, exactly, our heroes are commanding us to do, and why we should listen to them. Parton opted to rewrite the chorus to refer to an all-nighter: “Working five to nine / You’ve got passion and a vision / ’Cause it’s hustling time / What a Only way to make a living,” she sings. It seems as if the spot is supposed to convey the hopeful idea that we are not contained or limited by our soul-crushing day jobs. But what it actually suggests is that we should be defined and occupied exclusively by work—for twenty-four crippling hours a day. That the original “9 to 5” is a protest anthem of sorts, decrying the more dehumanizing aspects of capitalism (“Barely gettin’ by, it’s all taking and no giving / They just use your mind and they never give you credit / It’s enough to drive you crazy if you let it,” Parton sings in that version) makes the new iteration feel especially grievous. (It perhaps doesn’t help that partisan disagreement over universal basic income and the raising of the minimum wage are at least part of what sent Springsteen off to stare glumly at snowbanks in Kansas.) The New Statesman has called the commercial an “uber-capitalist girlboss hellscape.” “Can it ever not be ‘hustling time’?” an exhausted, quarantined-with-no-child-care, taking-Zoom-calls-from-the-bathroom nation wondered.
Ultimately, the Weeknd’s music—rhythmic, dance-oriented, and often beautiful, but so plainly despondent at heart—felt like the night’s most appropriate mirror of our cultural moment. He sang alone in a half-empty (though perhaps not empty enough) stadium, amplifying the glory of intemperance, gesturing to the rituals of before, while fully understanding that we don’t live there anymore. As incongruous as Tesfaye’s apocalyptic vibe might have been in the midst of a massive recreational sporting event, it also felt like an honest response to where we are now—his songs are about coping, by any means necessary.
