Were Never Getting A Kanye West Halftime Show
Last night, the world’s most nonchalant superstar returned to the stage at the Super Bowl Fenty Bowl. Rihanna is seven years removed from her last album, has become a billionaire thanks to lingerie and beauty products instead of music, and is confirmed to be pregnant with her second child. Despite all that, and the fact music seems more like a side gig for her these days, she sounded better than ever. She shined bright like a diamond, strutted the stage mid-air in an all-red fit, and did a Fenty Beauty product placement that put all the awful Super Bowl ads to shame. The Barbadian superstar’s vocals sounded great, her 100-person dance troupe performed with military precision, and she had the right mix of hits.
It was an excellent Super Bowl performance, a worthy outing that reminds us of how indelible a star she is. Everyone is going to opine about it all week (which they should) so I opted to go another way with something that occurred to me while watching. I loved watching Rihanna go through her hits, but I can’t lie: Nothing got me more excited than when the beat for Kanye’s “All Of The Lights” dropped. Watching RiRi’s performance made me pine for the Kanye West Super Bowl halftime show we’ll never get.
The epic horns, layered vocals, and maximalist beat of “All of The Lights” were all tailor-made for moments like last night, but that wasn’t the only part of Rihanna’s performance that was indebted to Ye. The stage 50-100 feet in the air with the artist strapped to a harness is reminiscent of Kanye’s floating stage during the Life of Pablo tour. Even her all-red fit reminded me of Kanye’s red jacket and pants at his DONDA listening party (though she’s obviously a style icon herself). Even hearing her belt out the Kanye and No I.D. produced “Run This Town” gave me a chill.
The reasons we’ll never get a Kanye Super Bowl performance boil down to an obvious, undeniable fact: The man is unstable. I’m no Roger Goodell fan, but imagine someone—even Jay-Z—trying to convince you that it’s a good idea to bet on Kanye in 2023. I doubt even Jay would be willing to stake his reputation on Kanye anymore, no matter how long they go back. You don’t know if Ye will show up, if his performance will happen on time, if he’ll quit in protest in the build-up, if he’ll call out the NFL or Apple Music, or if he’ll simply self-destruct with rants about Jews and the Chinese and whatever else. Basically, he’s liable to go Kyrie Irving on you and you’ll be trading him in for someone perfectly serviceable at the deadline.
At the same time, I’m 100% confident his halftime show would be incredible. For my money, the Yeezus tour was the greatest show I’ve ever seen. Not just the actual performance (Kanye is better on the mic than he gets credit for) but the set design, the costumes, the set list, everything was A+. The only show I’ve heard was better was the Glow In The Dark tour, which I was regrettably too broke to cop a ticket for.
What’s sad is Kanye spent his entire career trying to build up the cache of hits, grand displays of artistry, and fame to headline something like the Super Bowl halftime show.
Sure, he doesn’t have it altogether like he once did but he’s still head and shoulders above any rapper save for Kendrick Lamar. As disjointed as Ye’s DONDA listening parties were, at their best it was a compelling spectacle of an artist living in a glass house of fame and dealing with the emotions of divorce and separation from his children in real-time. During that weird Free Larry Hoover concert, Kanye shined doing a greatest hits collection that we may never get to see him perform again while Drake misunderstood the assignment and opted to promote subpar Certified Lover Boy tracks.
Even when Rihanna dropped the beat for “Work,” I wasn’t exactly hoping Drake would come out. He has a superstar gravitas, he’s never been a top-notch performer. He has the clout and hits for a Super Bowl set, but it’s hard to imagine him doing one and delivering on the level Rihanna did and Kanye would.
What makes me sad about all of this is that Yeezy spent his entire career trying to build up the cache of hits, grand displays of artistry, and fame to headline something like the Super Bowl halftime show—something his idol Micheal Jackson helped turn into a pop culture staple. Ye probably got to that superstar/still relevant/legacy artist trifecta in the period between Yeezus and Pablo. At that time, it seemed like Kanye was preoccupied with revolutionizing sneaker and fashion culture and the NFL wasn’t ready to open arms to embrace a hip-hop artist the way did with Dr. Dre last year and has done generally since Roc Nation started producing the halftime show.
None of that matters now. Kanye spent the last few years throwing it all away; his family, his wealth, his status as an entrepreneur and a visionary artist, and the ability to have a conversation about him that isn’t exhausting and ends with us shaking our heads. At this point, it’s impossible to imagine him ever gracing that stage.
Then again, never say never. Back in 2016 Rihanna passed playing at the Super Bowl and claimed she would never perform at it due to her support of Colin Kaepernick. She obviously changed her mind since then. Will we ever change our minds about Kanye after he torpedoed his legacy last year? Well like I said, it’s foolish to bet on Kanye in 2023.
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