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NFL Embraces Hip-Hop, Despite Its Conflicted History
Super Bowl halftimes have come a long way since Andy Williams and marching bands.
Feb 15, 2022
Sometime in the summer of 2023, the musical genre and lifestyle known as hip-hop will officially hit the half-century mark.
The difference now is that they've made their peace with hip-hop's critique of white privilege, its nonconformity, its own problematic narratives around gender and violence, its uncompromising Black aesthetic, its joy of innovation and its unpredictable irreverence.
It's hard to believe nearly 50 summers have passed since Clive Campbell, then an 18-year-old Jamaican-born American known as DJ Kool Herc, threw a house party in the South Bronx that changed the course of popular music while also challenging the idea of what constitutes American music.
Even as he thrilled party guests with unprecedented turntable artistry, no one, including Kool Herc himself, could have imagined that isolating and elongating beats using two turntables would become the foundation for an art form that would, within a generation, become the biggest and most profitable musical genre in the world.
DJ Kool Herc, now 66, probably watched Sunday's Super Bowl halftime show in amazement as Dr. Dre, Snoop Dogg, Mary J. Blige, Kendrick Lamar, Eminem and 50 Cent performed the first all-hip-hop show in NFL history.
If he bothered to watch Super Bowl VII in 1973, the sight of Andy Williams performing "Marmalade, Molasses and Honey" and "Happiness Is" backed by the Citrus College Singers and Woody Herman and the Michigan Marching Band is probably still burned into his memory. That's where the NFL thought America was at the time. It was a billion miles away from a house party in the Bronx.
What was so striking about the halftime performance was that a genre that was once considered antithetical to American order and our collective values was being celebrated on the highest holy day of America's civic calendar.
How did a musical genre that has never disguised its skepticism of American institutions become "safe enough" to program on Super Bowl Sunday?
I suspect that the team owners who collude and exercise monopoly powers within the NFL are probably still as conservative as they've always been. The difference now is that they've made their peace with hip-hop's critique of white privilege, its nonconformity, its own problematic narratives around gender and violence, its uncompromising Black aesthetic, its joy of innovation and its unpredictable irreverence.
A few years ago, the NFL hired the rap icon and music mogul Jay-Z to program its Super Bowl halftime shows for the foreseeable future. The NFL has come a long way since its Andy Williams days, but it decided that tapping someone as widely respected as Jay-Z to help steer them into the future would be a worthwhile investment.
Access to Jay-Z's Rolodex wouldn't come cheap. In exchange for his contacts and good will, the NFL would finally be compelled to bestow its imprimatur on a genre of music it strategically ignored for decades.
Those of us who are old enough to remember the controversies that swirled around Dr. Dre and his band N.W.A. in the late 1980s can't help but be amazed at the deference and respect these same artists are receiving today.
Remember when the FBI sent N.W.A. a letter warning them that they would be subject to arrest if they performed a song from their debut album, "Straight Outta Compton," that was perceived as "anti-cop" by law enforcement?
It was surreal seeing Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg, his one time protege, opening halftime with a G-rated performance of "The Next Episode" followed by "California Love" and getting the kind of reception that would've greeted Hall and Oates half a lifetime ago.
Did I dream that period in the early 1990s when Dre and Snoop were harassed by law enforcement for their recording of "Deep Cover," with its promise to do a "1-8-7 on an undercover cop?"
Yet, here they were at SoFi Stadium in broad daylight thrilling a sellout crowd with sanitized versions of songs that used to get them classified as public enemies.
When the spotlight segued to Curtis "50 Cent" Jackson hanging upside-down from a pullup bar in the rafters, I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that the game had irrevocably changed.
Surrounded by scantily clad dancers, "Fitty" tore into a clean version of his first big hit "In Da Club." Millions who either weren't alive or were very young when he originally recorded it will download the track this week in an attempt to understand what all the fuss was about when he showed up. It's a fitting "happy birthday" for hip-hop, indeed.
There's nothing like the allure of hip-hop nostalgia. Besides being relatable, the music can be endlessly recycled, reconstituted and monetized. Like its older musical siblings soul, country, disco and rock 'n' roll, much of hip-hop is also destined to become grist for elevators once it is rendered anodyne and nonthreatening by corporate ownership and co-option.
The dirty little secret of so much rap and hip-hop is that very few of its practitioners are rebels with--or without--a cause, though there was a time when the music was dominated by MCs and DJs who were so principled it spilled all over their lyrics and music.
Pulitzer Prize-winning rapper Kendrick Lamar is one such rapper. His commitment to saying something worthwhile through the tight but imaginative choreography for "Alright," his anti-police violence anthem, came through even if the line about the "po-po" wasn't audible in the arena or at home.
The best performance of the evening was Mary J. Blige digging deep with uncompromising renditions of "Family Affair" and "No More Drama" that brought down the house with their focused passion and emotional intelligence.
The only avowedly political "statement" of the evening was one I didn't notice until I read about it after the game. When Eminem finished his performance of "Lose Yourself," he took a knee in solidarity with Colin Kaepernick, according to reports. Eminem just looked tired to me.
There were stories that suggested that Eminem did so in defiance of the NFL's wishes, but that seems doubtful, given that the league realizes how self-defeating the original prohibition was and is no longer enforcing it--especially after the summer of George Floyd protests.
Everything that happened onstage Sunday, including all the acts of lyrical self-censorship and even Eminem's gesture of solidarity protesting police brutality, was choreographed. Wardrobe malfunctions are a thing of the past--and even that was partially staged.
Now, if Dre and his colleagues had managed to bring Mr. Kaepernick out to sing with them during "Still Dre" at the end of the show and kneeled with him as a group, that would have been the single most electrifying event in hip-hop history. It would have been the ultimate usurpation of a once-sacred stage.
Needless to say, that did not happen, and it probably never occurred to anyone involved to make something like that happen. It would have offended the team owners who have agreed to blackball Mr. Kaepernick for speaking out so forcefully against police violence five years ago.
The folks who put together Sunday's halftime show were determined to demonstrate hip-hop's global power and influence. It was not the time to demonstrate its conscience.
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Taking the Next Knee
Is this athletic revolt for real and is it a danger to Donald Trump?
Sep 17, 2020
Last year, when LeBron James described some of President Trump's public statements as "laughable and scary," Fox News commentator Laura Ingraham ordered the basketball superstar to "shut up and dribble."
LeBron responded thoughtfully by saying that her comment "resonated with me, but I think it resonated with a lot of people to be able to feel like they can be more."
Those "people" have come to include most of the National Basketball Association and hundreds of other athletes in professional baseball, hockey, football, women's basketball, and the top tiers of college sports. As for that "more" they have become? They are now active participants in the most significant and inclusive wave of the often crushed or coopted yet ever breathing "athletic revolution" that first took shape in the 1960s.
Thanks to the pandemically isolated "bubbles" in which some teams are now living and playing, and driven by Donald Trump's continuing racially based attacks on various sports, some athletes are now communing with each other ever more regularly and making collective decisions as never before--decisions often supported by their teams and even leagues. In the process, many of their protests against systemic racism and specific acts of police brutality have gone from messages at their usual social media outlets to acts like forcing games to be postponed via wildcat strikes.
As baseball and basketball, battered by the Covid-19 pandemic, cautiously continue their delayed and shortened seasons and the National Football League and some college football conferences finally launch their own belated starts, more and more questions arise: Will such physically dangerous playing conditions be sustainable? (Is there even such a thing as a socially distanced tackle?) Will fans accept rule changes meant to take the coronavirus into account and still keep watching (while their own lives threaten to go down the tubes)? Will former San Francisco 49er Super Bowl quarterback Colin Kaepernick, who sparked the current sports revolt by kneeling to the national anthem four years ago and was subsequently abused by the president and functionally banished from football, ever get to play again? And above all, what effect will the various protests of such athletes have, if any, on the election?
The Women Led the Way
However it plays out, the most recent victory of National Basketball League players striking during their playoffs over yet another grim death of a black man at the hands of the police was spectacular. The team owners agreed that, in the Covid-19 moment with polling places potentially in short supply on November 3rd, pro basketball arenas would be made available as just such sites. Consider this path breaking: it's the first time a player-owner bargaining agreement has included such a gift to democracy from two of the (previously) most self-centered groups in America.
Before we cry "Bravo!" however, let's cry "Brava!" After all, it was the most marginalized of the professional leagues, the Women's National Basketball Association (WNBA), that provided the impetus for the current movement and remains its moral center. Keep in mind that, for years now, women pro basketball players have been protesting against gun violence and police brutality, both individually and as teams, while their male equivalents, who earn so much more money and possess so much more security, tended to posture and pontificate while putting themselves at much less risk.
Last month, the women upped their game. The WNBA's Atlanta Dream players donned T-shirts endorsing Dr. Raphael Warnock, the Democratic opponent of Georgia Republican Senator Kelly Loeffler, who has disparaged Black Lives Matter and, as the New York Times reported, "publicly and frequently derided the league for dedicating its season to the Black Lives Matter movement." Loeffler just happens to be the Dream's co-owner. Other teams in the league followed suit and soon most teams were wearing such "Vote Warnock" T-shirts, while also proclaiming that Black Lives Matter. (BLM, by the way, was a group founded by women.)
Soon after, something stunning happened in the male version of pro basketball with the NBA in the first round of its playoff games in a "bubble" at Florida's Disney World. After a white police officer shot an unarmed black man, Jacob Blake, in the back seven times in Kenosha, Wisconsin, the Milwaukee Bucks refused to take part in their next playoff game. And that protest then produced a cascade of brief strikes by other NBA and WNBA teams and, most surprisingly, by predominantly white Major League Baseball teams.
While the statements of the protesters tended to describe the strikes as a response to recent incidents of police brutality, the underlying cause may have lain elsewhere. Those angry strikes may really have been side effects of the Covid-19 "bubbles" in which they were playing. In them, the usual focus on the game of the moment and the party to follow was replaced by conversations about Donald Trump, racism, and the responsibilities of rich Black sports celebrities to express themselves and act in the interests of their communities.
The New Yorker's Isaac Chotiner conducted a revealing interview with Andre Iguodala, a Miami Heat forward and the first vice-president of the NBA players' union, who said:
African-Americans are trying to search for ourselves and ask where we stand in the world and where we stand in America. And we don't know. We shoulder a lot of the burdens of our community, but I think a lot of that responsibility should fall on the majority, and those who are the lawmakers and who are supposed to insure that every man and woman is treated as an equal. But we still haven't seen that. So we are still searching for our place.
Take the Money or March?
One of the most poignant expressions of that search came from the coach of the Los Angeles Clippers, Doc Rivers, whose father had been a police officer. "It's amazing," he commented, "why we keep loving this country, and this country does not love us back. It's really so sad... I'm so often reminded of my color... We got to do better. But we got to demand better."
What exactly does "demand better" mean and what could it achieve? In the sports world, at least, with the possible exception of those still-must-be-seen-to-be-believed arena voting sites, the sporadic protests of various players over the years for equality and social justice have usually resulted, at best, in yet more discussion about the issues they were raising rather than actual solutions, however provisional. Although over the decades, the integration of baseball, the introduction of free agency, and the emergence of the Black quarterback could all certainly be viewed as progress in the sports world itself.
Today, however, it remains a question whether players will continue pushing for social reform or, as so often in the past, settle for better salaries and pensions. As Iguodala put it:
"Historically, money determines a lot of our actions. Do we stand up for something or take the money? We will always get caught in those crosshairs. But I think players are smartening up, and I think that will come into play with a lot of guys."
Similar optimism has been expressed recently by a number of sporting icons including Hall of Fame basketball player Kareem Abdul Jabbar who began his career with the Milwaukee Bucks. He found hope in "the instantaneous support of other sports teams and athletes," especially ones from Major League Soccer (only 26% black), Major League Baseball (8%), and overwhelmingly white pro tennis.
Times, Jabbar believes, may indeed be changing. After all, he remembers that "when I boycotted the 1968 Olympics because of the gross racial inequities, I was met with a vicious backlash criticizing my lack of gratitude for being invited into the air-conditioned Big House where I could comfortably watch my community swelter and suffer."
Another long-time sports activist, retired sociology professor Harry Edwards who was instrumental in inspiring the memorable Black power salute given from the medal stand at the 1968 Mexico Olympics by American track stars Tommie Smith and John Carlos, is similarly hopeful. An adviser to Kaepernick, Edwards sees an opening for genuine change in this moment because, he says, it's no longer just about the acts of individual sports figures. This wave of protest, he adds, "is distinctively different from the single athletes who were involved. These are entire teams that are reacting to this situation and leveraging their power to demand change. It's not just a Colin Kaepernick or Eric Reid or Michael Bennett or Maya Moore. This one is about an entire organization and I could see this coming from the time the University of Missouri football team protested."
That was back in 2015 when that football team joined a campus-wide demand for the resignation of the university's president for mishandling racial incidents at the school. (He did finally resign.) Such a full-scale involvement of a college sports team in a protest movement was unheard of at the time. It would take another five years and so many more racial nightmares before that spirit of unity with a larger protesting culture in this Black Lives Matter era, not to mention the willingness of athletes to risk their own brief careers, would bloom throughout sports.
"Spoiled Rotten Millionaires"
The current reaction of the Trump administration and its allies to such protests has underlined the threat that they clearly feel from wildcat strikes, bent knees, and other actions disrupting their notions of "normality" in an unnerved and unnerving world. The president, in particular, has been counting on the return of pro sports and college football to help project an image of him being in control in this ongoing pandemic.
Weighing in from the White House, President Trump's son-in-law and senior advisor Jared Kushner typically dismissed the recent set of basketball wildcat strikes by saying, "Look, I think that the NBA players are very fortunate that they have the financial position where they're able to take a night off from work without having to have the consequences to themselves financially."
That snide attempt to separate the athletes from their fan base, itself stricken by a weakening economy, the still-spreading coronavirus, and a mounting sense of political anxiety, soon blossomed into something more like a political campaign theme. At the right-wing website Newsmax, for instance, conservative radio host Chris Salcedo attacked "the spoiled rotten millionaires." He then added: "Pro sports is no longer about unifying us but about shoving left-wing politics down our throat and up our nearest orifice. They push social justice, which is the absence of justice."
For all the right-wing outrage over the basketball protests, football is now the true American national pastime and carries the most weight with Trump and gang. Several months ago, I speculated that, "if the National Football League plays regular season games this fall, President Trump stands a good chance of winning reelection for returning America to business as usual--or, at least, to his twisted version of the same."
Despite the fact that most NFL owners have been Trump donors, the league, which did away with pre-season games, has been bending leftward to avoid a NBA-style set of strikes that could cripple the season just as it's starting. Last month, League Commissioner Roger Goodell professed regret for not paying more attention to Colin Kaepernick's message when he took those knees. Topping that, earlier this month, Goodell announced that "End Racism" and "It Takes All of Us" signs will be stenciled in the end zones of all stadiums this season and the so-called Black national anthem, "Lift Every Voice and Sing," will be sung before each opening game. Political slogans will even be allowed on helmets.
In certain ways, when it comes to the Trump voter in particular, the return of college football--a major multibillion-dollar business that pays most of its "employees" nothing whatsoever--with its own cult-like regional passions is of particular importance. While college football fans tend to lean right and insist on their entertainment, no matter who has to die for it, college players have used the health risks of Covid-19 to ramp up their demands for more control over their lives and a share of the revenue that their schools collect from the sale of jerseys with their names on them.
After two of the five major conferences, the West Coast's Pac-12 and the Midwestern-based Big 10, worrying about the toll that the pandemic might take, called off their fall seasons, the Trump campaign declared: "The Radical Left is trying to CANCEL college football." The electoral implications were obvious: five key swing states--Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Ohio and Minnesota--have Big Ten teams and calling off the season in this fashion does, of course, send a message to future voters about the state of Trumpian America.
In reality, the urge to protest playing football in the midst of a pandemic was spreading (and not just among the usual suspects). Buzz Bissinger, the author of Friday Night Lights, a famed book on high school football in Texas, for instance, called on players in the remaining leagues to boycott their games:
[M]any of the states advocating to play are the same states that find wearing protective masks optional, college football a sacred American right. Football is not like other sports. It is blood, snot, sweat and spit, bodily meals the virus craves. How can these schools even be contemplating the risk when several medical advisers to the N.C.A.A. said it was ill advised? Some coaches have suggested that football players alone should return to campus, which provides additional evidence that they are viewed more like employees than traditional students and should be compensated.
Such evidence has, of course, been in plain sight for years, but maybe it takes a plague to see it clearly. College administrators may be no better than Trumpsters in their willingness to sacrifice lives for money and power. They certainly do fit comfortably with the sort of sentiments Donald Trump, Jr., expressed on Chris Salcedo's show: "I can't tell if some of this stuff is politically motivated because not going back to normalcy allows you to instill some fear that can be used as political leverage. Let them play, man."
In other words, the position of the Trump administration as it makes a Covid-19-ignoring scoring drive for November 3rd is distinctly shut up and dribble. However, the question, in this moment from hell, is: Will the players and fans agree?
Who will take the next knee?
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Booing by Fans Shows Objections to NFL Protests 'Was Always About Perpetuating White Supremacy'
"In the past, folks have claimed to be turned off by the Kaepernick-led protests because they disrespected the flag or the troops or the anthem or the country, or all of the above. That excuse is not applicable for the fans' ugly display Thursday night."
Sep 11, 2020
Following the political right's outcry in recent years over professional athletes' civil disobedience and calls for racial justice, even a measured show of unity by two opposing NFL teams Thursday night was not a neutral enough gesture to satisfy some football fans in Kansas City.
Fans in the city's Arrowhead Stadium were heard loudly booing as players from the Kansas City Chiefs and the Houston Texans linked arms and observed a moment of silence "dedicated to the ongoing fight for equality in our country."
The Kansas City Chiefs and Houston Texans begin the 2020 NFL season with linked arms and a moment of silence for social justice.pic.twitter.com/XPupLFGqoC
-- Keith Boykin (@keithboykin) September 11, 2020
"It was as unthreatening and unobjectionable as the NFL could have dreamed," Barry Petchesky wrote at Defector. "The players stood together, silently. And the fans...booed."
"Here were the players doing everything that racist fans claim they want: being peaceful, respectful, not accusing anyone of anything--shutting up and playing football!--and they booed. Because what doesn't matter and has never mattered to those people is how people are protesting, only that they are."
--Barry Petchesky, Defector
The display was paired with a large sign reading "We believe black lives matter," "We believe in justice for all," and other messages, and the playing of "Lift Every Voice and Sing," widely regarded by the African-American community as its national anthem.
The NFL's new interest in engaging with the nationwide uprising over police brutality and the killings of unarmed Black Americans comes after years of sidelining players who knelt in protest during the national anthem, particularly former San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick. Since Kaepernick originally began the peaceful protest during the 2016 season, he has not been signed to any NFL team and in 2019 reached a legal settlement with the league after accusing team owners of collusion.
This year, professional athletes in several leagues, including the NBA and WNBA, have led protests in support of the uprising which began after the killing of George Floyd by four Minneapolis police officers.
Although a majority of Americans support athletes' right to partake in civil disobedience, according to a Washington Post survey released on Thursday, many of the 16,000 Kansas City Chiefs fans who attended the game appeared not to approve of even a show of unity between the players.
The response was "no surprise," Petchesky wrote, saying the NFL's attempts to maintain the interest of the 42% of Americans who believe it's inappropriate for athletes to protest publicly have revealed that the objections of President Donald Trump and other critics were never about respecting the national anthem, as many claimed.
"Here were the players doing everything that racist fans claim they want: being peaceful, respectful, not accusing anyone of anything--shutting up and playing football!--and they booed," Petchesky wrote. "Because what doesn't matter and has never mattered to those people is how people are protesting, only that they are. What's being said scares them much more than how it's being said."
"The NFL chooses not to get that, and instead thinks it can walk a tightrope between insulting your intelligence and offending racists," he continued. "It's not possible. Not that this was in any doubt before, but Chiefs fans audibly put the lie to any notions of compromise when they booed a group of black men pleading, silently, not to be treated like shit."
Kansas City Council member Eric Bunch wrote on Twitter that the display by fans in the stands at Arrowhead Stadium was "embarrassing" for the city and revealed the racism inherent in objections to the earlier protests.
\u201cSome NFL fans booing the players for standing and locking arms in a moment of silent unity proves that for them \u201cstanding for the flag\u201d was always about perpetuating white supremacy.\u201d— Eric Bunch (@Eric Bunch) 1599787002
The prevalence of booing in the stadium during the moment of silence was evidence that racism in the U.S. is perpetuated by "more than just a few bad apples," wroteHouston Chronicle columnist Matt Young.
\u201cStop giving fans - no matter how small the portion of fans - excuses for why they would boo NFL players taking 10 seconds for a moment of unity. https://t.co/hSo5znxuyo\u201d— Matt Young (@Matt Young) 1599836969
"In the past, folks have claimed to be turned off by the Kaepernick-led protests because they disrespected the flag or the troops or the anthem or the country, or all of the above," he wrote. "That excuse is not applicable for the fans' ugly display Thursday night."
"Others say they don't want their football mussed by politics, yet those same people have no problem with a military fighter jet flying over the stadium before their game starts," Young continued. "Never mind the sobering thought that equality and unity is viewed as some sort of divisive political statement."
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