The game. What about the game? I actually enjoyed the game. It was a slog. A throwback. An existential defensive struggle; sputtering offenses battered around by excellent defensive schemes. It was sort of an old world NFL game, one that those ancient football beings Halas and Lombardi would recognize. The old world-style team beat the shiny, new-fangled team.
The rest of it?
The commercials and half-time show were a Complete Bleak Spectacle of Ineptness! Pop Culture eating itself. Feed everything into the Pop Culture Beast and watch it shit it all out in vivid technicolor. Somehow the ghost of MLK Jr was conjured up and worked into the spectacle. Just to sell shit. That is the point. Turn everything into shit, reprocess it, repackage it, and sell that same shit back to the teeming masses.
Then there was The Last Temptation of Adam Levine. Whatever the man believed he was doing up onstage was not what was actually happening. It was a comic, horror-show of epic proportions. He kept undressing as the show went along. He finally stripped down and displayed a body full of tattoos. Maybe it is his way of claiming his body for himself? He just looked like a confused human billboard of contradictory signifiers. Maybe he's serious, maybe he really is sincere, but it looked like Pop Culture has totally hollowed out, eviscerated and extracted this poor man's soul. A lost pilgrim, a hollow husk of a human, in search of the last remaining, misplaced cells of his integrity.
Eddie Vedder of Pearl Jam once pointed out that when dealing with the demands of the masses, and the voracious Pop Culture Machine, one must learn it's often wise to say "No!" You don't actually have to take every gig, you don't have to pose for every camera, you don't need to expose yourself to every last eyeball. Sometimes the "No," will be your saving grace. No to this fiasco. Just No.
Did I really forget to mute one segment of commercials? Yes, I did. And I watched and listened to Bob Dylan's 60's Civil Rights Anthem "Blowing in the Wind," used to sell Budweiser beer. "How many roads must a man walk down..."
Yes, that is perfect. No, nothing is sacred, everything is infinitely consumable, everything is commodified, more product for the machine. That is the beauty and horror of Pop Culture. A Civil Rights Anthem one day, Cheesy Beer Commercial Theme Song the next. A Grand Ritual Humiliation. Pop Culture's finest spectacle!
