There was evidently something controversial about Beyonce’s portion of Super Bowl 50‘s halftime show according to a handful of right-leaning politicians and organizations, but this article isn’t going to be about that.
Yes, the entire performance from Coldplay, Beyonce and Bruno Mars was awful. It’s like they took my entire Pandora “thumbs down” history and turned it into a halftime show. All they were missing was a special appearance by the Foo Fighters and it would have been complete.
No, I’m talking about the cartoonish rendition of the national anthem by none other than our civilization’s own musical HPV infection, Lady Gaga.
Gaga, eschewing her usual suit of pork/beef tripe and byproducts instead came out dressed like a sparkling shar pei penis, her coif a specially-crafted Star Trek Klingon forehead replica and suffering from the worst case of pink-eye on record.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tyqkN3zezso
With everyone sufficiently stunned into silence, Gaga slowly squeezed out a silent fart, then spent the next three minutes lovingly smelling it in front of all of us.
If you enjoyed the Super Bowl 50 live blog, then you got my live reaction. If you didn’t, or you missed it, I’ll quote myself.
“If they’d really wanted to honor America somebody would have taped lady Gaga’s mouth shut.”
The fact that we had a lame anthem is nothing new. Every one of these people the NFL trots out before us on Super Bowl Sunday tries to put their own little spin on it, they try their own little arrangement, waver their voices at the worst possible times and in general make a complete ass of themselves. I seem to be the only one that cares.
Or, worse than that, I’m one of the few who didn’t think it was completely fantastic. Phil Simms went on and on during the actual broadcast about it and then reiterated his thoughts on Inside the NFL, saying it brought tears to his eyes. My own twitter and facebook comments were disagreed with by people I actually know and like. Just click on this. Frankly, it was unbelievable.
The thing about the anthem is, it’s already dramatic. It doesn’t need your extra cancerous touch to punch it up. The song is literally about America being the most awesome country in the world, unbeatable in war and our flag being bulletproof.
So save your wavering weak-ass vocal work for your American Idol audition. The anthem doesn’t need it.
Now, this wasn’t the worst anthem of all time. Make no mistake, Gaga’s anthem is par for the mediocre course, made only slightly worse by the ridiculous faces and tai-chi moves she made with her arms. We’re only lucky she didn’t wheel off some kind of Elvis karate kicks before it was over. You’re not auditioning for the local theater company’s production of Technicolor Dreamcoat. It ain’t about you.
No, the worst anthem of all time happened 10 years ago nearly to the day when Aaron Neville, Aretha Franklin and Dr. John teamed up to create a singularity of awful that, as it now travels unfettered through the universe, currently about 11 light years away and going, it will be the one signal that convinces an advanced alien species some day that we are too dangerous to the cosmos to be allowed to live.
Prepare yourself.
That wasn’t fair of me. There’s no way a person can be expected to ready themselves for the horror you just witnessed in Franklin, Neville and John’s version of our nation’s theme song. If you gouged out your eardrums a minute in, I apologize.
Before that day in 2006 I had never seen Dr. John before and can only now look back at that time with a sad, sweet regret of innocence forever lost. Aaron Neville, on the other hand, had never looked more swollen and allergic. It’s like his entire person had been stung by killer bees and instead of taking his EpiPen shot, he decided to squeeze himself into a set of full-body spanx.
For her part Aretha Franklin looked, as she often does, like a freshly-baked potato with all the fixings wrapped in a rabbit-fur table napkin.
That anthem too, if you can believe it, was beloved at the time. Sports Illustrated’s Peter King has it was the second best all-time, behind only Whitney Houston’s rendition in 1990. Sports Illustrated, for some reason, didn’t fire King right on the spot.
The anthem should be about the power of the song and the person’s voice, unwavering and strong, singing it. You show off by killing the notes as written, not by adding your own little motorboat sound effects and 30 seconds of jazz scat. Again, I seem to be alone in this thought.
In the end, we might be lucky that Gaga just barely got her stink on the anthem. She didn’t crap all over it so much as just kind of extended her anus like a Hyena and marked it so everyone would know she was there. It could have been worse. I mean, what if they’d invited Billy Joel back?
