Member Since: 4/17/2011
Posts: 9,162
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NYTIMES - Coldplay Buoyed by Beyonce & Bruno Mars
Quote:
Everything that could be said about the choice of Coldplay to headline the halftime show at Super Bowl 50 was said by the band members themselves Sunday evening — not with their mouths, but with their outfits.
The members of Coldplay? They wore gray, slate blue, musky brown, dusty black. Visually, it made them the literal void at the center of a riot of exuberance. And such was the case musically, as well; Coldplay was the center of the show but functioned more as a stagehand than an actual performer, making sure things were properly aligned so that the night’s true event could go off without a hitch.
That, of course, was Beyoncé, who returned to the halftime show three years after headlining it to provide a much-needed assist to Chris Martin’s band. On Saturday, she released a new song and video, “Formation,” which took up most of her part of Sunday’s performance.
That’s notable for a few reasons: Only Beyoncé could use the Super Bowl, perhaps the largest stage in the country, to showcase new material. She also announced a new world tour right on the heels of the performance. In so doing, she was arguing, in essence, that the halftime show was there to serve her, not the other way around.
And maybe only Beyoncé is capable of walking the cultural tightrope of delivering a song with such potent declarations of black pride on a stage that prefers studied neutrality or, at the loudest, pure jingoism. She wore an outfit — black leather draped in gold — that recalled Michael Jackson militaria. She did a few Vine-friendly dances — the milly rock, a sort of halfhearted whip. She sang, “I like my baby hair with baby hair and Afro/I like my Negro nose with Jackson 5 nostrils.”
Together, Beyoncé and Mr. Mars brought screaming jolts of soul and funk and jubilation onto a stage that until that point had lacked all of those things.
Eventually he shifted into “Up & Up,” a dopey song about reconciliation and uplift, and was joined by Beyoncé and Mr. Mars. They seemed to be stabilizing him. It wasn’t the first time. Earlier, during a transition, all three of them were singing a bit of “Uptown Funk” together. Beyoncé laid her left hand on Mr. Martin’s right shoulder as she and Mr. Mars outsang him — an act of love, of pity, of grace.
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http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/08/sp...show.html?_r=0
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Brr.
