Bowling ‘em over

Unless you 
have much experience of America, you probably don’t know what the Super Bowl is. Speaking for myself, I was vaguely aware that it was some kind of championship match in American football and imagined that it would be like an IPL final or an English soccer cup final.

To some extent, those parallels hold. It is the match that decides the American football champions. But, as I discovered this year, the Super Bowl is so much more. While the match is important — the New York Giants won this year — this must be the only sporting event in the world where what happens during half-time and the other periods when the players are off the field is almost as important as what happens when the match is actually underway.

The Super Bowl is traditionally the period when American companies premiere their new commercials, paying around $3.5 million for a single 30-second spot. These ads become a subject of national debate and, the following day, the newspapers review the commercials devoting almost as much space to them as they do to the game itself.

But the highlight of the Super Bowl is the concert. During half-time, a major league rock or pop performer is brought on to entertain the waiting crowd and the TV audience. Though the concert rarely extends beyond 12 minutes, it is probably the most watched gig of the year (owing to the Super Bowl’s vast TV audience) so performers vie for the honour of being half-time entertainment.

In recent years, the music has not been enough so a dose of controversy has been added. The most famous such incident was the so-called ‘wardrobe malfunction’ when Justin Timberlake ripped off a part of Janet Jackson’s outfit to reveal her breast to millions of Americans.

This year, Madonna performed and people waited to see what outrageous stunt she would pull. As it turned out, the Material Girl was on top form, turning in an energetic and super-athletic set with the assistance of dozens of dancers. But it was one of her sidekicks who created the storm. The Lankan Tamil rap singer MIA performed alongside Madonna and at one stage raised her hand to give the camera the finger for no apparent reason.

Cue mass hysteria.

For two days afterwards, America was enraged. Newspapers and TV 
channels were full of angry discussions about MIA’s 
insult to the TV audience and indeed to the American nation itself. The organisers of the Super Bowl blamed the NBC TV network (which telecast the show with a delay of a few seconds following Timberlake’s antics) for not being able to obscure MIA’s hand during the telecast. NBC blamed the Super Bowl organisers and said that they had chosen MIA and Madonna to perform so how could the network be held responsible for anything that went wrong during the performance?

The irony is that I don’t think MIA intended to offend anyone. The next day her people told the press that she was embarrassed and mortified. She had acted stupidly out of nervousness and regretted the offence her gesture has caused. While MIA can be politically motivated, she has no reason to insult America though, of course, she has frequently given the finger to Colombo in the past.

The biggest loser in all this is Madonna, whose comeback performance has been overshadowed by the controversy. I suspect that if Madonna had known that America was just waiting to get outraged she would gladly have done something wild herself instead of letting MIA get all the publicity. Certainly, she is no stranger to engineered controversy and has a record of publicity-generating stunts, including a deep kiss with Britney Spears during a performance at the 2003 MTV Awards.

It’s too early to say how the controversy will pan out but one obvious consequence is that MIA, who was hardly known outside of rap circles, is now a household name in middle America. At some stage, that is bound to translate into commercial success.

Experience demonstrates that whenever musicians give offence, their careers soar. Nobody had heard of the Sex Pistols till a television anchor called Bill Grundy asked them to say something offensive on British TV. The Pistols responded by abusing him on live TV. The network promptly suspended Grundy but the previously-obscure Pistols hit the headlines.

The Doors were not much known outside of California when lead singer Jim Morrison was arrested for exposing himself on stage. The arrest generated so much interest that it established Morrison as a teen icon. The Rolling Stones owed their early career only to their ability to be outrageous and to offend the British establishment.

Savvy rock stars recognise that public offence makes for good public relations. When the Stones were busy being outrageous, the group’s management released an ad with the headline: “Would you let your daughter go out with a Rolling Stone?” The idea was to capitalise on the controversies.

Even John Lennon, who was consistently outrageous, would slyly acknowledge the commercial considerations. When the Beatles were given MBEs, the controversy not only caused many old buffers to return their MBEs in protest but it also helped record sales. So, some years later, when Lennon returned his MBE he wrote to Buckingham Palace to say that it was a gesture of protest prompted by the Vietnam War and by Cold Turkey slipping down the charts.

So it is with the Super Bowl. The football is an excuse for commercial promotion and for entertainment. And now, it has also become an opportunity for generating commercially significant controversy and outrage.

(Vir Sanghvi is a celebrated Indian journalist, television personality, author and lifestyle writer. To follow 
Vir’s other writings, visit 
www.virsanghvi.com.)