Super Bowl XLIX

Last night the New England Patriots played the Seattle Seahawks in the 49th Super Bowl. As I explained in my previous post the main political theme of the game was US President Obama's attempts to win the 2014 mid-term elections by stoking up protests against largely imagined instances of police racism and brutality. The part of the protesters was being played by the Seahawks while the Patriots represented to other 99.3% of Americans who didn't take part in the protests.

Maybe because it's a subject about which I'm more knowledgeable then most or maybe because it produced a seemingly never ending stream of stupid on Twitter but this whole thing made me really angry. Possibly because of my influence it also seemed to be a massive turn-off to most US voters who responded by handing Obama's Democrat Party their biggest defeat in 69 years. As such I thought that the only possible outcome for last night's game was for the Patriots to destroy the Seahawks by a similar margin to Obama's mid-term defeat. At least that way it would have sent a message to Obama who still seems to genuinely believe that he has won every election campaign.

With such a serious topic in the air the game actually started out incredibly slowly with both sides seeming afraid to score at all in the first quarter. This left me plenty of time to think up increasingly elaborate ways to point out that I'd rather be watching Ice Hockey. Five minutes into the second quarter the Patriots took a 7-0 lead. Things really started to heat up then with the Seahawks levelling the game at 7-7 with 2 minutes left in the second. With 30 seconds of play left the Patriots then went 14-7 up only to be pegged back to 14-14 with just two seconds left in the half. In the third quarter the Patriots basically fell to bits allowing the Seahawks to open up a 24-14 lead.

Obviously with me wanting to see the Patriots win for purely political reasons I would have been furious if this had been the final result. Not only didn't I want to see the Seahawks win I most certainly didn't want to see them win with a score of 24 points. The day before the Super Bowl Bobbi Kristina Brown - the daughter of Bobby Brown and Whitney Houston - was found effectively drowned in her bathtub much like how her mother died in 2012. At the time a lot of the same people who participated in the recent protests claimed that Whitney Houston had been assassinated as part of a white conspiracy to oppress black Americans. Although she's actually 21 one of the best conspiracy theories I saw on the Internet claimed the mythical Illuminati had killed Bobbi Kristina Brown at age 24 to tip off the world that the Super Bowl would be won with a score of 24 points.

Fortunately as I was making increasingly offensive jokes about the type of brain damage that is familiar to NFL players and possibly now Bobbi Kristina Brown the Patriots woke up a bit and closed the gap to 24-21 with eight minutes left in the game. Then something which is apparently extremely rare in American Football happened and Patriots took a 28-24 lead with just two minutes remaining in the game. This obviously prompted the Seahawks to charge up the other end of the pitch to restore their lead. They very nearly managed it with 20 seconds of the game left when the Patriots Malcolm Butler prevented a Seahawks touch-down with what will be understood by soccer fans as a dramatic goal-line clearance and what I think was just one of those random sporting moments. The ensuing, erm, Scrum? ended in the sort of mass brawl which along with it being a much faster sport is part of the reason I'm still a bit miffed that the Stanley Cup doesn't get the same level of coverage as the Super Bowl.

28-24 was how it ended so the Patriots won their first Super Bowl in ten years and in the process putting them in the elite group of teams that have won at least fiver Super Bowls in total.

The other main attraction of the Super Bowl is of course the half-time show which this year was performed by Katy Perry. Here I have to declare something of an odd personal connection to Ms Perry. For starters she is quite good friends with Rihanna on whom I seem to have wasted an entire year of my life. Having played a pre-game concert Rihanna was in the crowd at the Super Bowl and there were rumours that she would join Katy Perry as a guest performer during the half-time show.

Secondly Katy Perry used to be married Russell Brand a British guy who I sort of knew from our street protest days although even then he had a reputation in being more interested in his own ego then any political issue. One of the most infamous occasions where I met Russell Brand was at a protest in Soho, London back in 2002. He climbed on top of a TV broadcast truck and dropped his trousers for all the world to see. This prompted the police to move into arrest him and in the ensuing melee I and a few other people (not Brand) got bashed about by the police's batons and riot shields. To this day I still have lumps on the back of my skull to remind me of that incident. Since blowing up his relationship with Katy Perry and his career in the US Brand has returned to the UK and re-invented himself as the self-appointed leader of some mythical left-wing revolution. Despite knowing absolutely b*gger all about politics the UK media have decided to indulge Brand with him appearing on otherwise serious political shows like the BBC's Question Time and Newsnight.

So I have many, many issues with Russell Brand that have absolutely nothing to do with his ex-wife. However if I'm watching a live Katy Perry performance I do find it slightly difficult to relax and enjoy the show not least because I think that as with Rihanna by now Katy Perry and I should have met up in person if only to prove to each other that we don't just exist behind glass screens.

The half-time show was actually very easy to relax and enjoy because it was very light, fun and largely lacking in any political dimension. However it began with Perry performing "Roar" while being carried across the pitch on an Egyptian-style lion/sphinx/giant gold thing. As she made away the arena dancers holding glowing red balls of light parted. This was of course reminiscent of the parting of the Red Sea in the Exodus book of the Bible. The recent film "Exodus" which featured the Red Sea being parted was banned in many Arab-nations including Egypt because it lied about Jewish slaves being forced to build the Pyramids. During her recent tour which featured a lot of ancient Egyptian imagery Katy Perry caused a bit of controversy because the original version of the video for "Dark Horse" featured an Islamic symbol being burned. As such this sequence in the show was a jokey reference to all that.

Next Perry performed Dark Horse while being accompanied by dancers dressed as Chess pieces while lighting effects turned the arena into a giant Chess board. Apart from  her friendship with Rihanna Katy Perry's own "Prism" tour was accompanied by the release of the Edward Snowden files on the US' Prism spy program which seemed to be an attempt to drag her into the great Chess game of international diplomacy.

In the next sequence Perry performed "California Gurls" which is one of her most upbeat bubblegum pop hits on a stage that was reminiscent of the silly cartoon "Spongebob Square Pants." Accompanied by an uncomfortable looking Lenny Kravitz this sequence was pure good natured nonsense and featured a dancer dressed as a cuddly shark who seemed to be making things up as they went along for comic effect. Due to my knowledge of Russell Brand and Kravitz's talent as a guitar player I'm sure there was a bad pun about "Ex-Licks" (XLIX) in this sequence somewhere

Finally Katy Perry revealed her much rumoured mystery female guest. It turned out it wasn't Rihanna but Missy Elliot. Although I've never bothered look into her personal life I am aware that Missy Elliot is a huge icon to a lesbians of a certain generation. So as they performed "I Kissed A Girl" together Perry wore a football jersey style dress emblazoned with the number 49. This could have been a reference to the fact it was the 49th Super Bowl or a jokey little reference to the San Francisco 49's who represent homosexuals/gay-rights in the NFL code.

Missy Elliot then performed a three minute medley of her hits "Get Your Freak On," "Work It," and "Lose Control." This gave Katy Perry a chance to prepare for the big finale which saw her perform "Firework" as she was raised above the arena on a giant sculpture of the NFL logo as lots of fireworks went off. I suppose through the use of fireworks you could draw comparisons between the US low culture versus European high culture debate that featured at the 2014 Winter Olympics but I think that would be a bit of a reach and this was certainly one of those occasions where light and silly was definitely appropriate.

Although she is likely to pick up new fans due to her Super Bowl performance here in the UK Missy Elliot is already being exposed to a fresh audience with her song "Get Your Freak On" featuring the in the government's "This Girl Can" campaign which is intended to encourage more young women to participate in sport.

This type of strange government advertising campaign to tell us how to live our lives was very popular under the last centre-left Labour government but seemed to dramatically fall out of favour under the current centre-right Conservative government. As such this type of advertising campaign can be seen as a divider between liberal conservatives and authoritarian socialists of which Obama seems to be one. This practice of the government using propaganda to tell the public what to think and how to act is something the Soviet Union was famous for particularly through the state-run newspaper "Pravda."

That rather neatly allows me to segway into that other Super Bowl institution - the commercials. I should start by pointing out that although some of the international brands have been making a bit more of an effort recently here in the UK we don't get the Super Bowl commercials. As a result rather then watching them as part of the spectacle I now need to go and suck all the fun out of it by watching them on the Internet, alone in a darkened room while taking notes. However through Twitter I do get an idea of what the big commericals that everybody has been talking about were.

This year though there doesn't seem to have been any big commercials. This reflects the seriousness of the games theme with many advertisers afraid of a backlash by getting the mood around such a hot button issue wrong or by being seen to make fun of it. This is actually very relevant to the Black Lives Matter protests because although I think there is a pro-Obama bias in the US media much of the news coverage of the protests has often been overly indulgent of the protesters or just plain wrong. A large part of this has been media outlets acting in fear of being targeted by the protesters who although small in number were very vocal.

Although I think that many were just deflated I suspect that the large US motor companies such as GM whose commercials are almost as much a part of the Super Bowl as the game itself purposely opted not to run commercials to make the point that the type of political unrest that Obama is creating through the protests discourage and scare off private investment. I think the story of Go Daddy deciding to withdraw its original commercial after being targeted by protesters was done specifically to promote discussion about this issue.

With many of the traditional big players staying out of the game this year it freed up space for smaller, newer participants. Amongst these were a number of political campaigns including the "No More" campaign targeting domestic violence alongside commericals from regular brands which had a strong social message such as Toyota which showed Paralympian Amy Purdey dancing to promote disability rights while Always' "Like A Girl" commercial challenged the notion that women can't take part in sports in exactly the style of the UK's  "This Girl Can" campaign.

Although I doubt groups like No More realised it much this seems to have been done on purpose to give the impression that many of the Super Bowl commercials were in fact Pravda-style government propaganda films. The intention being to promote discussion about how far the Obama administration has moved towards radical, authoritarian socialism particularly through the Black Lives Matter protests. After all the the pan-Africanist ideas that many in the protest movement such as Al Sharpton subscribe to were invented by the Soviet KGB during the Cold War as a way to use the civil rights movement to trigger a Communist revolution in America.

As such I think the winner of this years commercials was undoubtedly Always because by invoking the link established in the half-time show they absolutely nailed it. I also think honourable mentions should go to any brand such as Dove who were brave enough use their commercials to play around with the notion of fatherhood. After all it has long been suggested that a particularly high rate of fatherless households is another reason for the lack of positive role models for young black men.

This evening I'll try and watch some more of the commericals so I may do another post about the ones that simply made me laugh or appealed to my sense of vanity. For example I suspect Kim Kardashian's commercial for T-Mobile was influenced by the way I've been able to divert funds from my cellphone provider to charitable causes such as the recent Ebola outbreak. Somehow I don't think cellphone providers are too happy about this.

As a final note though I should point out though that watching the Patriot's coach Bill Belichick prowl the touch line in his weathered hoodie he reminded me of that famous fleece wearer, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie. Governor Christ is currently in my home city of London to, amongst other things, meet the British Prime Minister to boost his foreign policy credentials ahead of a possible Presidential run. Much like Richard Sherman's hair last year this was apparently enough to draw all my drunken frustration at having to be stay awake for far too long to watch the Super Bowl. Plus I gather that people in New York mock New Jersey in much the same way people in London mock Croydon.

18:05 on 2/2/15 (UK date).