Super Bowl! (Super Bowl?)
Not day-after keyword grubbing, really.
I did not watch the Super Bowl last night, but it turns out that’s needed anymore in order to watch the commercials, get the lowdown on the halftime show, and even learn who won within .0032498 seconds after it ends.
Two music-y things: First, fun.’s “We Are Young” in… one of the car commercials! My fellow fun.-loving (ha, fun-loving) friend texted to let me know, and it must also be noted that I was wearing my fun. hoodie at the time.
I’d already been starting to get the feeling that this band was on the verge of Serious Popularity (especially among teenagers, which is cool except for the fact that it makes me look elderly at their concerts). So catching the commercial online later was exciting.
[caption id=”attachment_4115220185" align=”aligncenter” width=”300" caption=”I bet their next NYC show will be somewhere a lot bigger than The Bell House (from a show in Sept. 2010)”]
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Right, yes. The song itself. I hadn’t known it was available for listening before the Feb. 21 release of their album Some Nights). It’s theatrical, stirring, dramatic, piano-filled. Maybe even a bit more Queen-like than some of their earlier songs. (What, the lyrics are little clichéd, you say? I can’t hear you.) Begs to be played with the windows down while driving through New York at night. Definitely on repeat listening now.
And halftime. Speaking of seeing artists I like who are hitting the big time with Super Bowl glory, how about M.I.A.?
I first learned about her in the summer of 2006, shortly after activating my glorious (at the time) brand-new eMusic account. Arular was in heavy rotation immediately, and the follow-up, Kala, arrived on my doorstep the next year, right before I saw her live at the Austin City Limits Music Festival. The performance was so full of unbridled energy and so much fun, and still stands out as a highlight more than four years later.
And now, apparently she flipped everyone off during the Super Bowl performance, which may involve fines and has probably provoked a lot of inevitable “won’t somebody please think of the children?” moral outrage that I’ve tried to avoid finding online.
When the screen captures first surfaced, I thought back to that ACL performance, when she told the audience how festival officials had prohibited her from using the gunshot sound effects… and proceeded to gleefully pound out those gunshots on the keyboard. A few songs later, she started inviting the crowd up on stage to dance around with her, security removed everyone, and she invited them back up.
[caption id=”attachment_4115220186" align=”aligncenter” width=”300" caption=”ACL 2007. About the best I could do at a large festival — M.I.A. is up there on stage, really.”]
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Good ol’ M.I.A. She may have terrorist ties (I would never claim to be knowledgeable enough about the political situation in Sri Lanka to say definitively) and I may not understand her tweets, like, ever, but that concert in 2007 showed that she does what she wants and delights in causing trouble, even if just as an act. I’m glad she still does.
Also, what an excellent marketing move. Everyone is already on heightened Super Bowl Scandal! alert, so any little taste of inappropriateness is instantly magnified. M.I.A. was the break-room discussion topic at work today. Mission accomplished, Miss Maya.
