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0:49

They beat the Kansas City

0:51

Chiefs decisively and denied the

0:54

Chiefs a third straight championship.

0:56

I'm Stephen Thompson. It is

0:58

1101 on Sunday night. We're

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just one year against all

2:59

the odds, told in the

3:01

band's own words for the first

3:03

time. Now playing exclusively in

3:06

IMAX everywhere February 14th. Joining

3:08

me is one of the hosts

3:10

of NPR's Code Switch podcast, Gene

3:12

Dembe. Hey, Gene. Whiskoo, which is

3:14

Stephen. We'll get to what's good

3:16

in just a moment. Also with

3:18

us, Culture Writer and Critic Shimira,

3:20

Ibrahim, hey, Shimira. Hey, Stephen,

3:22

two weekends in a row! I

3:25

know! It is so nice to have

3:27

you back for another late Sunday night.

3:29

So, two years ago, the Philadelphia Eagles

3:31

and the Kansas City Chiefs battled a

3:34

close-fought Super Bowl that came down to

3:36

the final moments. Tonight, they played again

3:38

and... It was not close. This time,

3:40

the Eagles jumped out to a massive

3:42

lead and dominated in every phase of

3:45

the game, though the Chiefs did score

3:47

a few times late to pull the

3:49

final score to 40-22. Eagles quarterback Jaylon

3:51

Hurts was named the game's MVP. We're

3:54

going to talk about Kendrick Lamar's halftime

3:56

show, and we'll even talk about a

3:58

few of the commercials. But I wanted

4:00

to grab a few thoughts on the

4:03

game itself. Gene, I know you

4:05

to be a lifelong Eagles

4:07

fan. We have recorded entire

4:09

podcasts about our respective football

4:11

fandoms. I am guessing that

4:13

you are a happy man right now.

4:15

I'm very happy. I'm also like a

4:17

little disconcerted because... the nature of this

4:19

movement was like so comprehensive it was

4:21

so holistic you know if you're an

4:24

Eagles fan you're like oh we might

4:26

lose this or if we win it'll

4:28

be close you'd never imagine a demolition

4:30

like this you know what I mean

4:32

so even those happen I was like

4:34

yeah I was at your house Stephen

4:36

when the Atlanta Falcons were up like on

4:38

the Patriots 28 to 3 and somehow lost that

4:40

Super Bowl at the end of the most one

4:43

of the most banana and I remember just being

4:45

like oh my god and so a cosmic jinks

4:47

could happen like I was like oh we're gonna

4:49

win this like I was like oh no I would

4:51

never say that I would like that's my ego's fandom

4:54

has bruised me so much over so many years I'm

4:56

like now it got to the point where I mean

4:58

even when Schmer and I were sex ex exe and

5:00

I was like Is this really happening? Like,

5:02

I seem like everything we did

5:04

was right. Everything was working and

5:06

nothing was working for the Chiefs. Like,

5:08

those things lining up that way in one

5:10

game is bananas anyway. At one point, Gene,

5:13

you texted me during the game and said,

5:15

the Chiefs look like the Jets. I feel

5:17

like as the resident New Yorker, I should

5:19

take offense to that. But I never cared

5:22

about the Jets, even when I cared about

5:24

the NFL, so it's fine. Well, Shamira,

5:26

you come into this game, you're a

5:28

New Yorker, you're a, would you say

5:30

lapsed Giants fan? Yes, I would say a

5:32

lap. I think that is a fair label to

5:35

put upon me, yes. So what did you

5:37

think of this game? Well, like, what

5:39

was your rooting interest? And how did

5:41

you feel about how it turned out?

5:43

Well. I reluctantly had to

5:45

put my hat in with the

5:47

Eagles. One, out of solidarity with

5:49

my fellow NFC East team. Two,

5:52

one thing New Yorkers and Philadelphia

5:54

fans share in kinship is our

5:56

innate destructiveness at the site of

5:58

success, which is. but I can deeply

6:00

identify with. I am, in fact, surprised

6:02

that Gene is here and not on a

6:05

car directly to Broad Street, which is

6:07

a testament to his current life as a

6:09

family man. Not currently

6:11

dangling from a lamppost.

6:13

Exactly, exactly. And to

6:15

win, these are three texts that Gene

6:17

sent to me near the end of

6:19

the match. He said, I'm so confused.

6:21

I mean, I'm happy, but I'm confused.

6:23

Gotta be happy for Philadelphia. Yeah,

6:25

this game really felt like an

6:27

accumulation of the suspicions that had

6:29

mounted around the Kansas City Chiefs

6:32

over the course of the season.

6:34

This team won a historic number

6:36

of close games. They were consistently

6:38

pulling games out in improbable ways.

6:40

And on one hand, that is

6:42

the sign of a winner, that

6:45

is the sign of a champion,

6:47

that is the sign of a

6:49

well -coached team and a well -led

6:51

team, but it is also the

6:53

sign of a team that is

6:56

not necessarily gonna go into the Super

6:58

Bowl and dominate. And it

7:00

just felt like all those one

7:02

-score games. This still felt like

7:04

a culmination of a team

7:06

that had really been kind of

7:08

hanging on by their fingernails.

7:10

And then once they got to

7:12

the Super Bowl, they fell

7:14

off the cliff. I got into

7:16

this very annoying argument with

7:18

my Uber driver last week who

7:20

was like, oh, you

7:22

know, the Chiefs, I don't know if anybody got beat them. And I

7:25

was like, they've been riding their luck all season, right? Like sooner

7:27

or later, the coin is gonna flip the wrong

7:29

way. Like, because some of these games were, games they

7:31

could have very realistically lost, right? So many things

7:33

have to go right for you to win one Super

7:35

Bowl. You have to be really good. You

7:37

have to get injury luck on your side. You

7:39

have to be able to hold on to your

7:41

player, you know, your key pieces, whatever. Like, you

7:43

know, but these are three years in a row,

7:45

that's like a - Once you start paying Patrick Mahomes

7:48

$450 million, then you have to pay everybody else

7:50

less. Absolutely. And so how do you keep a

7:52

team together with that setup? And like, to do

7:54

that three years in a row was like, that's...

7:56

I mean, if they don't want a day, it's like, what are

7:58

we doing now? Like, I mean, like, that would be... like a

8:00

historic amount of good luck

8:03

for over the course of

8:05

three years. Well, in addition

8:08

to what turned out to

8:10

be a very lopsided football

8:12

game, there was also a

8:15

half-time show that felt like

8:17

the culmination of a very

8:19

lopsided beef. You had Kendrick

8:22

Lamar coming out and kind

8:24

of getting his victory lap,

8:27

performing a Super Bowl halftime

8:29

show with support

8:31

from Sizza, with

8:33

kind of narration

8:36

from Samuel L.

8:38

Jackson. Shamira,

8:40

I'm going to start with you.

8:42

What did you think of the

8:44

halftime show? Well, what do you think

8:46

about it? We kind of did

8:48

see two drubbings on that field,

8:50

right? Oh, no. It's definitely

8:53

an eventful night for

8:55

America's greatest tradition, right?

8:57

Some things that Kendrick

8:59

did were so prototypically,

9:02

Kendrick, they were unsurprising.

9:04

diverted from years of tradition from the

9:06

last few major acts by choosing to

9:08

open a set by performing an unreleased

9:11

song that he only showed a 60-second

9:13

snip of it and promoting his last

9:15

album. I already kind of knew where

9:17

we were out the gates. The shiny

9:19

G&X car was definitely an amazing look

9:21

and that he proceeded to completely ignore

9:24

the back half of his catalog and

9:26

remind you guys that he has a

9:28

tour to promote and do all of

9:30

his most current singles while also committing

9:32

to aesthetics that he has had for

9:34

years, right? The black nationalist aesthetics

9:37

aesthetics, the way that he plays

9:39

around with stage production feels on

9:41

his shows, the way that he

9:43

plays around with vocal intonations, and

9:45

constantly reminds us that he works

9:47

out harder than all of us

9:49

by rapping and jogging at the

9:51

same time. His cardio was on point.

9:53

Absolutely. It was a very Kendrick show,

9:56

and also I'm ready for the next

9:58

chapter of it at this point. Yeah,

10:00

I hear that. How about you, how about you,

10:02

Gene? I was just like fixate on his

10:04

jeans. I was like, oh, is he wearing flare

10:06

jeans? Like I was like, oh, wait, what's

10:08

the cut the little bell bottoms that happened to

10:10

him? Picking him to begin with was kind

10:12

of like a, you know, as big as Kendrick

10:14

is, like his music. He is not like

10:16

a, you know, he's not Shakira.

10:19

And he has music that's like,

10:21

I would say probably more danceable than music the

10:23

performance tonight. And he went away from that.

10:25

And I thought the, you know, presentation of it

10:27

was really, really well done considering, you know,

10:29

hip -hop doesn't always translate to that kind of,

10:31

like to the stadium field. I've seen Kendrick Glav

10:33

and the outdoor concert ones. And he was

10:35

incredible. Like, and that's like a really hard thing

10:37

to pull off for a hip -hop artist, right?

10:39

But he sort of filled up the space a

10:41

lot, which is like, again, really hard for

10:43

a hip -hop back, right? You know, I love

10:45

the little Serena cameo. Serena cameo. Which of course

10:47

is like, you know, layer, like she's confident,

10:49

she's, they drink, you know what I mean? Like

10:51

it's just, there was just so much pettiness

10:53

in the performance. You've got to be a

10:56

little impressed at the fact that Marky

10:58

Artists, about to do a stadium tour, has

11:00

the opportunity to showcase, you know, the

11:02

best of his catalog to like ramp up

11:04

ticket sales. That is a level of

11:06

commitment to pettiness that I don't know I

11:08

have in me. And I am a

11:10

long about hater, right? I have to respect

11:13

it. This is

11:15

the exclamation point on

11:17

the incredible run that Not Like Us

11:19

has had. It was one of the biggest

11:21

hits of last year. And just last weekend

11:23

as Shamira and I discussed on this show,

11:25

Not Like Us, one record of the year

11:27

and song of the year with the Grammys.

11:29

Like that song is getting like all these

11:31

stamps of mainstream validation. I mean, mainstream validation.

11:33

It was, you know, all over the billboard

11:35

charts all year last year. It's not like

11:37

it wasn't mainstream before. But I was surprised

11:39

how deep you went into the verses in

11:41

that song. Yeah, absolutely. Also like how he

11:43

was like showing a little leg. Like he's

11:45

like, am I going to do it now? Am

11:48

I going to do it now? Like no.

11:50

Like little snippets like sprinkled out. I was like,

11:52

oh, he is trying to. Everyone

11:55

is here because they want to see how this goes on.

11:57

I mean, also like, can he do that

11:59

song? Like I was like, I was. Can you

12:02

do this

12:04

song at

12:07

the Super

12:09

Bowl? There were so

12:12

many intentional choices made in that respect to

12:14

your point, Gene, you know. There was like

12:16

the coquettish, like, oh no, I'm not going

12:18

to do it, you know. When that first,

12:20

what would happen, where he kind of plays

12:22

around it and backs up off the instrumental,

12:24

I was like, watch him still do it

12:27

anyway. That was my exact reply in the

12:29

group. And then of course, he runs it

12:31

back and plays the entire first verse, which

12:33

was, I think I had resigned, I had

12:35

resigned in my head in my head in

12:37

my head. And not only did they do

12:40

the first first, they intentionally cut out the

12:42

mixing of the backing track so that

12:44

we could hear the stadium at some

12:46

rather pivotal points in the verse, which

12:48

is more daring than if he had

12:50

just done it all the way through

12:52

himself. That's when that is one of the

12:54

most most crazy things I've seen in my

12:57

life. Wow. To add to that, the fact

12:59

that he even did euphoria as a

13:01

track just felt like... extra pointed like,

13:03

oh, you think I can't do this?

13:05

So I'm just going to do it

13:07

twice as hard, just to prove that

13:09

I can do this, you know, which

13:11

is rather dare me to reserve your

13:13

mainstream portion primarily for your main collaborator,

13:16

who is Sizza, right? And then also

13:18

just the cascade of hits that he's

13:20

made off of an opponent in the

13:22

last months is definitely an unprecedented choice,

13:24

but it was certainly an amusing one,

13:26

all in bell bottom jeans, to boot,

13:28

right, right? I wanted to talk a

13:30

little bit about the commercials. If I

13:33

have had one kind of primary

13:35

complaint about the Super Bowl commercials

13:37

over the years, it's that they've

13:39

really become kind of... little more

13:42

than a parade of celebrities. Did

13:44

you guys have any, like, any

13:46

impressions of the commercials? People are

13:49

always like, oh, what are the

13:51

big hot Super Bowl ads? Like,

13:53

I don't care. I used to

13:56

be that person who regularly paid

13:58

attention to the ads. and what

14:00

they indicated marketing trend-wise, what we were

14:02

paying attention to. I have found them

14:04

to be more disappointing to engage with,

14:07

more than anything else, because there's just

14:09

a general lack of creativity. I think

14:11

the most compelling celebrity associated brand is

14:13

probably Ben Affleck with Duncan Donuts, which

14:16

is more a testament to his Bostonian

14:18

nature than anything else. Yes. Where the

14:20

hell of Matt and Tom? Forget them

14:22

suckers. Matt Damon and Tom Brady don't

14:24

have the heart of a champion. We

14:26

don't have the hot of a champion

14:28

Brady. They're very on brand. Exactly, exactly.

14:30

I have found it a little

14:33

damning because I think that, you know,

14:35

what celebrity means in the contemporary

14:37

era has come to mean everything

14:39

and nothing, right? I think if

14:41

you look like 15 years ago,

14:43

those same celebrities were still doing

14:45

branded advertisements for money, right? But

14:47

they would go to Asia or

14:49

go internationally where those commercials wouldn't

14:52

be advertised here because it. dulled

14:54

your prestige a little bit to

14:56

actually have commercials airing here while

14:58

you were trying to be considered

15:00

a quote-unquote serious actor, right? I

15:02

think the fact that there's like

15:04

a shameless integration now It's telling I guess

15:06

probably what do they call it out recession

15:09

indicators right you know like oh wow we

15:11

just all need to get all the checks

15:13

we can get now right you know well

15:15

and it's part of that whole chase that

15:17

bag mentally or somewhere along the way we

15:20

went from don't sell out to make that

15:22

much exactly exactly to the point

15:24

that you know the creative elements

15:27

of it are fully you know

15:29

abandoned like It's, you know, product,

15:31

celebrity, maybe three well-written lines, right?

15:34

You know, and we perceive it.

15:36

It's a little bit disappointing. I

15:38

think the only ad that has

15:41

actually stuck in my head, which

15:43

says a lot, is, seal, sing

15:45

as a seal, which is

15:47

a testament to how terrible.

15:53

Yeah, the ones that stood out were nightmare

15:56

fuel. Like like the seal as a

15:58

seal was straight up night there was

16:00

a whipped cream ad involving tongues.

16:02

I got it from the couch, I

16:04

was like, what? This is disgusting.

16:06

I felt like, oh, I'm somebody's dead.

16:08

I'm somebody's whole father. I was

16:10

like, yo. I feel like every Super

16:13

Bowl, whether it was one person

16:15

watching a Super Bowl alone in a

16:17

room or 60 people crammed into

16:19

a rec room, watching the Super Bowl

16:21

together communally, I felt like every

16:23

room with a TV in it in

16:25

America went at the same time.

16:27

I was like, what is this ad

16:29

for? And then it was

16:31

like coffee creamer or whipped creamer. I

16:34

did enjoy, I don't know if enjoy

16:36

is the right word, but I

16:38

was tickled, I guess. But I think

16:40

Angelsoft, it was a toilet paper

16:42

company that said, hey, here's your bathroom

16:44

brick. I thought it was amusingly

16:46

clever enough that I let it pass,

16:48

but really that just shows you

16:50

how low the bar is more than

16:52

anything else. Why are you still

16:54

here? This is your potty duty. It's

16:56

simple, do not watch this. So

16:58

you there, get off the couch and

17:00

go to the bathroom. I

17:04

have to say, there was one

17:06

ad kind of late in the broadcast

17:08

for Totino's with Tim Robinson and

17:10

Sam Richardson. And it's like kind of

17:13

a scene from a movie where

17:15

they're sending the alien home and the

17:17

alien ends up dying. Press and

17:19

peace, Jagmo. We didn't know him as

17:21

well of you, so it's not

17:23

as sad for us. Not that we

17:25

didn't want to. Just didn't open

17:27

up around us. It feels very much

17:29

like an, I think you should

17:31

leave sketch. It feels like Tim Robinson

17:33

and his people wrote this. As

17:36

opposed to all of these 30

17:38

second clips that cost, you know, who

17:40

knows how much money to make and

17:42

who knows how much more money

17:45

to actually broadcast. Those ads are just

17:47

throwing money and celebrities at the

17:49

screen. I was glad to see an

17:51

ad that seemed to actually understand

17:53

that you can make people laugh with

17:55

your commercial. I would be remiss if

17:57

I didn't point out, Nike did a woman.

18:00

sports advertisement which

18:02

wasn't trying to go for the

18:04

humor so there were no he's

18:06

out of me right it's standard

18:08

Nike aspirational messaging sure you can't

18:10

be confident so be confident

18:13

you can't challenge so challenge

18:15

you can't dominate so dominate so dominate

18:17

It is a big deal that women's sports

18:19

got that much airtime on like national televised

18:21

event which is our closest to a monoculture.

18:24

It does speak to the big strides that

18:26

we've made in the last two years that

18:28

it's even getting that amount of space. Like

18:30

Nike has this very like specific sort of

18:33

grammar to their commercials to their advertising. They've

18:35

had for like 40 years and they always

18:37

it always works on me. Yeah and so

18:39

like going through you see Shakari, you see

18:41

like all of them like doing like oh

18:44

you're you're a woman you're always going

18:46

to... You can't win, so you may as

18:48

well go win. I was like, that

18:50

was, I'm sorry, I was like, oh,

18:52

it worked, it worked on me, it

18:55

worked on me. It worked on the

18:57

Nike commercial, it was like Jordan Childs

18:59

inverted, doing like a one handstand, and

19:01

I was like, oh, I too need

19:03

to buy a sports bra. Like, let's

19:06

go. Let's go. All right, well, we

19:08

want to know what you think about

19:10

this year's Super Bowl. Find us on

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Facebook at facebook.com/PCHH. That brings us to

19:14

the end of our show. Gene Dembe,

19:17

Shimira Ibrahim, thanks so much

19:19

for being here. Thanks as always.

19:21

Appreciate you, Stephen. And just a

19:24

reminder that signing up for Pop

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Culture Happy Hour plus is a

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great way to support our show

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and public radio, and you get

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to listen to all of our

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episodes, sponsor free. or visit the

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link in our show notes. This

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episode was produced by Mike Katzith

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and edited by Jessica Reedy. Hello,

19:44

come in, provides our theme music.

19:47

Clips of the halftime show are

19:49

credited to the NFL. Thank

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you for listening to Pop

19:53

Culture Happy Hour from NPR.

19:55

I'm Stephen Thompson and

19:57

we will see you all next

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