The second quarter finally comes to a close. Everybody sits up in their chairs to watch the performance of the year, “The National Football League welcomes you to the Apple Music Super Bowl 57 Halftime Show.” Rihanna appears onto TV screens all across America and performs the most watched halftime show of all time. Now this year’s halftime show…
Every year around February marks plenty of holidays like Lunar New Year and Valentine’s Day, but something that is arguably the most important event during the month is the NFL Superbowl.
Last year, Rihanna broke records and has become the most viewed Super Bowl halftime show of all time, standing at a peak of 118 million viewers. She did everything a halftime show should, brought extremely popular songs that anyone would know, had interesting set designs and costumes, and continued to entertain throughout the entirety of the event. But with Usher, it seems like it would be hard to live up to expectations. Around 60% of UHS students couldn’t even name any Usher songs when asked.
“I think there are way better options,” says Senior Chase King. “ Hopefully he at least puts on a good show.” And that is the majority of opinions on Usher in general this year, out of the blue and not really wanted by anybody.
After surveying a few people about what they thought about this year’s halftime show, 62% believe that Usher was not a good pick for the Super Bowl. The most popular halftime shows were, of course, Rihanna, but also Katy Perry ,Lady Gaga, and Coldplay. All of these artists have over 55 million monthly listeners on Spotify minimum, but Usher only has around 37 million monthly listeners.
“I think they could have had someone who was a lot more relevant today, but I can see why they chose Usher because the target audience of the Super Bowl is a little older” states Nico Brown, another senior disappointed in the choice of this year’s halftime show. Nobody really expected Usher to be the performer this year, because everyone thought it was going to be Taylor Swift.
In case you haven’t been keeping up with the NFL this year, Taylor Swift has been dating Travis Kelce, a tight end for the Kansas City Chiefs and has been seen at every single one of his games cheering him on. So much so, that it is almost expected that the camera goes to Taylor Swift everytime Kelce scores, which happens at least once a game.
Since the Chiefs were going all the way to the Super Bowl this year, many people expected that Taylor Swift to be the halftime show, but since the announcement that Usher was going to be performing this year went unnoticed by a large amount of people this year, they were even more disappointed when they realized who really was doing the show.
Most UHS students did not realize that Usher was doing the halftime show and would have preferred plenty of other popular artists instead. Some popular votes were Drake, Kendrick Lamar, and BTS.
Usher all in all is a disappointment to many as the choice for this year’s halftime show, as everyone else believed it would have easily been Taylor Swift this year. It makes so much more sense to put the artist heavily involved in the NFL while also being a huge artist in her own right as the halftime show. But instead, we have Usher, who can hopefully subvert expectations and perform a halftime show we won’t forget in a year.
