Super Bowl Halftime Show
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At long last, Rihanna made grand return to the stage — the world’s biggest one, by the way — and her fans couldn’t have been more excited. And because she’s Rihanna, her fanbase happens to include some of the biggest names in music, from Karol G to SZA, both of whom shared their post-Super Bowl LVII Halftime Show praise on social media on Sunday night (Feb. 12).
“The HITS RIH HAS…,” tweeted “Kill Bill” musician SZA. “Low key endless . So inspiring !”
Karol G, meanwhile, was lucky enough to be in the house at Glendale Arizona’s State Farm Stadium — where the Kansas City Chiefs triumphed over the Philadelphia Eagles 38-35 — to congratulate the Fenty Beauty founder in person. “As a Fan, I have to say that this was the HIGHLIGHT of my entire life!!!” wrote the Latin music star in Spanish on Instagram, sharing photos of her and Rih posing adorably together.
“I hope when you guys meet your idols, they’re as awesome as she was with me. I LOVE YOU.”
Many more artists, including Christina Aguilera, Diplo, Dionne Warwick and Fifth Harmony’s Dinah Jane, also shared congratulations following Rihanna’s extravagant medley of Super Bowl-curated hits, a performance that marked the pop star’s first live show in nearly six years.
Strutting down a light-up runway and soaring above the crowd on a floating platform, Rih belted out beloved hits including “Only Girl (In the World),” “We Found Love,” “Umbrella” and “Diamonds” while debuting her brand new baby bump; reps later confirmed that she and partner A$AP Rocky are in fact expecting Baby No. 2.
Check out SZA, Karol G, and more musicians’ reactions to Rihanna’s epic Super Bowl Halftime set below:
I was rooting for the Raiders even though they weren’t there… and Rihanna. Goodnight.— Dionne Warwick (@dionnewarwick) February 13, 2023
And if anyone thinks I’m somehow making fun of the QUEEN Rihanna with this, you’re reaching. I’m a huge fan and thought she did great.— The Smashing Pumpkins (@SmashingPumpkin) February 13, 2023
WOW! #RIHANNA WHAT BALLS!! That was fantastic!! Thank you to ever who made that spectacular 1/2 Time Show JUST FANTASTIC! How did they do that??— bettemidler (@BetteMidler) February 13, 2023
TV producer Jesse Collins said there was some pressure following last year’s epic, Emmy-winning Super Bowl halftime show with Dr. Dre, Snoop Dogg and more, but working with Rihanna made the process easy.
“She’s a lot of fun, very cool, never stressed. Just like, ‘All right, I’m going to go do this real quick.’ The pressure never got to her. She just was in it from day one, and really warm and let everybody have fun with it,” Collins told The Hollywood Reporter moments after Rihanna blazed the stage Sunday at the State Farm Arena in Glendale, Arizona.
“I think there’s always pressure with this show,” added Collins, who also produced The Weeknd’s 2021 halftime show. “You work so hard, six months for 13 minutes. [This was] an opportunity to work with a global superstar and her re-entry into music.”
Rihanna last performed live at the 2018 Grammy Awards. Before that, she was on the road promoting her album Anti, released in 2016.
Collins won the outstanding variety show (live) Emmy for last year’s halftime show alongside Dr. Dre, Snoop Dogg, Mary J. Blige, Eminem, Kendrick Lamar, 50 Cent and Jay-Z, who also produced the spectacle. He has also produced the Grammy Awards, Academy Awards, Golden Globes, BET Awards, American Music Awards and more.
Rihanna’s performance — where she announced she was pregnant — was exciting and energetic, and she sang a number of her popular hits, including “Work,” “Diamonds” and “Umbrella.”
“I just feel great,” he said of Rihanna’s show. “I feel like her vision was executed. She shocked the world and the Navy’s [Rihanna’s fans] happy, and I’m just glad we got another great one in the books.
“We couldn’t have a massive stage on the field because of the grass and so they put it in the air and it was just brilliant,” he added. “It was just a great idea of where there’s a will, there’s a way.”
This article originally appeared on The Hollywood Reporter.
You can count Chris Martin among the millions of fans who can’t wait to watch Rihanna perform this weekend at the Super Bowl Halftime Show. In a new interview with Apple Music 1, the Coldplay frontman sang the pop star’s praises while reflecting on his own memories of performing on one of the world’s biggest stages with Beyoncé and Bruno Mars.
“I don’t know Rihanna very well,” Martin told host Zane Lowe on Friday (Feb. 10). “I’m mainly just a fan, and we have performed with her a few times, and you’re right, it is rarer and rarer for her to just sing, which is what makes it even more special, and in a strange way, it shows that she really, really wants to do it. No one can make Rihanna do anything at this point.”
“You have to be an idiot not to recognize that she’s the best singer of all time,” he continued. “I’m very biased because I’m such a big Rihanna fan. I mean, I think she could just walk out in sweatpants and sing, and that would be just great.”
The “Love on the Brain” singer has just two days left before she headlines the Apple Music-sponsored event between the game’s second and third quarters. This year, the Super Bowl will see the Kansas City Chiefs facing off with the Philadelphia Eagles at 6:30 p.m. on Sunday (Feb. 12) at Glendale’s State Farm Stadium in Arizona.
In 2016, it was Coldplay who headlined. Wanting to do justice to the NFL’s 50th anniversary Super Bowl, the band brought out a pair of superstar guests — Bey and Bruno — to assist them.
“I felt really straight away, well, we have to ask Beyoncé because we had a song together at the time, but it hadn’t come out yet,” Martin recalled. “And then Beyoncé, we spoke on the phone and she said, ‘Should we do our song together?’ And I thought, ‘I don’t know. No one knows it yet, and maybe just do something that you want to do.’ And then she came up with ‘Formation,’ which was the best.”
Not everyone loved the final product of Coldplay’s efforts, however. The band was met with criticism from certain viewers, something Martin also opened up about with Lowe. “We got quite a hard time afterwards from some people who didn’t really like it, which was hard to take at the time,” he confessed. “But then at a certain point I realized, ‘Well, we did exactly what we wanted to do given all those limitations.’ We would do exactly the same way, I think. We would ask the same guests.”
“I don’t mind the fact that I’m going to be in a dance-off with Beyoncé and Bruno and lose, that’s the point,” he added. “Someone has to represent the non-dancing humans. So I think I sort of became really at peace with it a few weeks afterwards.”
Rihanna unpacked the “jam-packed show” she’ll be giving on Sunday during the Apple Music Super Bowl LVII Halftime Show press conference Thursday (Feb. 9).
In Phoenix just days ahead of the big game and even bigger performance, RiRi sat down with Apple Music’s Nadeska Alexis in front of a live studio audience to discuss all of the hard work she’s put into her first live performance in seven years.
“It feels like it could have only been now,” she said about the timing of her Super Bowl Halftime Show performance at this point in her career. With 14 Billboard Hot 100 No. 1 hits, nine Grammy Awards, eight studio albums and $1.4 billion net worth under her belt, Rihanna (born Robyn Rihanna Fenty) only accumulates more achievements in need of celebration, and this weekend’s performance is no exception.
“When I first got the call to do it again this year, I was like, [hisses] ‘You sure?’ I’m three months postpartum. Should I be making major decisions like this right now? I might regret this,” she said. “But when you become a mom, there’s something that just happens where you feel like you can take on the world. The Super Bowl is one of the biggest stages in the world, so as scary as that was because I haven’t been on stage in seven years, there’s something exhilarating about the challenge of it all … It’s important for my son to see that.”
The 34-year-old singer later opened up about the “immense” physical challenges of performing again after she welcomed her first child with A$AP Rocky in May. “You’re just running around for 13 minutes, trying to put like a two-hour set for 13 minutes,” Rihanna explained. “And you’re gonna see on Sunday, from the time it starts, it just never ends until the very last second. I know I’m saying too much, but it’s a jam-packed show.”
Even filling the show with all of her jams has been challenging, having to curate a setlist that represents her discography and sticks to that 13-minute runtime. We at Billboard have even tried coming up with our ideal setlist for RiRi — and even thought about more songs she should still consider performing — but Rihanna has us beat, because she said she came up with 39 versions of the setlist, which she called the “biggest challenge” of all.
“That was the hardest, hardest part — deciding how to maximize 13 minutes but also celebrate. That’s what this show’s gonna be. It’s gonna be a celebration of my catalog in the best way that we could have put it together. You’re trying to cram 17 years of work into 13 minutes … but I think we did a pretty good job of narrowing it down,” she explained with a chuckle during the press conference. “There were probably about 39 version of the setlist right now. We’re on our 39th. Every little change counts, whether I want a guitar cut out, something muted, something added or just put in a whole new song, or take out a whole song.”
While Alexis reflected what Rihanna means to her as a fellow Caribbean woman, the superstar mused about how her halftime show special will certainly be about “representing for immigrants, representing for my country, Barbados, representing for Black women everywhere … I’m really excited to have Barbados on the Super Bowl stage.”
The Apple Music host also questioned the direction of her new music — yes, what her fans have all been waiting for — especially in regards to RiRi’s claim from her 2019 Vogue cover story that her ninth studio album, called R9 in the meantime, would be “reggae-inspired or reggae-infused.”
“Musically, I’m feeling open. I’m feeling open to exploring, discovering, creating things that are new, things that are different, things that are off, weird, might not ever make sense to my fans, the people that know the music that I put out. But I just wanna play it,” she responded. “I want to have fun. I want to have fun with music.”
The Fenty mogul later had fun answering questions from young fans, one of whom asked what her favorite album or song to record was. After much deliberation, she answered, “ANTI, for sure, top favorite album I’ve ever made,” and joked that her last studio album “was the first time that I took my time making an album while not being on tour, and that frustrated my fans a bit and here I am doing it again to them.”
Rihanna also shared some advice about staying humble to another young girl in the audience.
“My humility came from my childhood, growing up in the Caribbean, growing up in my household with my mom. She’s a very humble woman, her mom was a very humble woman. And I’ve never lost sight of that,” she said. “I often fear the pedestal that the world can put you on, and I always want to feel my feet on the ground. That makes me feel safe.”
We get an inside scoop on Rihanna’s Super Bowl Halftime show from some of the producers behind the show. Madonna claps back at backlash over her looks, Bad Bunny and Christina Aguilera will be honored at the GLAAD Awards. Billboard unveils our top 10 greatest rappers of all time and more!
Jennifer Lopez look back at her epic Super Bowl halftime show on Friday (Feb. 3), particularly on her child Emme performing with her at the big show.
“3 years ago …,” the superstar captioned a throwback reel on the anniversary of her star-studded set with Shakira, using a football emoji and the hashtags “#TBT #SuperBowlLIV #Halftime.”
In a separate Instagram Story and tweet, she gave Emme a sweet shout-out as well, writing, “My lil’ coconut gave me all the energy I needed to go out there… #MySunshine #MamaBearEnergy.” Memorably, the then-11-year-old joined her famous mom for a mash-up of “Let’s Get Loud” and Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the U.S.A.,” which contained a subtly political reference to the immigration crisis at the U.S. border by having Emme and the other kids on the field boxed into glowing cage-like structures.
Later, J. Lo’s entire experience was documented in the 2022 Netflix documentary Jennifer Lopez Halftime, during which she expressed her frustration over time constraints between her performance time and Shakira’s. The film also claimed the NFL thought the “Jenny From the Block” singer’s concept for the halftime show was too controversial and tried to make her change it just 24 hours ahead of kickoff.
While Rihanna is slated to take the field for her own hotly anticipated halftime show Feb. 12 during Super Bowl LVI, Lopez’s latest big-screen rom-com, Shotgun Wedding, just premiered on Amazon Prime Video. The latter also recently attended a star-studded bash celebrating the 25th anniversary of Anastasia Beverly Hills alongside Kim Kardashian and Oprah Winfrey.
Check out J. Lo’s throwback to her Super Bowl performance and sweet moment with Emme below:
We’re weeks away from Rihanna taking over the Super Bowl LVII halftime show on Feb. 12. But before the superstar makes her sure-to-be-triumphant return to the stage, let’s look back on the halftime spectacles that have come before her.
The 2023 game marks 30 years since Michael Jackson‘s Super Bowl performance of 1993, which marked the beginning of a new kind of halftime show — one where fans began expecting to see the superstars they love enlisted to put on a career-defining set filled with lights, music and often a special surprise or two.
Throughout the last three decades, everyone from Katy Perry and Madonna to Paul McCartney and The Rolling Stones have graced center stage between the goalposts, and we want to know which halftime performance is your all-time favorite.
In Billboard‘s official ranking, staffers put Prince‘s 2007 set at the very top thanks to The Purple One’s mix of his own hits with covers of Queen (“We Will Rock You”), Bob Dylan (“All Along the Watchtower”) and Creedence Clearwater Revival by way of Tina Turner (“Proud Mary”), though the defining act of his halftime show was the extended coda of “Purple Rain” as actual rain poured down in the stadium.
Then there’s U2‘s set just months after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, which brought the still-mourning nation together for a special tribute that included “Beautiful Day,” “MLK” and “Where the Streets Have No Name.”
Of course, the most memorable Super Bowl moment of all time occurred in 2004 when Janet Jackson and Justin Timberlake headlined and an accidental tear-away (or expertly planned shock to the system, depending on who you ask) in the closing strains of “Rock Your Body” rocketed the phrase “wardrobe malfunction” into the cultural vernacular.
Other modern triumphs at the Super Bowl halftime show have come in recent years courtesy of Beyoncé, whose incredible 2013 set shut down the power in the third quarter of the game; Lady Gaga, who kicked off her 2017 performance by singing “God Bless America” and jumping from the roof of the stadium; and Jennifer Lopez and Shakira, whose combined dance moves and costumes sparked a flood of controversy just weeks before the coronavirus pandemic took over the world.
And last year, Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg headlined an epic hip-hop show with help from Mary J. Blige, Eminem, Kendrick Lamar, 50 Cent and Anderson .Paak that electrified the hometown crowd at L.A.’s SoFi Stadium with hits like “California Love,” “No More Drama” and “Still D.R.E.”
Vote for your favorite Super Bowl halftime show below!
Stephen A. Smith walked back the comments he made comparing Rihanna to Beyoncé on Wednesday (Jan. 18).
The moment occurred when the firebrand sports commentator stopped by Sherri Shepherd’s eponymous talk show to discuss the “Needed Me” singer’s upcoming Super Bowl LVII halftime show. “Ladies and gentlemen, she’s a lot of things; she’s spectacular, actually,” he said. “There’s one thing she’s not: She ain’t Beyoncé.”
Obviously, the ill-suited comparison sparked a vocal outcry from the studio audience — as well as backlash among Rihanna’s fans on social media — and hours after the interview aired, Smith hopped on Instagram ready to eat crow. “I’m gonna own it,” he said. “I know what y’all tryin’ to do. But I’m gon’ own it because I get paid to speak for a living, so I need to be more careful.
“I want Rihanna to know: You’re a superstar, you’re sensational, you’re spectacular,” the ESPN personality continued. “You’re no joke. And you are a worthy person to be doing the Super Bowl halftime show.”
However, Smith then attempted to justify his comment by blaming Shepherd for asking a question in front of her largely female studio audience. “Now I’m a Beyoncé fan,” he stated. “I think that Beyoncé is not only a phenomenal performer, but the phenomenal performer. And the only reason any kind of comparison came into play is because Beyoncé performed at halftime at the Super Bowl not just by herself, but one separate Super Bowl performance with Bruno Mars and Coldplay. And I thought that those were two of the greatest shows that I’ve ever seen.
“So what I’m saying is anybody has to measure up to that,” he concluded. “Last year with Snoop and Dre and Mary J. and Eminem, I was like, ‘Bruno Mars! Beyoncé! Coldplay! Big time! They’ve got to measure up to that.’ Anybody who does a Super Bowl halftime show, forever I’m gonna say, ‘Beyoncé, Bruno Mars, Coldplay, and Beyoncé by themselves.’ Michael Jackson could still be alive and I would say, ‘It’s gotta measure up to that.’”
Watch Smith’s gasp-inducing Sherri interview and subsequent mea culpa to Rihanna below.
Her biggest fan! A$AP Rocky dished on just how much he’s looking forward to Rihanna‘s Super Bowl Halftime Show in a new interview on Wednesday (Jan. 18), and teased that she’s going to impress.
“Oh, man. I’m just as excited as you guys, if not more,” he told Zane Lowe on Apple Music 1. “Yeah, I’m super excited. This is huge. This is incredible. I’m so glad that my lady’s back making music again and whatnot, and getting back out there.”
“It’s just incredible,” the rapper continued. “Especially for both of us — it is a good year for both of us to be more active and be out there. But the Super Bowl is huge, and her being the creative she is, she going to bring it, man. I’m excited. I’m more excited than everybody else, honestly.”
RiRi’s big game-day performance may still be a few weeks away, but she’s already released a teaser for the show as well as a limited edition Savage X Fenty Game Day collection filled with merch for fans to wear as they watch her return to the stage after a six-year hiatus.
During the interview, Rocky also opened up about what it’s been like becoming a father. “I’m a member of our club now, like the dad club. You see a dad, you see me. I’m playing on, I’m a full dad now,” said the rapper, who welcomed a son with Rihanna in May. “Being outside and working and being creative, it drives more energy for you to obviously to think and soak things up like a sponge now that I’m a dad, because I have a whole ‘nother perspective. But it honestly helps you get home to your family and get home to your baby. And I can’t even explain it, man. You come home to heaven every day. I’m so thankful. God is good, man.”
The Super Bowl Halftime Show has come a long way over the years, growing from a quaint marching band-centric affair to a blockbuster concert that draws in the biggest names in music — not to mention millions of eyeballs.
When it debuted in 1967, the halftime show featured, among other things, the University of Arizona Symphonic Marching Band performing “The Sound of Music” and “When the Saints Go Marching In,” nothing you wouldn’t be surprised to see at any ordinary college football game. As the years went on, however, it expanded — but it wasn’t quite A-list. Mid-game breaks featured everything from an Elvis Presley-impersonating magician (Elvis Presto, obviously) to the New Mouseketeers.
But when Michael Jackson headlined the halftime show in 1993, everything changed. Audiences grew accustomed to the idea of seeing the biggest pop star in the world performing at the biggest game in America, and before long, the modern halftime show took hold. It became not only an offering of live music and entertainment for football fans waiting patiently for third quarter to start, but also a badge of honor for the artists invited to perform. Playing the Super Bowl is one of the greatest milestones you can achieve as a musician, a singular marker of a star who’s earned their stripes as a bona fide legend.
From MJ’s game-changer to Justin Timberlake and Janet Jackson’s culture-shifting slipup, and from Beyonce’s 2013 show-stopper to Dr. Dre’s 2022 hip-hop extravaganza, keep reading to see Billboard‘s 13 best Super Bowl Halftime Show performances of all time.