Uh, Mr. Prince, yes you can.Jesus. Did anyone else see that? Seriously though. I was all questioning whether or not Prince was a good pick for the Superbowl (tm) Pepsi (tm) halftime (tm) gig. What am I? A fucking nut? A crazy nut? Of course he was. File under: duh!
I don't even remember who won the game. In fact, I'll probably forget who played in the game in a couple of days, but I'll remember the halftime show.
I got this in the electronic mail this a.m.:
"Prince put on a guitar hero monster show. 'I'm sorry, is my androgynous dick in your Pepsi (tm) Superbowl (tm) Halftime Show?'"I heard this one this morning too:
"Prince was the Superbowl (tm), man!"Uh, no goddamn lie. I was questioning Prince. Where did I ever grow those balls? That's why I'm an office monkey and he's, uh, well, he's Prince.
Seriously, he could call it a career right here. Done. "Out, y'all." I remember saying two things:
- "I'd fuck him." <-- a metaphor
- "He came to own."
Sez, Village Voice (clicky):
Prince made it work by immediately forgoing the idea of groove, highlighting his Hendrix side rather than his James Brown side. He also jammed a ton of material into his set, only about half of it was his. He's been doing time in Vegas lately, and he must've been honing his sense of pandering; I'm not sure how else to explain the chorus of "Proud Mary" he threw into "Baby I'm a Star." And he must've also been honing his sense of the absurd; I'm imagining the Foo Fighters sitting around last night watching the game and peeling their jaws off the floor when Prince launched into "The Best of You." But he found room for fierce displays of raw technique: liquid falsetto yowls and shockingly discordant squalls of solo guitar. And he finally had a platform big enough to fully explore the outer limits of his sense for spectacle, prancing around a stage shaped like the symbol he stopped using seven years ago and casting an enormous shadow across a billowing sheet during one solo. A part of me wonders if he didn't somehow create last night's torrential downpour himself just to give us the moving visual of a stadium bathed in purple light and soaked to the bone as he finished "Purple Rain" without a hair out of place.
