Coldplay is a gift

Fey British Mom-rockers Coldplay were announced as the halftme entertainment for Super Bowl L.  Predictably, everyone lost their goddam minds.

Colplay playing the Super Bowl? Will they play that one that sounds exactly like all the other ones and is also terrible?

— Andrew Stoeten (@AndrewStoeten) December 4, 2015

Coldplay? seriously? One more reason Goodell must step down

— Matt Powell (@NPDMattPowell) December 4, 2015

Coldplay for a Silicon Valley Super Bowl sounds about right for some reason.

— Niners Nation (@NinersNation) December 3, 2015

Chin up, footballers! It could be so, so, so much worse. Just check out this list of Super Bowl halftime performers.  It is truly a dark tome.

FOR THE FIRST FEW YEARS, it was mostly marching bands, which is fine because no one cares and you can go get more Jell-O with marshmallows in it and a Hershey bar or whateverTF they ate in the late 60's.  The producer of the Super Bowl IV halftime show, in 1970, no doubt had a headful of the cheap and plentiful blotter acid that flooded the market back then because he booked Carol Channing and the Southern University Marching Band, two entities that had almost certainly never been in the same room together.

Super Bowl V, 1971, featured the first appearance of Up With People, a "musical" sensation so bland and earnest it makes It's a Small World look like Cannibal Corpse.  Up With People would return to darken the Super Bowl stage again and again, in 1976, 1980, 1982, and 1986, before they were blessedly sent to a re-education camp in the North Dakota desert and never heard from again.

UPDATE: Commenter Stoney claims to have no memory of Up With People!  Let's fix that.


Shoulda kept your mouth shut, big man.

What we think of as the Event Halftime didn't really start until Michael Jackson did it in 1993.  (Don't even try to suggest it started in 1991, with "New Kids on the Block (NKOTB), Disney characters, Warren Moon, 2,000 [presumably terrified] local children, and audience card stunt")  Suddenly Carol Channing, the USC Trojans Marching Band, and UWP were shunted to the side to make way for more palatable artists like The Blues Brothers (1997) and Big Bad Voodoo Daddy (1999).

The path to Coldplay was paved by similarly self-important anthemizers U2 in 2002.  Somehow-younger-seeming-than-U2 Paul McCartney was in 2005 and the Stones in 2006 but surprisingly not Elton John or Paul Revere and the Raiders in 2007.

(I started looking into this because Olu texted me about Peter Hartlaub's suggestion that Huey Lewis play the SB and I was honestly shocked Huey has never played a SB.  Is there any more perfect SB artist?  He's as smooth and featureless as a beach pebble, and even has an album called "Sports."  It's amazing the NFL didn't invent him solely for the purpose of playing halftime shows.)

So in closing, stop bitching about Coldplay.  At least it's not Charo with the Southeastern Missouri Marching Beavers or whatever they have.