Superbowl Halftime Show - M.I.A. Flips the Bird

[Mx32]

Watching the vid now - can anyone explain the phenomenon of tens of thousands of people taking photos of "stars" from miles away using their phones when as we've all get google we can access professional quality footage of the "stars" including HD moving video any time we want?

There's no point taking a photo of Tom Cruise as he passes 200 feet away - if you ever want to see what he looks like just use google images.

This phenomenon seems to be some kind of automatic behaviour - like during the recent British riots we had idiots simply photographing any and every piece of crap that had been set on fire - as if having a photo of a burning bin on your phone was something you really needed.

There must be thousands of young Brits out there with pictures of random crap on fire that's stored in a folder on their desktop, never looked at or maybelooked at once, forgotten but not deleted yet.

We've gone quite mad (says me posting online at 3.20am )

[Mx32]

ok - watching Madonna doing her cheerleader bit right now.

I do not consider the tune, lyrics, singing tone (Girly/childish/tweenager) or dance routine the actions of a "normal" grown up, adult woman.

Basically, I feel like saying to her "Just STFU with this rubbish and go make a proper song, like a proper adult. You're not 15, ffs."

No idea if it's occult or satanic but it is certainly mindless.

[Project Willow]

It occurred to me that there are two things I very often trust in this venue, Sunny's intuition and Jack's intellectual rigor.

The last thing I want to do is trivialize acts of abuse, but don't acts of abuse often come in the form of ritualized 'entertainment'? Can we agree that some individual acts of entertainment are created, even organized around ritual, with the express intent to cause harm, psychic and otherwise? Shoot, I include most Christian church revivals in that definition of occult entertainment.

Certainly revival style preaching is a form of mass manipulation. Ellen Lacter described many different techniques and placed them along a sort of scale of coercion. I need to look up the link.

I'm wondering if perhaps the central issue with this half time show was that we haven't actually seen something that could appear to be like an occult ritual replicated in front of a massive, mainstream audience, not since the 1970's I would guess. Can someone correct me here? Just the appearance of some trappings, with our world crumbling the way it is, might feel like a giant (and coordinated) slap in the face, especially to people who frequent RI.

I say something that could appear to be like because a reenactment is not what I saw her doing. If that were so, I would be running all over screaming about it and rather upset. This was art, that for indiscernible reasons employed some of the same symbols, it was not a direct interpretation of a satanic ritual, if even a sideways one. The meaning of an artwork is always dependent on what the viewer assigns to it. There's very little an artist can do to interfere with that process, I've tried.

C'mon people, this particular artist, over the entirety of her career, from the choice of her stage name and right on up until this latest stunt has centered her work around throwing offensive, sensationalist rebellions against the Catholic Church, especially over its control of the female sex. Just exactly what could she do to up the offensive ante at this point? Invoke Satan, of course.

And there you have it, this was not some ptb plot to further enslave the masses, it's a continuation of an artist's neurosis-fueled rebellion writ large. Actually, I'm beginning to wonder if neurosis-fueled artist rebellions are primary components of social change.

[crikkett]

Thinking and saying so doesn't make it okay for crikkett (or anyone) to call me an asshole.

Hey, I didn't call you an asshole. Whether you felt like one after I commented on your rhetoric is another matter.

[Elihu]

Would we class entertainers such as Madonnas as "normal" (in the psychological sense) and their fans as "normal"?

Becuase if I look at what Madonna is/does it strikes me she's un-normal enough to be the kiNd of person I'd expect to belong to a weird cult that did crazy rituals.

I have always found much of pop music culture pretty weird and it's fans often strike me as being incredibly stupid people.

I come from a British Acid House background myself so I understand the appeal of dance, machine made music and drugs - what I could never really "get" is the status to which pop music and pop musicians are elevated to in British culture.

I could never understand why my friends would spend money on what are, ultimatley, really terrible ryhmes on a limited number of subjects (love and shagging, mostly). How many 3 minute songs on the theme of "i love you - please don't leave me" or "I'm glad you've gone" can one human actually own?

In the UK we even had the novelty records phenomenon - people literally going to the shops (pre-internets) to spend their money on records everyone agreed were utter shit.

I find the entire industry pointless - if LadyGaGa or Britney release a new tune tomorrow with a new video to go with it I've no idea why anyone would be interested. What is it people are interested in? There's no script to follow, no unfolding plot, no surprises or twists (unless you count a dress made from meat as some kind of plot twist?).

Books, comics, films, games - I get these things, they actually "last" and develop (a typical book might require 7 days to get from beginning to end, for example) Pop Music though - it's just 3 mintes of some right old shit.

Not all pop music is bad in the sense I can't listen to it but, really, why would anyone on Earth feel the need to own Madonna's or Britney's next 3 minute song about absolutely nothing and watch a video in which some stupid, plotless stuff happens ("Cool! At 2 mins 45 seconds Britney is dressed up like a giant panda - and she rides a motorbike - OMG!! OMG!! YOU MUST WATCH THIS - I LUV BRITNEY.")

We've gone quite mad (says me posting online at 3.20am )

wow, some (to me) outstanding thoughts Mx32. some i've had myself. i always felt it a great injustice that obvious low-brow, titillation and monotony wields such massive cultural power. i think the answer is "monopoly". it's the only way the bad can drive out the good. in a world of x-billion people, how big is the stable of stars? a few thousand? and how other than central production and restricted distribution could so many eyes and ears be fixed on so few? and it has to be low-brow because, like a magic trick, if consistent quality came through, the audience would immediately realize that central production cannot deliver the self-actualizing higher quality that they really desire. it does deliver the orgasms, booty shakes, and outrages in spades though. all tied in with monopoly beer, sugar water, and fighter bombers of course.

ok - watching Madonna doing her cheerleader bit right now.

I do not consider the tune, lyrics, singing tone (Girly/childish/tweenager) or dance routine the actions of a "normal" grown up, adult woman.

Basically, I feel like saying to her "Just STFU with this rubbish and go make a proper song, like a proper adult. You're not 15, ffs."

so poignant.

No idea if it's occult or satanic but it is certainly mindless.

i would submit that it doesn't matter. mission accomplished.

[Luther Blissett]

Watching the vid now - can anyone explain the phenomenon of tens of thousands of people taking photos of "stars" from miles away using their phones when as we've all get google we can access professional quality footage of the "stars" including HD moving video any time we want?

There's no point taking a photo of Tom Cruise as he passes 200 feet away - if you ever want to see what he looks like just use google images.

This phenomenon seems to be some kind of automatic behaviour - like during the recent British riots we had idiots simply photographing any and every piece of crap that had been set on fire - as if having a photo of a burning bin on your phone was something you really needed.

There must be thousands of young Brits out there with pictures of random crap on fire that's stored in a folder on their desktop, never looked at or maybelooked at once, forgotten but not deleted yet.

We've gone quite mad (says me posting online at 3.20am )

They do this so that they can post it on social media, with the accompanying caption, and "own" the moment. To show that their experiences are that much more meaningful than those of their peers. That the things they've seen have more impact than what others have seen, or even felt.

[Plutonia]

what I could never really "get" is the status to which pop music and pop musicians are elevated to in British culture.

Mimetic desire.

The theory answers in this way:
1. The impulse to emulate others is inherent, thus all the discussion of "role-models;"
2. It's safer to emulate someone that you will never meet than your peer, who can easily become your rival;
3. If your friends LUV Britney, you probably will too, because we can't help emulating our peers desires;
4. The entertainment industry exploits this psychological mechanism for profit;
5. The PTB exploit this mechanism to maintain social order (with them at the top) and to direct it.
6. What Luther said

Far from being autonomous, our desire for a certain object is always provoked by the desire of another person — the model — for this same object. This means that the relationship between the subject and the object is not direct: there is always a triangular relationship of subject, model, and object. Through the object, one is drawn to the model, whom Girard calls the mediator: it is in fact the model who is sought. René Girard calls desire "metaphysical" in the measure that, as soon as a desire is something more than a simple need or appetite, "all desire is a desire to be",[9] it is an aspiration, the dream of a fullness attributed to the mediator.

Mediation is external when the mediator of the desire is socially beyond the reach of the subject or, for example, a fictional character, as in the case of Amadis de Gaula and Don Quixote. The hero lives a kind of folly that nonetheless remains optimistic. Mediation is internal when the mediator is at the same level as the subject. The mediator then transforms into a rival and an obstacle to the acquisition of the object, whose value increases as the rivalry grows. This is the universe of the novels of Stendhal, Flaubert, Proust and Dostoevsky, which are particularly studied in this book.

Through their characters, our own behaviour is displayed. Everyone holds firmly to the illusion of the authenticity of one's own desires; the novelists implacably expose all the diversity of lies, dissimulations, maneuvers, and the snobbery of the Proustian heroes; these are all but "tricks of desire", which prevent one from facing the truth: envy and jealousy. These characters, desiring the being of the mediator, project upon him superhuman virtues while at the same time depreciating themselves, making him a god while making themselves slaves, in the measure that the mediator is an obstacle to them. Some, pursuing this logic, come to seek the failures that are the signs of the proximity of the ideal to which they aspire. This is masochism, which can turn into sadism.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ren%C3%A9 ... tic_desire

As a thought experiment, I tried to imagine the Lady Gaga version of Half-Time Show ...

Yeah. Lady Gaga ain't Britney. Her version of celebrity may be just as contrived as her rivals', but it's also pretty damn dark. Viewed from this angle, the Madonna show looks like an attempt to inject a little of that into her brand.

[Project Willow]

Thinking and saying so doesn't make it okay for crikkett (or anyone) to call me an asshole.

Hey, I didn't call you an asshole. Whether you felt like one after I commented on your rhetoric is another matter.

It was close enough, and you were wrong, demonstrably so, rebutted directly by the content you conveniently excised out of my earlier post and now once over again since you've read the post you quote above. My meaning and intent are absolutely crystal clear in both instances.

You're just being jerk, and that needs to stop.

[sunny]

The Gaga video makes me feel uncomfortable. And a little afraid, but I don't know why. I'm probably overreacting again, but while her narrative sounds harmless, even noble at times, the intent feels much different.

The insidious, harmful part of any kind of entertainment is how little thought goes into the consumption of it, not the form or content of the act itself. Most viewers and readers and listeners seem not to care about the deeper subtext of the entertainment products they are consuming. Hidden narratives are mostly ignored unless it's emotional, or they pick it up because supports their biases. Meta discussions concern themselves mostly with the lifestyles of the 'stars' not the context in which we could view it in our time and place in history. The most consumers ask for is titillation, sensation, and instant gratification. Political discussions, including discussions of misogyny among majority female fan participants, of entertainment product is uniformly superficial where it exists. This is not just true within fandoms but among the professional entertainment press. Expressing the idea of occult or hidden meaning in entertainment, especially if it is truly subversive, is treated across the board as a prerequisite for medication, as if to say occult or hidden meanings in any aspect of life is unheard of or could never happen now even if we all accepted it as a fact. It reminds of the skeptical attitude MC victims are faced with. Many people know about and accept on an intellectual level that MK-Ultra and other of these govt's mind control programs exist/ed but they can't wrap their heads around it when confronted with proof in the form of a real live victim, a real live consequence of the program.


I guess the bottom line is it might be prudent to assume any product of the massive corporate entertainment industry is harmful to our psyches unless or until we prove to our own satisfaction that we are wrong. We can do that or come face to face with the consequences if we don't. Maybe it's here, right in front of us.

[compared2what?]

Mindlessness is as mindlessness does. And for the purposes of inferring Madonna's intentions, I'd say it's worth bearing this in mind:

It might be merely crappy pop music to you -- or even objectively speaking, it actually doesn't matter -- but it's a pretty safe bet that it means something to her, ffs, what with it being her all-consuming life's work to which, you know, she's dedicated a mind-boggling amount of time, energy and attention for decades and all. So. Let's look at her set list:

"Vogue" -- an exhortation/invitation to the listener to use the song as a vehicle for personal empowerment, transcendence, joy and self-realization:

All you need is your own imagination
So use it that's what it's for
Go inside, for your finest inspiration
Your dreams will open the door

It makes no difference if you're black or white
If you're a boy or a girl
If the music's pumping, it will give you new life
You're a superstar, yes, that's what you are, you know it

"Music" -- Same, but political and populist, too:

Hey, Mr DJ put a record on
I wanna dance with my baby

Do you like to Boogie woogie, do you like to Boogie woogie,
do you like to Boogie woogie, do you like my dancing?

Hey Mr. DJ put a record on I wanna dance with my baby
And when the music starts
I never wanna stop, it's gonna drive me crazy

Music, music
Music makes the people come together
Music mix the bourgeoisie and the rebel

^^ Incidentally, that theme has been one of the major thru-lines of her career, starting with her first record and, indeed, her first single. (Unless that was "Holiday." But I think it was "Everybody.") Which puts her well within the long and beautiful tradition of persona-oriented pop performers who symbolically position themselves as proxies for (or maybe embodiments of) the audience in order to swoop them shamanistically away via your basic shared-experience-of-pleasure-wavelength mind-meld.

She's a pretty mundane lyricist, obviously. But happily, she also has a career-long history of using imagery, symbolism and pageantry to augment, elaborate upon and add nuance to the meaning and messages sent by her music. That too is worth bearing in mind, and the same goes double for this:

Madonna came up during the punk era, and she's always been very fond of doing that old punk cooptation-and-subversion-of-power-via-the-cooptation-and-subversion-of-its-formal-emblems thing, notably wrt the imagery of female sexual objectification. Which is OBVIOUSLY what she's doing with that Roman military-imperial razzamatazz, which is OBVIOUSLY a comment (and not at all a mindless one) on the venue in which she's performing, both in an immediate sense and in terms of the values/state-of-mind it represents.

IOW: Symbolically speaking, she's basically saying,

Oh, hello, military-imperial power --

You know why I'm not thanking you for letting me triumphantly parade my way into the arena in which you're staging your decadent and self-aggrandizing orgy? Because I've got no one to thank for it but myself. But sheer dint of my own will and effort, I so totally rule as a force that you have to recognize and accommodate that I've managed to force my way into the spotlight here. And, as always, I refuse to be grateful for that. Because it's my position that I both deserve and have earned it.

PS -- I also refuse to apologize for either the enormity of my own ambition, or my own penchant for self-aggrandizement, or my purported evil influence on the world at large. In fact, I mock you in advance for the ludicrous attacks along those lines that I anticipate you'll be making shortly by lampooning them in my performance, which I suggest you take a look at if you don't have a mirror handy.

Fuck you and let's dance,

M

______________

Getting back to the set-list:

"Give Me All Your Luvin'" -- New product, has a beat, you can dance to it. In itself, I'd say that it's a pretty straightforward and honest request by a performer in the twilight of her career for what she really does want, as I hear it. (cf. -- That unapologetic ambition thing I mentioned, which in her case is usually metaphorically entwined with unapologetic sexual-appetite having of a most unladylike kind.)

In context, though, it kind of functions as a period at the end of the sentence that began with her entrance -- ie, I came, I saw, I conquered, so now it's all mine.

It also serves as a symbolic transition from the imagery of pure spectacle for spectacle's sake to something that's much more explicitly a celebration/appreciation of the reciprocity of the performer-audience-bond (the stars-as-cheerleaders/marching-band corps stuff, the repeated flashing in huge letters of the words "L-U-V Y-O-U," etcetera). Which brings us to:

"Open Your Heart"/"Express Yourself" mini-medley -- I don't know what you need me for on this one, it's self-explanatory. She finishes up the transition by asking you to open your heart so that she can make you love her, and once again spells out (for the benefit of the dull-witted) that the reason she wants to get you in her clutches is that once you're there, she plans to imbue you with the spirit of her own conquering/creative spirit so that you too can be a force equal to empire. (Or, more simply put: Open your heart to and love Madonna so that she can share her powers of self-expression and self-respect with you. Hey, hey.)

"Like a Prayer" -- It's about the sexual as sacred, ffs. I mean, come on.

Via association with its very controversial and world-famous video -- which she references with the gospel-choir stuff -- it's also a statement of racial inclusion and/or a statement by the artist that when it comes to racial conflict, she's on the side of the underdog.

And lastly, her performance makes it very, very clear that IN CONTEXT it's a role-reversal expression of worship by the artist of the audience. Just look at her face and emotional affect between 10:35 and 11:00. Could anything say: "OMG, you guys, thank you. You make me feel like I'm home. It's my dream come true. Right back at you. L-U-V, Madonna" any more sweetly or sincerely?

I almost cried watching it.

I think people are a little too cynical for their own good sometimes.

[compared2what?]

Those who have never heard of MIA should start with "Paper Planes."

And please. Six years from now, I don't want to hear anybody saying they've never heard of Nicki Minaj. She was there, too. And so was Cee-Lo, who added a touch of wardrobe intertextuality...



...for those keeping score at home.

[compared2what?]

STOP THE LADY GAGA HATRED. SHE'S GREAT.

[compared2what?]

C'mon people, this particular artist, over the entirety of her career, from the choice of her stage name and right on up until this latest stunt has centered her work around throwing offensive, sensationalist rebellions against the Catholic Church, especially over its control of the female sex. Just exactly what could she do to up the offensive ante at this point? Invoke Satan, of course.

Excellent insight.

And there you have it, this was not some ptb plot to further enslave the masses, it's a continuation of an artist's neurosis-fueled rebellion writ large. Actually, I'm beginning to wonder if neurosis-fueled artist rebellions are primary components of social change.

Really? I don't wonder about that!

[compared2what?]

But Prince's halftime performance is still the most amazingly subversive anti-imperial statement in superbowl history, imo.

Can we talk about that one? It was actually complicated and interesting.

[sunny]

STOP THE LADY GAGA HATRED. SHE'S GREAT.

That's a bit of hyperbole. I don't hate Gaga, I said her video made me feel uncomfortable/somewhat afraid. My first impression might be wrong, therefore I reserve the right to further reflect upon it and possibly change my thinking. But I still don't hate her. I rather like her face. I think she must be the spawn of Fanny Bryce and Bette Midler.

I like how you are able to get right inside Madonna's head. I don't doubt from her perspective, all you say is perfectly true. But you'll forgive me if I don't respond to her exhortations. I can think of better ways of beating the Empire than joining it.