The Super Bowl & The Power of Nostalgia

Nostalgia is pervasive in the culture, but between the reboots, remakes, and remixes, the romanticization of it hasn’t given us much of anything new to work with. Most of the time, we’re stuck looking to the past for inspiration or to the future for possibilities, neither of which leave any space for the present. However, this year’s Super Bowl Halftime Show disrupted that flow, not just utilizing nostalgia but contextualizing it.

This year’s performance came packaged between plentiful nostalgic ads, some of which felt hollow, others that felt like wacky SNL skits, and all of which preyed on memories of a halycon past rather than saying anything meaningful about culture today. Add to that the flurry of crypto ads, and what we got was anachronism.Theorist Mark Fisher explains that nostalgia can act as “the slippage of discrete time periods into one another.” Our penchant for the past often means that we get shows, movies, ads, music, etc, that are a melange of references and artifacts from different eras. Juxtaposing all of that in one medium results in a feeling of time suspended, a placenessless that gives the present a sense of unreality. McDonald’s had the only Super Bowl ad that felt fresh and present this year, taking uhhhhhh simple premise and executing it with imagination. And then of course, came the halftime show.

Featuring musical legends that were the soundtrack of Gen X’s nascent adulthood and Millennials’ adolescence, the halftime performance was both an homage to Los Angeles and a love letter to nostalgia. With Dr Dre at the helm, the show tapped into a very particular kind of 2000s nostalgia — the performance felt vital, alive, and in touch with the frequency of the current culture. Usually, nostalgia for the early years of this century focuses on a narrow range of aesthetics, primarily white aesthetics. Remember Y2K, Delia’s catalogs, indie sleaze, the emo/pop punk resurgence. Rarely do the trending 2000s aesthetics include Black or Latine aesthetics specifically, and this year’s halftime show reveled in exactly that: Black aesthetics, Black sounds, Black Los Angeles. The performance was an ode to 90s & 2000s West Coast rap, the enduring influence of Dr Dre, and to Los Angeles as an innovative hub of cultural creativity far beyond its current image as InfluencerLand.

The 2022 halftime show revealed precisely how to use nostalgia by contextualizing it with specificity. It wasn’t used simply for the sake of it, but to show its reverberations within the culture, in the past as well as the present. With an incredibly produced, modular buildout with different scenes of LA, from Tam’s #21 to Dale’s Donuts to the barbershop, you got an immediate sense of the city. Add to that the aerial sprawl of Compton underneath it all, along with the dancers’ quintessentially 2000s LA uniforms of khakis, Cortezes, and Converse, and holistically it illustrated a very specific point and place in time (one that felt especially intimate to me as a born & raised Angeleno). But beyond the visuals and the setlist, it was the inclusion of Kendrick Lamar in Virgil Abloh-designed LV and Anderson .Paak on drums that made the performance more than just nostalgic: it made it about relevance. The very real relevance that 2000s Los Angeles had on music from the 2010s and the very real impact that the era has on the current sonic landscape.

There are, of course, myriad issues around the construction of SoFi stadium; that the halftime show spoke so clearly about the nostalgia of a city that is irrevocably changing due to the displacement of Black and Latine Angelenos is more than ironic. There’s also much to be said about how the NFL is not nearly as progressive and inclusive as it paints itself to be. But in the meantime, I will say this: the halftime show (no doubt influenced by Jay-Z’s Roc Nation consultancy) highlighted the enduring power of nostalgia and above all else, it prioritized Black nostalgia, which is often left out of the cultural conversation. Between the setlist and the visual abstraction of LA, the performance highlighted how references from the past can be used correctly. Rather than removing music, style, and influence from their original contexts, the performance showed the many ways in which contextualized nostalgia can be an illustration of a cultural continuum, rather than a moment trapped in time. 

If you want to chat more about how nostalgia operates within the culture or just about Los Angeles, the city of champions, drop us a line!

Love from LA🌴,

Brenda