Rihanna Performs at Super Bowl Halftime Show with Pure Solo Spectacle; “Umbrella” singer reveals baby bump before TV’s biggest crowd – reviews
Rihanna hasn’t toured since 2016, but Sunday during the Jay Z-produced spectacle that was the Super Bowl LVII halftime show. Good girl gone bad The singer put on a tour de force.
Filling her 15-minute set with hit, floating platform, club dance floor dynamism and vision, the second-best-selling female artist of all time owns the arena with pure superstar swagger near State Farm Stadium.
Pushing the high-profile slot to new technical and Olympian heights, Rihanna was pure solo. With a catalog full of work with the likes of the aforementioned Jay-Z, Eminem and Drake over the decades, the “Umbrella” singer teased a guest star earlier this week, but it was all hype because when it came to showtime, Rihanna totally nailed it. On his own with an army of dancers as sidekicks in the 2023 performance.
Rob Carr/Getty Images
It was also culturally an evolution for the halftime show as the longtime bold-brass singer made no secret of her sporting baby bump. A far cry from the days when Janet Jackson’s career was shamed by Justin Timberlake in 2004, Rihanna made a public display of motherhood less than a year after giving birth to her first child. It also played 21St The Century Celebrity Game notes perfectly without telling the world – which is social media in short. (Her PR team confirmed after the show that she was indeed pregnant.)
Unlike absent President Joe Biden this year, Rihanna took advantage of the more than 100 million viewers Fox will attract to pre-record today’s big NFL game and sit down earlier today for a softball-tossing chat with NFL analysts and GMA co. Hosted by Michael Strahan.
The 12-song set, which opened with 2015’s “Beach Better Have My Money,” was a confidence move and a work of visual art that worked on many levels. Directed by Hamish Hamilton and produced again by Ray-Z’s winning team of Roc Nation and DPS with Jessie Collins, the now Apple Music-sponsored halftime show was a continuous combination of struck red lights, choreography, and situation-specific improvisations such as Rihanna’s Permit was given Camera, gravity and music do the trick.’
Rihanna took to the floating platform with the stadium’s seemingly 72,000 fans (a crowd that included a quick camera cut to Elon Musk and Rupert Murdoch in a VIP box) lighting up the joint as the setlist kicked off her 2021 megahit “Diamonds.”
To be honest, Rihanna put on quite the show at halftime, with the Philadelphia Eagles leading the Kansas City Chiefs 24-14 over two grinding quarters – making her high-flying high-wire win Sunday all the more impressive.
First, on 50 years of hip-hopm anniversary, the nine-time Grammy winner was following last year’s historic near-gold-medal-level “California Love” halftime extravaganza that featured Dr. Dre, Snoop Dogg, Mary J. Blige, Kendrick Lamar and Eminem. Around the calendar, there were Babyface’s “America the Beautiful” and Chris Stapleton’s stripped-down version of the national anthem, the latter of which brought Eagles coach Nick Siriani and several players from both teams to tears. lateral line
After turning down a coveted halftime slot in 2019 in solidarity with blacklisted QB Colin Kaepernick, this year Rihanna masterfully squeezed a 17-year career — relatively short by halftime headliner standards — into perhaps the most watched 14 minutes in small-screen history.
One of the most dynamic of performers and never hesitant to share the spotlight on tracks, Rihanna has always had a cool charisma since bursting onto the scene in 2005. Flags of her Barbadian roots, a red-clad Rihanna and her white-hooded dancers literally cheered the Glendale, AZ, stadium with a gasp and a wink.
That’s how you uncover a return to center stage on the biggest stage around.
Coming off another successful Super Bowl halftime show, why aren’t Jay-Z, Roc Nation and Jesse Collins making the Oscars, Emmys and everything in between? Let’s AMPAS, call that 2024…
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