You’d have to be living under a rock to have not noticed all the controversy surrounding the half-time show of Super Bowl LIV (54), but just in case you missed it, let me hit the highlights: Latina artists Shakira, 43, and Jennifer Lopez, 50, took the stage and sang highlights from some of their biggest hits over the years wearing skin-tight costumes of glitter, spandex, jewels and metallic prints while dancing with a lot high energy to keep up with the backup dancers, who I might add, were half their age.
And let the social media complaining begin.
Droves of women took to their cell phones and computers to criticize the performance as scandalous, inappropriate for children, unwholesome and degrading to women.
Right.
Well, I feel like if this is the way that you feel about live entertainment at a football game, you might not have been to a local high school football game in a while. Most of the football games that I have visited this past football season have featured the bands, color guards, majorettes, and cheerleaders dancing and entertaining the crowds while the they were cheered on and met with applause at the end of the performances. Folks, there wasn’t much of a difference between what I saw on a high school level compared with what I saw televised on the most watched football game in the world.
At the local games, there were kids in the audiences and let’s face it, these were kids doing the performances under those Friday night lights. So unless we want to step back in time by about 60 years, there wasn’t much of a shock value in the difference between high school entertainment and the Super Bowl show.
Not to mention that professional cheerleaders take the sidelines by storm scantily clad in brightly colored sequin adorned costumes, yet, no one screams foul at the women getting paid to entertain crowds, including children, at the pro games.
Moving on to my next point, I graduated in 2005 from high school. I was an impressionable youth during the dawn of the new century. Things were slightly different then, but not by much. Facebook was just in its infancy and hadn’t fully taken control into becoming a part of our everyday lives. We had a Republican president, access to internet, cell phones, and cable television. But perhaps the biggest difference was that MTV actually still focused on music entertainment.
MTV was constantly giving updates on the latest trends and song releases by headlining artists.
Ya’ll wanna take a stab at who was making headlines back then...
That’s right, you guessed it, Shakira and J Lo were everywhere with their high-energy music and fashion-setting trends. (You know you remember J Lo’s green dress at the Grammy’s in 2000.)
They have been shocking people since the launch of their careers. It is part of what made them famous in the first place. They get paid to look good, and stay famous. We did that. We paid them by buying their albums, attending their shows, picking up the tabloid magazines that featured them on the cover, and grabbing up all sorts of merchandise put out with their names attached. We put them in the spotlight over twenty years ago.
The fact that they can still pull off those outfits and have the athleticism to hang upside down from a pole or out dance performers half their age should be applauded, and perhaps that should be the lesson to our kids: “Eat right and stay healthy to live longer fuller lives."
And honestly, I came across a post on Facebook the other day that featured Cher and mentioned a sarcastic saying about ‘turning back time’ for family values. Cher has been in the spotlight a lot longer than Shakira and J Lo, yet, the American family has survived.
As an added bonus to consider, since their performance at the Super Bowl Shakira and J Lo’s sales have jumped 800 percent, and Shakira’s 19-year old song “Whenever, Wherever” is number one on the charts again.
Look, if you honestly believe that the performance was bad for family values, then turn off the television, but if you are going to do that, then also maybe don’t go to the local football games, or cheer on the neighbor’s child participating in a local dance competition, or take the grand kids to the beach, because I gotta tell ya, you’ll see more skin at those places than you did on the television during the Super Bowl performance.
