Hip-hop finally came to the Super Bowl on Sunday when Dr. Dre led a team of his closest collaborators in a festive, funky, thoroughly trunk-rattling halftime show.
Decades into the genre’s domination of pop music — but not too soon for the famously conservative National Football League — Dre took over the field at Inglewood’s SoFi Stadium, close to where he grew up in Compton, alongside Snoop Dogg, Mary J. Blige, Eminem and Kendrick Lamar for a nearly 14-minute spectacle that included some of the biggest rap hits of the last 30 years. 50 Cent, who hadn’t been announced in advance, also showed up to do his indelible “In Da Club,” which Dre co-produced.
The show, which came midway through the Los Angeles Rams’ hometown championship game against the Cincinnati Bengals, was a proud celebration of Black L.A. from the get-go, playing out on a set done up with architectural replicas of Tam’s Burgers, Randy’s Donuts and the Compton courthouse.
Dre and Snoop opened the production with “The Next Episode,” Dre dressed in all black and Snoop in Rams blue, then segued into “California Love,” 2Pac’s mid-’90s Dre-produced smash that shouts out Watts, Compton and Inglewood. On the field, dancers twirled between lowriders shimmering in sparkling colors.
For “In Da Club,” 50 Cent started out hanging upside down before descending into a mock nightclub populated by gyrating women.
Blige was up next, singing the low-slung “Family Affair” — another Dre-helmed hit — and “No More Drama,” which she finished in a flourish of growly R&B vocals.
Lamar, widely regarded as the chief inheritor of the West Coast hip-hop tradition that Dre pioneered, appended a bit of his “good kid” to “Alright,” his unofficial Black Lives Matter anthem, which he performed amid a phalanx of dancers in quasi-military formation.
For Eminem’s portion of the quick-moving show, he followed suit, rapping a few lines from “Forgot About Dre” before moving into “Lose Yourself,” his Oscar-winning rely-on-yourself jam, for which he was backed by a live band that included Anderson .Paak on drums. Eminem finished his set by taking a knee, nodding to Colin Kaepernick’s much-discussed NFL protest from a few years ago.
To end the show, the six hip-hop heavyweights convened at SoFi’s 50-yard line for a swaggering run through “Still D.R.E.”
The show was the third halftime — after the duo of Shakira and Jennifer Lopez in 2020 and the Weeknd last year — overseen by Jay-Z’s Roc Nation company. The partnership raised eyebrows when it was announced and drew fresh scrutiny this month in the wake of an explosive lawsuit filed by former Miami Dolphins head coach Brian Flores, who alleges that he and other Black coaches were subject to the NFL’s discriminatory hiring practices. (Approximately 70% of NFL players are black, while the league had only two Black head coaches this season.)
Before kickoff, the Black country singer Mickey Guyton, who has spoken openly about the prejudice she’s faced in Nashville, sang a gospel-inspired rendition of the national anthem, while Jhene Aiko did “America the Beautiful” with a cool, jazzy lilt.
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