“I would’ve never thought that this moment would be happening right now,” Dr Dre said in an October interview heralding his headlining slot in this year’s Super Bowl halftime show. “Everybody’s gonna leave here happy and excited about what we’re about to do.”
On paper the 55-year-old Dre (real name: Andre Romelle Young) seems a perfect fit for this showcase – not just a famous Angeleno of the City of Compton but arguably the most influential maker of modern Black music besides Quincy Jones and Kanye West.
In addition to the Dre and NWA rap catalogues, the Super Bowl halftime show – the world’s most watched musical performance – will include collaborators Snoop Dogg, Eminem and Kendrick Lamar, plus hip-hop soul queen Mary J Blige. Midway through next Sunday’s title clash between the Cincinnati Bengals and Los Angeles Rams, Dre and friends will play to a global audience in the hundreds of millions for 12 precious minutes. The F Gary Gray directed trailer, titled The Call, features Dre organizing his team like chess pieces as Still Dre and Mary J’s Family Affair and other Dre-produced hits play in the background. The slick production harks to the naughties era of million-dollar music video budgets.
It’s an audacious return to the spotlight for a man who once ruled the radio, stage and screen as a solo rap artist – and who is barely a year removed from suffering a brain aneurysm. But in the age of #MeToo and #BlackLivesMatter, frankly, the gangster rapper turned super producer is a tone deaf choice for a league grappling with raging gender and race crises.
This year’s music lineup, with its cumulative 43 Grammys, puts most music festivals to shame and is already being feted as the best ever Super Bowl halftime bill. But apart from the conservative pundit Jason Whitlock (who upbraided the Dr Dre Super Bowl halftime as an exhibition of “lyrical pornography”) and Howard University Africana studies professor Greg Carr (who dismissed it as a “21st century minstrel show”), it wouldn’t be a stretch to say that everyone else is looking forward to this show. Who couldn’t be? The trailer, which immediately went viral, has more than 12m YouTube views.
At the very least it marks an emphatic turnabout from five years ago, when Rihanna, Cardi B, Adele and other high-profile artists reportedly rejected opportunities to perform at the Super Bowl halftime in solidarity with Colin Kaepernick, the mega-talented quarterback who knelt during pre-game performances of the national anthem to bring awareness of anti-Black racism. He touched off an activism movement in sports that contributed to his apparent blackballing, a contention that became the basis of his 2018 collusion lawsuit against the league.
This led to Super Bowl halftime bills featuring Justin Timberlake in 2018 and Maroon 5 in 2019. In an attempt to win back the big-name artists and disgruntled fans, NFL commissioner Roger Goodell joined forces with Jay-Z, a prominent Kaepernick advocate and adviser who was among the most prominent artists to boycott the Super Bowl halftime show.
The idea was that Jay-Z would provide the NFL’s aggrieved Black worker class a platform where they freely speak out about pressing issues while negotiating with the NFL’s billionaire owners behind the scenes to engineer Kaepernick’s return. But instead of a Kaepernick sequel or better representation within the sport’s decision-making ranks, the Jay-Z-Goodell alliance yielded hashtags on the field and other performative gestures, including the playing of Lift Every Voice – aka the Black national anthem.
Months after Kaepernick settled with the league in 2019, Goodell and Jay-Z went public with their relationship, which gave the hip-hop mogul’s Roc Nation entertainment company significant power to choose the acts for the NFL’s signature events. But Jay-Z, who arguably sold his friend out for a content deal, has yet to say anything in defense of a halftime show lineup that celebrates a league whose racial woes appear to be worse than ever.
Just last week Brian Flores, a bright Afro-Latino coach who was fired after three overachieving seasons with the Miami Dolphins, filed a class action suit against the NFL, his former employer and two other teams he interviewed with in the past, branding the sport as systemically racist. And with only Pittsburgh Steelers longtime head man Mike Tomlin remaining as the NFL’s only Black head coach, the Flores lawsuit has reignited the debate about the efficacy of the Rooney Rule, an exemplary league policy that requires teams to interview ethnic-minority candidates for head coaching and executive football operations vacancies. For the past two decades team owners have gotten around this by bringing in Rooney Rule candidates for token interviews only to wind up hiring the white guy they wanted all along.
Before that bombshell, in October the NFL was rocked by the release of eight years of emails from the Las Vegas Raiders Jon Gruden, the league’s highest-profile coach; his misogynistic, racist and homophobic correspondence, which was unearthed in a larger inquiry into the Washington Football Team’s frat house-like workplace culture, ultimately cost Gruden his $10m a year job.
While the NFL was attending to that crisis, it was seeking to put an even bigger one to bed, agreeing to a $1bn settlement with former players after being outed for using the practice of “race norming” – which, among other things, assumed Black people to be cognitively inferior – in determining payouts for concussions claims. But this, too, became headline news and left the league with another black eye.
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“Jay-Z is one of the main reasons we’re sitting here right now,” Dre said in October, flanked by Snoop Dogg – an early collaborator and mentee.
“See that’s hip-hop, Dre,” Snoop said. “See how hip-hop has been implemented at a high executive level to where the NFL trusts him? He’s a part of our culture; we’re a part of his culture. So it’s a beautiful thing to where the NFL is catching up.”
Dr Dre has yet to really answer for his own fraught history with women.
In 1991 Dre assaulted television host Dee Barnes after an episode taping, “slamming her face and the right side of her body repeatedly against a wall near the stairway,” according to Barnes’ $22.7m lawsuit. (After pleading no contest, he was fined $2,500 and given a community service sentence that included a spot on an anti-violence public service announcement.) In 2015, the singer Michel’le, the mother of one of Dre’s children, accused him of committing domestic violence against her throughout their entire time as a couple.
In a 2016 book Lisa Johnson, the mother of three Dre kids, alleged Dre “hit me in the mouth and bust my lip”. (She never filed criminal allegations against him, but was granted a restraining order.) In 1990 label-mate Tairrie B claimed Dre punched her twice at the Grammys for releasing a song slagging him and his NWA bandmates, an altercation that the police allegedly broke up. She further claims that she was paid to drop the charges against Dre because her album wouldn’t come out if she moved forward.
In December Dre finalised a $100m divorce settlement with Nicole Young, his wife of 24 years. And during a contentious 18 months of back-and-forth exchanges, she alleged the music tycoon held a gun to her head, punched her in the face and slammed her against a wall, lifting her off her feet by her neck. While Dre refuted those claims, he did somewhat address the other allegations before the 2015 release of his third album Compton, apologising to “the women I’ve hurt”.
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“We have 11 or 12 minutes to go out and do something spectacular,” Dre said in October. “We have to figure out, creatively, how we’re just gonna, like, blow people’s minds.”
At this point, the lineup’s too big to fail. The show is this weekend, and the league’s partners have so much at stake already – not least Dre and Jay-Z, the pen behind Still Dre. The Dr himself is said to have invested millions in the show. Like the league’s efforts to address its race and gender problems, this too appears to be a no-win proposition. Most disappointing: it’s a moment we all should have expected.
