“The World’s Biggest Stage”: Performing America through the “Acoustic Territories” of the Super Bowl Halftime Show

Keywords: super bowl halftime show, America, acoustic territories, cultural ideologies, spectacle, mega-event
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Tuesday
Session Start / End Time: 3/1/2022 03:40 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 3/1/2022 05:00 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 26

Abstract

Music and sport occupy spatio-temporal conjunctures grounded in performance, spectacle, and myth. The mythologies of music and sport are configured, in part, through mediated representations of mega-events that recall storied pasts and produce idealized futures—re-activating moments of performance long after live events have concluded. Regarded as the “world’s biggest stage,” the NFL Super Bowl halftime show exists as a mega-event that is both sutured to and transcends the annual football championship—a game that is, as sport and communication scholar Michael Real (2013) argues, “America’s ultimate celebration of itself” (p. 31). As a spectacle where sport and music converge, the halftime show is a critical site of contestation, a highly visible battleground upon which American ideals, injustices, and cultural ideologies are actively performed, negotiated, and contested. This presentation interrogates the site-specific, socio-cultural “topography” of the Super Bowl halftime show, exploring the ways in which this stage both presents a dynamic locale for interrogating how this unique intersection of music and sport alerts us to the cultural distinctions of a particular geography, while at once serving as the (re)configuration and dissemination of America as nation-state, place, and myth. Informed by the work of Real, alongside critical-race and feminist theorist Kathryn McKittrick (2006), who argues that geography is an “alterable terrain,” and sound artist and scholar Brandon LaBelle (2010), who conceptualizes the intersection of space and sound as an “acoustic territory,” we consider how American ideals and dominant conceptions of the nation are constructed and challenged through this coveted media event.