She is the kind of superstar a game like the Super Bowl deserves.
The Super Bowl halftime show is America's penitential stage. It is the biggest gig in the world, with the biggest audience, and it draws the biggest acts. But in many ways it's like the game itself: deracinated from any real fan base, given over to corporate excess, spectacular only in the sense that it offers spectacle, loud and overblown, subordinate to the products being hawked on the commercials. The game, however, often rises above the Christians-versus-lions atmosphere of excess because, after all, it's football — those really are Christians and lions, they're tearing each other apart, and despite all the artificiality they really do bleed. The halftime show never does. We watch Tom Brady and Eli Manning to see how good they might be; we watch The Who or The Stones or even Bruce to see how bad. Performers don't get to sing at the Super Bowl halftime unless they're among the very best in the world; and yet we watch them for the same reason we watch the first round of American Idol.
