Pop Culture Happy Hour - 2025 Super Bowl

Episode Date: February 10, 2025

At this year's Super Bowl, the Philadelphia Eagles beat the Kansas City Chiefs 40-22. During the halftime show, Kendrick Lamar performed his Grammy-winning diss track "Not Like Us," and brought out special guests Samuel L. Jackson, Serena Williams, and SZA. And we watched plenty of commercials featuring celebrities.Subscribe to Pop Culture Happy Hour Plus at plus.npr.org/happyhourSee pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

Super Bowl 59 is just wrapped up, and the Philadelphia Eagles are your champion. They beat the Kansas City Chiefs decisively and denied the Chiefs a third straight championship. I'm Stephen Thompson. It is 1101 on Sunday night. We're recapping the Super Bowl and the halftime show with Kendrick Lamar on NPR's Pop Culture Happy Hour. Joining me is one of the hosts of NPR's Code Switch podcast, Gene Demby. Hey Gene. What's good? What's you, Stephen? We'll get to what's good. in just a moment. Also with us,

culture writer and critic Shemira. Ibrahim, hey, Shemira. Hey, Stephen, two weekends in a row. I know. It is so nice to have you back for another late Sunday night. So two years ago, the Philadelphia Eagles and the Kansas City Chiefs battled a close-fought Super Bowl that came down to the final moments. Tonight, they played again, and it was not close. This time, the Eagles jumped out to a massive lead and dominated in every phase of the game,

though the Chiefs did score a few times late to pull the final score to 40 to 22. Eagles quarterback Jalen Hertz was named the game's MVP. We're going to talk about Kendrick Lamar's halftime show and we'll even talk about a few of the commercials, but I wanted to grab a few thoughts on the game itself. Gene, I know you to be a lifelong Eagles fan. We have recorded entire podcasts about our respective football fandoms.

I am guessing that you are a happy man right now. I'm very happy. I'm also like a little disconcerted because the nature of this weapon, it was like so comprehensive. It was so holistic. You know, if you're an Eagles fan, you're like, oh, we might lose this. Or if we win, it'll be close. You'd never imagine a demolition like this. You know what I mean?

So even though this happened, I was like, I was at your house, Stephen, when the Atlanta Falcons were up like on the Patriots. 28 to 3. And somehow lost that Super Bowl. At the end, it was one of the most banana. And I remember just being like, oh, my God. And so a cosmic jinx could happen. Like, I was like, oh, we're going to win this. Like, I was like, oh, no, I will never say that.

I would, like, that's my Eagles fandom has bruised me so much over so many years. I'm like, nah. It got to the point where, I mean, even when Shemar and I were sex and was like, is this really happening? Like, it seemed like everything we did was right. Everything was working and nothing was working for the chiefs. Like, those things lining up that way in one game is bananas. At one point, Gene, you texted me during the game and said, the chiefs look like the Jets. I feel like as the resident New Yorker, I should take offense to that.

But I never cared about the Jets, even when I cared about the NFL, so it's fine. Well, Shamira, you come into this game. You're a New Yorker. You're a, would you say lapsed giants fan? Yes, I would say a lap. I think that is a fair label to put upon me. Yes. So what did you think of this game?

What was your rooting interest? And how did you feel about how it turned out? Well, I reluctantly had to put my hat in with the Eagles. One out of solidarity with my fellow NFC East team. Two, one thing New Yorkers and Philadelphia fans share in kinship is our inane destructiveness at the side of success, which is what I can deeply identify with. I am in fact surprised that Jean is here and not on a car directly to Broad Street, which is a testament to his current life as a family man. Not currently dangling from a lamp post. Exactly. Exactly. And to wit, these are three texts that Gene said to me near the end of the match.

He said, I'm so confused. I mean, I'm happy, but I'm confused. Got to be happy for Philadelphia. Yeah, this game really felt like an accumulation of the suspicions that had mounted around the Kansas City Chiefs over the course of the season. This team won a historic number of close games. They were consistently pulled. pulling games out in improbable ways. And on one hand, that is the sign of a winner. That is the sign of a champion. That is the sign of a well-coached team and a well-led team. But it is also the sign of a team that is not necessarily going to go into the Super Bowl and dominate.

And it just felt like all those one-score games, this still felt like a culmination of a team that had really been kind of hanging on by their fingernails. And then once they got to the Super Bowl, they fell off the clef. I got into this very annoying argument with my Uber driver last week who was like, oh, you know, the Chiefs, I don't know if any got to beat them. I was like, they've been riding their luck all season, right? Like, sooner or later, the coin is going to flip the wrong way. Like, because some of these games were games they could have very realistically lost, right? So many things have to go right for you to win one Super Bowl. You have to be really good.

You have to get injury luck on your side. You have to be able to hold on to your player, you know, your key pieces or whatever. Like, you know, but to do that three years in a row, that's like a... Once you start paying Patrick Mahomes $450 million, then you have to pay everybody else less. Absolutely. And so how do you keep a team together with that setup? And, like, to do that three years in a row was like, that's...

I mean, if they don't want a day, it's like, what are we doing now? Like, I mean, like, that would be, like, a historic amount of good luck for over the course of three years. Well, in addition to what turned out to be a very lopsided football game, there was also a half-time show that felt like the culmination of a very lopsided. beef. You had Kendrick Lamar coming out and kind of getting his victory lap, performing a Super Bowl halftime show with support from Siza, with kind of narration from Samuel L. Jackson.

Salutation. It's your uncle, Sam. And this is the great American game. Shemira, I'm going to start with you. What did you think of the house? halftime show. Well, what do you think about it? We kind of did see two drubbins on that field, right? Oh, no. It's definitely an eventful night for America's greatest tradition, right? Some things that Kendrick did were so prototypically Kendrick that they were unsurprising to an extent, and also

still surprising. Kendrick diverted from years of tradition from the last few major acts by choosing to open a set by performing an unreleased song that he only showed a 60-second snip of it in promoting his last album. I already kind of knew where we were out the gates. The shiny GNX car was definitely an amazing look. And then he proceeded to completely ignore the back half of his catalog and remind you guys that he has a tour to promote

and do all of his most current singles while also committing to aesthetics that he has had for years, right? The black nationalist aesthetics, the way that he plays around with stage production feels on his shows, the way that he plays around with vocal intonations, and constantly reminds us that he works out harder than all of us by rapping and jogging at the same time, which I never did.

His cardio was on pole. Absolutely. It was a very Kendrick show, and also I'm ready for the next chapter of it at this point. Yeah, I hear that. How about you, how about Eugene? I was just, like, fixated on his jeans. I was like, oh, is he wearing flared jeans?

I was like, oh, wait, got the little bell bottoms that happened. Picking him to begin was kind of like a, you know, as big as Kendrick is. Like his music, he is not like a, you know, he's not Shakira. And he has music that's like, I would say probably more danceable than music, the performance tonight. And he went away from that. And I thought the, you know, the presentation of it was really, really well done, considering, you know, hip hop doesn't always translate to that kind of, like, to the stadium field.

I've seen Kendrick Live at an outdoor concert once. And he was incredible. And it's like a really hard thing to pull off for a hip hop artist, right? But he sort of filled up the space a lot, which is like, again, really hard for hip hop back, right? You know, I love the little Serena cameo. Oh, absolutely. Which, of course, is like, you know, Larry, like, she's been coppin, she's a day drink. You know what I mean?

Like, it's just, there was just so much pettiness in performance. You've got to be a little impressed at the fact that marquee artist, about to do a stadium tour, has the opportunity to showcase, you know, the best of his catalog, to, like, ramp up ticket sales. That is a level of commitment to pettiness that I don't know I have in me, and I am a long-about hater. I have to respect it. This is the exclamation point on the incredible run that Not Like Us has had. It was one of the biggest hits of last year. And just last weekend, as Shamira and I discussed on this show, not like us won record

of the year and song of the year at the Grammys. Like that song is getting like all these stamps of mainstream validation. I mean, mainstream validation. It was, you know, all over the billboard charts all year last year. It's not like it wasn't mainstream before. But I was surprised how, like, how deep he went into the verses in that song. Yeah, absolutely. I also liked how he was, like, showing a little leg.

Like, am I going to do it now? Am I going to do it now? I'm not going to do it now? Like, a little snippets, like, sprinkled out. I was like, oh, he is trying to. Everyone is here because they want to see how this goes all. And also, like, can he do that song? Like, I was like, can you do this song at the Super Bowl?

Think it on it like that. Hey, I'm tripping. There were so many intentional choices made in that respect. To your point, Gene, you know, there was like the coquettish like, oh, no, I'm not going to do it, you know. When that first one would happen, where he kind of plays around and backs up off the instrumental, I was like, watch him still do it anyway. That was my exact reply in the group chat. And then, of course, he runs it back and plays the entire first verse, which was, I think I had resigned in my head.

oh, he's going to do the instrumental, mixing it somehow. And not only did they do the first verse, they intentionally cut out the mixing of the backing track so that we could hear the stadium at some rather pivotal points in the verse, which is more damning than if he had just done it all the way through himself. That's one of the most crazy things I've seen in my life. Wow.

To add to that, the fact that he even did euphoria as a track just felt like extra pointed, like, oh, you think, think I can't do this. So I'm just going to do it twice as hard just to prove that I can do this, you know, which is rather daring to reserve your mainstream portion primarily for your main collaborator who is SZA, right? And then also just the cascade of hits that he's made off of an opponent in the last month is definitely an unprecedented choice, but it was certainly an amusing one. All in bell bottom jeans to boot, right? Yeah. Well, I wanted to talk a little bit about the commercials. If I have had one kind of primary complaint about the Super Bowl commercials

over the years, it's that they've really become kind of little more than a parade of celebrities. Did you guys have any, like any impressions of the commercials? People are always like, ooh, what are the big hot Super Bowl ads? Like, I don't care. I used to be that person who regularly paid attention to the ads and what they indicated marketing trend-wise, what we were paying attention to. I have found them to be more disappointing to engage with more than anything else because there's just a general lack of creativity. I think the most compelling celebrity associated brand is probably bad affluent with Dunkin' Donuts, which is more a testament to his Bostonian nature than anything else. Yes. Where the hell of Matt and Tom?

Forget them suckers. Matt Damon and Tom Brady don't have the heart of a champion. We got a new squad Dunkin's sequel. Afflex and Belichick. They're very unbranded. Exactly, exactly. I have found it a little damning because I think that, you know, what celebrity means in the contemporary era has come to mean everything and nothing, right? I think if you look like 15 years ago, those same celebrities were still doing branded advertisements for money, right?

But they would go to Asia or go internationally where those commercials would be advertised here because it dulled your prestige a little bit to actually have. have commercials airing here while you were trying to be considered a quote-unquote serious actor, right? I think the fact that there's like a shameless integration now is telling, I guess, probably, what do they call it now? Recession indicators, right? You know, like, oh, wow. We just all need to get all the checks we can get now, right?

You know? Well, and it's part of that whole chase that bag mentality. Absolutely. Or somewhere along the way we went from don't sell out to make that money. Exactly, exactly. To the point that, you know, the creative elements of it, are fully, you know, abandoned. Like, it's, you know, product, celebrity,

maybe three well-written lines, right? You know, and we proceed. It's a little bit disappointed. I think the only ad that has actually stuck in my head, which says a lot, is seal singing as a seal, which is a testament to how terrible is this one. Yeah, the ones that stood out were nightmare fuel. Right.

Like the seal as a seal was straight up nightmare fuel. There was a whipped cream ad involving tongues. I got it from the couch. I was like, what, this is disgusting. I felt like, I felt like, oh, I'm somebody's dad. I'm somebody's old father. I was like, yo. I feel like every Super Bowl, whether it was one person watching a Super Bowl alone in a room,

or 60 people crammed into a wreck room watching the Super Bowl together communally. I felt like every room with a TV in it in America went at the same time. I was like, what is this an ad for? And then it was like coffee creamer or whipped cream? I did enjoy. I don't know if enjoy is the right word, but I was tickled, I guess. But I think AngelSoft, it was a toilet paper company that said, hey, here's your bathroom brick. I thought it was amusingly clever enough that I let it pass.

But really, that just shows you how low the part is more than anything else. Why are you still here? This is your potty-tunity. It's simple. Do not watch this. So you there. Get off the couch. and go to the bathroom.

I have to say there was one ad kind of late in the broadcast for Totinos with Tim Robinson and Sam Richardson. And it's like kind of a scene from a movie where they're sending the alien home and the alien ends up dying. Breath and peace, Jamo. We didn't know him as well of you

so it's not as sad for us. Not that we didn't want to. Just didn't open up around us. It feels very much like an, I think you should leave sketch. It feels like Tim Robinson and his people wrote it. As opposed to all of these 30-second clips that cost, you know, who knows how much money to make and who knows how much more money to actually broadcast, those ads are just throwing money

and celebrities at the screen. I was glad to see an ad that seemed to actually understand that you can make people laugh with your commercial. I would be remiss if I didn't point out Nike did a woman's sports. advertisement, which wasn't trying to go for the humor, so there were no he-his out of meat, right? It's standard Nike aspirational messaging. Sure.

You can't be confident. So be confident. You can't challenge. So challenge. You can't dominate. So dominate. It is a big deal that women's sports got that much airtime on like national televised event, which is our closest to a monoculture.

It does speak to the big strides that we've made in the last two years. that it's even getting that amount of space. Like Nike has this very, like, specific sort of grammar to their commercials, to their advertising. Absolutely. They've had for, like, 40 years. And they always, it always works on me. Yeah. And so, like, going through, you see Shakari.

You see, like, all of them, like, doing it's like, oh, you're a woman, you're always going to, you can't win. So you may as well go to win. I was like, that was, I'm sorry. I was like, oh, it worked. It worked on me. It worked on me. It was like, when the end of that Nike commercial was like, Jordan Child's inverted, doing, like, a one handstand.

Exactly. Oh, yeah. I, too, need to buy it. sports bra. Let's go. Let's go. All right, well, we want to know what you think about this year's Super Bowl.

Find us on Facebook at facebook.com slash PCH. That brings us to the end of our show. Gene Demby, Shamira, Ibrahim. Thanks so much for being here. Thanks as always. Appreciate you, Stephen. And just a reminder that signing up for Pop Culture Happy Hour Plus is a great way to support our show and public radio,

and you get to listen to all of our episodes, sponsor-free. So please go and find out more at plus.npr.org slash happy hour or visit the link in our show notes. This episode was produced by Mike Katzif and edited by Jessica Reedy. Hello, Come In, provides our theme music. Clips of the halftime show are credited to the NFL. Thank you for listening to Pop Culture Happy Hour from NPR. I'm Stephen Thompson, and we will see you all next time.