I have little interest in watching professional sports that I am familiar with and I have zero interest in watching sports that I have never played. Except maybe as some kind of voyeuristic anthropological exercise. Last Sunday, I had a choice: watch a video of either:
“El Colacho” in Castrillo de Murcia, Spain, where men dressed as devils run through the streets and jump over babies laid out on mattresses, a ritual believed to cleanse the infants of original sin and protect them from evil spirits.
The SuperBowl.
In the end, I elected for an early night but it appears many people on LinkedIn wanted to talk about the SuperBowl. For me, this is simply a quite good music performance bookended by something that is fetishistic, homoerotic - and yet, despite all this, somehow tedious. The helmets, the tight clothing, the brain damage, the shoulder pads that might give even prime 80s Dynasty Joan Collins pause. All this passes me by. What the LinkedIners are hot for is not the grassy guy-on-guy action. Nor are they hot for the hygienically sexy highlights of Usher’s career*.
No, they are hot for The Ads. Because what could be more American than someone trying to sell you something that you haven’t asked them to? Obviously it’s better if they are trying to sell you something that could bankrupt you. But sometimes you just have to make do with mayonnaise. Not every ad can be for FTX**.
I am not going to tell you which ads were the good ones. They weren’t made for me. If a Superbowl ad actually did end up appealing to me then something has gone massively wrong in the whole process. And I am no expert on advertising.
However something about the Superbowl did feel like a missed opportunity. The Hellman’s Mayonnaise ad featured… a cat, I think? Look I’m not going to watch it. I already have some mayonnaise in the fridge which I want to reserve some positive feelings for as I am making coleslaw this evening. And I don’t trust VRML*** (or whoever the agency behind it was) not to ruin that for me.
For reasons that will soon become clear, I need to state my position on country music. There are many country artists that I respect - mostly of a certain vintage. Heck, we’ve even had Kenny Rogers making an appearance here. There’s a grandeur, a romance to classic country. However its modern purveyors seem to lack the insight, honesty, and charm of the old guard. In particular, I find the valorization of small town values a bit hard to stomach. I grew up in a small(ish) town. There was nothing especially bad about the people there. But nothing especially noble either. And pride in your own small group can twist into a disdain for people different to you.
Jason Aldean’s “Try That In A Small Town” is a song about small town pride (OK) and is against mugging people (sure) and… stomping on the flag (er…) and doing something with “a gun that my granddad gave me” (hmmm). N.B. My grandad did not give me a gun. He gave me his Scrabble set and his list of two letter words (he played for blood but mostly metaphorically). I’ve never used these against a flag stomper so I can’t vouch for their efficacy. Some people have questioned Mr Aldean’s decision to shoot record the video for this song at a Tennessee courthouse that was the site of lynching. Although to be fair, finding a Tennessee courthouse that hasn’t been the site of a lynching is probably a tall order.
Personally I like to picture a quarter time performance where the Chiefs and the 49ers beat the stuffing out of Mr Aldean and then treat his wounds with Hellmann’s Mayonnaise.
But on reflection, the cat thing is probably a better idea.
*I first encountered Usher when I was mobbed by a mass of screaming teenage girls one late 90s Saturday morning on the Holloway Road. Obviously they weren’t mobbing me. I merely stood between them and the bandana-d object of their desire who was waving from the roof of a rapidly receding limo. I still bear the scars to this day.
**But may be if we innovate hard enough, one day all products can be as grandiose and as incompetently managed as the FTX. Someone call Marc Andreessen. Or review his podcast. Or something.
***Someone call Mark Pesce. Or review his podcast. Or something.
Liz Truss and Keir Starmer bury the hatchet