Love bomb

World Cup Halftime Show, Metlife Stadium, July 19, 2026

I watched the first ever World Cup halftime show whilst sitting in an armchair in IKEA. I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to see it after it aired, because they’d paywall it, but since it has an ad stuck right in the middle (for Airbnb) they’re keeping it up on Youtube. Watching it at IKEA meant I didn’t hear the music, but that didn’t matter; it never does. I watched it with the sound on later and it wasn’t all that different.

I like soccer OK and I had my opinions - hard to spend June in Europe during the WC and NOT - but I do not know whereof I speak on that front, so I won’t. Halftime shows now: I’m the expert! This one was interesting because it was the first one the World Cup had ever had. Apparently, it was very much not wanted by FIFA or anyone, because it breaks the time rules and messes up the pitch. BBC and other outlets threatened not to show it, they were going to show their usual expert commentary instead, but someone put pressure on them, and they changed their mind. Obviously, this is all in keeping with everything that happened around this World Cup, a set of circumstances that could loosely be termed “Americanization” but also the natural enshittification of sport. FIFA, faugh!

Besides its status as first, another fun and unusual thing about this halftime show was it was only 11 minutes long. One has to think, why bother? I can only suppose they bothered because of that fat paycheck for the Airbnb ad, or maybe because American organizers literally could not imagine a half time where people did nothing but go to the restroom, buy beer, or maybe sit there and discuss the game so far. I love the idea of the whole world getting to know what an American half time show looks like though. This was the mini version, the abridged edition, the DJ edit, and thus was perfect for teeny-tiny attention spans that have been addled by TikTok. In fact, it was perfect for TikTok.

You would think that making something shorter might make it clearer – like writing a thesis statement or eliminating excess modifers from your sentences – but in fact in this one case it seems to have made the form more incoherent. The show was curated by Chris Martin of Coldplay, and his vision was to smash the five biggest stars he could think of (or who’d say yes) into an eleven minute medley. Those stars were Madonna, BTS, Justin Bieber, and Shakira & Burna Boy (who performed together).

Also performing were Dr. Teeth and the Electric Mayhem, a band composed of Muppets, and the New York Philharmonic with the Simón Bolívar Symphony Orchestra, of Venezuela, conducted by Gustavo Dudamel playing a song by the White Stripes, and a children’s chorus from PS 22 in Staten Island singing a song written by himself. That’s a LOT for eleven minutes so of course each of these acts got approximately 90 seconds in the spotlight.

Both BTS and Shakira & Burna Boy did OK with their 90 seconds. BTS are on tour and have this whole stadium thing down pat, and Shakira and the Boy just have the right charisma for it. Halftime shows rise and fall on precision dancing, and they were surrounded by large troupes doing just that. Madonna’s bit was, frankly, horrid, and Bieber was given the unenviable task of wandering around with an acoustic guitar singing soulfully, which is obviously not a possible way of entertaining 80,000 people. Luckily, thanks to modern technology, all he really had to to do -- all any of them had to do -- was stay in a tiny area while hovered over by drone-cameras and one still camera placed smack in front of them that they could perform straight into. BTS is the master of this.

These four/five acts did what they do, only on 45 rpm, or even faster. That left only the Philharmonic, the Muppets and the children’s chorus, and they were tasked with giving us the semiotic and semantic message of the whole thing. The semantic meaning was “LOVE”. As for semiotics, in the past few years Super Bowl Half Times have become this ideological space where artists are given a quarter of an hour to narrate a contemporary version of American history and politics. Both Bad Bunny (2026) and Kendrick Lamar (2025) killed it in this department, and we have seen a few other ideologically pregnant moments, like Beyonce’s homage to the Black Panthers. Some of them have been accidental, like Janet Jackson’s boob accident, left shark, and MIA’s middle finger, but all of them have something to tell us about America’s history, values, and compulsions.

This halftime was both unlikely and unwilling to do something like that, and the Muppets are a great choice if that’s what you wish to prevent from happening. In her recent New Yorker article on the event, Amanda Petrusich described the Superbowl Halftime as “corny and extra,” adding that the whole exercise is, like American politics, about pageantry and bluster, which is all very true. If I were asked what I thought the message of the World Cup halftime show was, it would be, on one level, an attempt to cement the image of America as Not That Horrible that seems to be what some foreigners went away with (or so we’re told). Perhaps it was trying to telegraph that, despite our politics, we Americans are like Muppets, fun, colorful, childlike, and harmless. But another, and equally valid, way of looking at it would be that this was the smokescreen put up because in fact we - we, writ large, i.e. We, The People - are none of those things.

And maybe even the opposite.

I did enjoy the fact that literally the only white person to be seen on the field during the children’s chorus segment was Chris Martin. If we have to have only One White Man, I would have preferred it to be Erland Haaland, but I believe he had gone home already, clutching a taxidermy’ed trash panda holding a whisky bottle to his chest. More than the new halftime, that image feels like the real keeper. Feel free to make your own comments on what it says about US.

(If you haven’t seen the halftime show and would like to, I’ve linked it in the first sentence and also here.)