Madonna performs during halftime show of New York Giants vs New England Patriots game at Lucas Oil Stadium.
Madonna performs during halftime show of New York Giants vs New England Patriots game at Lucas Oil Stadium. SHe is wearing a black and gold costume and a gold headdress. She is flanked by dancers in a variety of black and gold costumes.

Meet the professor studying Super Bowl halftime shows

Music professor Joanna Love has built a career studying how pop music, mass culture, and branding overlap, harmonize, and sometimes collide.

When associate professor of music Joanna Love reached sixth grade, she experienced a middle school rite of passage: choosing a musical instrument to play in concert band. Luckily, she had a head start. As a child, her parents bought a house and discovered that the previous owners left an upright, portable organ behind. Love’s mom was thrilled—and insisted her daughter take lessons.

Years later, however, Love decided to take up something a little more portable: clarinet. The choice unwittingly changed the course of her life. When she was in seventh grade, Love’s band director handed her a box and cryptically told her learning to play what was inside would allow her to get scholarships.

The mystery box contained another woodwind instrument: a bassoon. “And he said, ‘By the way, I can’t tell you how to put it together. You need to find a teacher,’” she says today, laughing at the memory. “That was really my pathway in: doing this strange thing that nobody else did. And it’s kind of who I am. I always love the path that nobody takes.”

Love took her director’s advice to heart and became a classically trained bassoonist. But she also became a history-loving musicologist who’s carving out a singular niche for herself analyzing the history and impact of the Super Bowl halftime show and what these musical spectacles tell us about culture, politics, and society. Out of necessity—popular music is only just starting to become a serious topic of academic inquiry—her research is interdisciplinary, wrapping in media theory and advertising theory, as well as deep musical and visual analysis.

Today, the halftime show is almost as big a draw as the game itself, with viewers tuning in specifically for high-profile headliners. In 2024, a staggering 123.4 million people watched the R&B star Usher run through a medley of hits. It wasn’t always like this. Decades ago, the Super Bowl halftime show was a low-key affair featuring marching bands or the performance troupe Up With People, and shows programmed around specific themes: the big band era, jazz artist Duke Ellington, or Motown.

But starting with a 1991 mini-concert featuring boy band sensation New Kids on the Block, the Super Bowl halftime show slowly started to become a showcase for mainstream music acts. In subsequent decades, the show has booked classic rockers (Paul McCartney, Bruce Springsteen & The E Street Band, The Rolling Stones), major pop stars (Lady Gaga, Katy Perry) and solo artists who defy categorization (Beyoncé, Rihanna, Kendrick Lamar).

A portrait of Professor Joanna Love in the Alice Jepson theater. She is wearing an olive green blouse and is smiling at the camera.

“I’ll talk to my students about ideas that I’m thinking about, and they’re really into it. The day after the Super Bowl, they’ll say, ‘Let’s talk about it.’”

—Joanna Love
Associate professor of music

Love watched football as a kid but was more influenced by the music in her household, as her “typical boomer parents” spun ’70s rock and pop and enjoyed the classics; she vividly recalls listening to the Beatles’ “Yellow Submarine” and Michael Jackson’s Thriller. “My parents were not musical, but they loved music,” she says. “I can’t even remember a moment without sound in my house.” Love inherited this curiosity and passion for music. When she was a kid riding around in the car, she’d pepper her mom with inquisitive questions like, “Why are all songs about love?”

“Or I remember listening to Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons and asking, ‘Why does he sing like that? The other men that I hear don’t sing like that,’” she says. “I think I was always primed to be a musicologist, even though I didn’t know what that was until I was in college.”

But growing up in a family of educators, Love assumed she would follow in their footsteps into teaching. She ended up earning an undergraduate degree in music education and becoming a band director. (Among other things, she was excited that one requirement of this job was learning how to play every musical instrument.) But after a few years, Love realized she couldn’t see herself teaching K-12 for the next few decades. Restless and seeking a new challenge, she decided to pursue a master’s degree focused on music history at night while keeping her day job.

Juggling life as a band director with graduate-level work was understandably hectic. “Everybody asks my pathway into coffee—doing my student teaching, I did it at a high school that was about 45 minutes from my house. So you’re doing marching band, all-day classes, and then games at night—and then going home and then doing it the next day. That’s how I started coffee.”

While earning a master’s degree, she took a class on music and technology that piqued her interest in the intersection of songs and advertising, as she wrote about the use of George Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue” in commercials for United Airlines and Aaron Copland’s Rodeo suite in the “Beef. It’s What’s for Dinner” campaign. Eventually, she decided to leave teaching K-12 altogether and headed to UCLA to pursue a doctorate in musicology.

In February 2012, when Love was at UCLA, she took a break to watch the Super Bowl with friends. At the time, she was deep into her dissertation, which included analysis of how Pepsi used popular music in ad campaigns. Among other things, Love was studying Madonna, who had a contentious relationship with the soda brand. In 1989, Pepsi banned an ad featuring the pop superstar due to the “Like a Prayer” music video, which drew intense criticism for imagery such as burning crosses.

Coincidentally, Madonna headlined the Super Bowl halftime show the year Love was watching. The musician’s career-spanning performance was elaborate and impressive—among other things, 150 people dressed as gladiators carried her to the stage—and ended with her belting out a moving version of “Like A Prayer” alongside a 200-person gospel choir and the words “World Peace” projected on the field in sparkly gold letters.

“I was sitting in a room with all these people, and my mouth was on the floor the whole time,” Love recalls now of watching this set, noting that “Like a Prayer” especially caught her attention. “I was thinking, ‘Nobody notices that she put this thing on national television that was stripped from the air.’ And so [Madonna’s set] stuck with me for a really long time, and I put glimpses of that in things that I was writing.”

“If you knew Madonna, you were like, ‘Whoa, that show was really subversive.’”

—Joanna Love

Love eventually published a revised and expanded version of her dissertation in the 2019 book Soda Goes Pop: Pepsi-Cola Advertising and Popular Music (University of Michigan Press). But she also couldn’t stop thinking about Madonna’s Super Bowl appearance. In the direct aftermath, some critics raved about the performance’s symbolism-rich choreography and staging. And during Madonna’s set, the rapper M.I.A. also drew outrage for her guest appearance, after she flouted censors and deliberately flipped off the camera.

Madonna also received criticism rooted in ageism, ableism, and misogyny; at one point, people zeroed in on a moment where it appeared like she might lose her balance. “If you knew Madonna, you were like, ‘Whoa, that show was really subversive,’” Love says. “But from the other side, people were like, ‘That is the lamest, blandest thing I’ve ever seen. She’s just an old lady [who] almost fell down the stairs.’”

Nearly a decade later, Love revisited Madonna’s halftime show in a 2020 paper called “Song Vs. Brawn: Hearing Bodies Of Resistance At The NFL Super Bowl” that incorporated media and cultural theory, studies about music in sports, and musical and visual analysis. Inspired by a method of sociological analysis based on the interconnected relationships between things like identity, representation, and cultural consumption, Love developed a theory called “circuits of spectacle.” These defined what values the performances and game conveyed—and when these circuits clashed, they explained the resulting tension.

“I started to theorize how the NFL has its own circuit of spectacle that emphasizes masculinity and patriotism and nationalism and capitalism,” Love explains. “And then you have this halftime show that’s shoved in the middle that sometimes says, ‘No, no, no, no, no,’ and ends with ‘World Peace.’”

Of course, Madonna’s set is far from the only Super Bowl halftime show to spawn vigorous conversation. Viral moments are common: In Katy Perry’s 2015 set, the dancer colloquially known as “left shark,” a.k.a. someone dressed in a shark costume, became a meme after moving charmingly out of step; Prince flawlessly played hits like “Purple Rain” in 2007 during a pouring rainstorm; Rihanna casually revealed her pregnancy during a 2023 set.

Prince performs at half time during Super Bowl XLI. He is standing in the rain with his hand up to his ear, and is holding a purple version of his iconic guitar.
Prince performs (flawlessly, in the pouring rain) at halftime during the 2007 Super Bowl at Dolphins Stadium in Miami Gardens, Florida. 
Photo by Theo Wargo/WireImage

But the Super Bowl halftime show has often been surprisingly contentious. In 2004, Janet Jackson was vilified after Justin Timberlake tore off part of her costume and briefly exposed her breast; in 2016, Beyoncé was accused of being anti-police after referencing the Black Panthers and other Black Pride symbols while performing her political anthem “Formation.” And the FCC received more than 1,300 complaints after the 2020 halftime show co-starring Latin music stars Shakira and Jennifer Lopez, amid accusations the women wore outfits that were too skimpy.

Some of these controversies stem from friction caused by generational shifts, Love says. The baby boomer generation—who was responsible for popular music becoming an integral part of advertising—are stepping aside for younger generations, including and especially Generation X.

But in her 2020 paper, Love further theorized that the response to Madonna’s set wasn’t unlike the response to other contentious Super Bowl shows—all of which involved artists who were part of historically marginalized groups. In turn, these debates reflected conversations within the NFL over who belonged—and were a microcosm of other conversations going on in the U.S. over other places different marginalized groups are (or aren’t) welcome.

The more Love explored these polarizing shows, the more she realized something else larger was at play; most significantly, the biggest controversies (Janet Jackson, Beyoncé, Shakira/Jennifer Lopez) fell in the years when there were U.S. presidential elections. “You start to put it together, and you’re like, ‘OK, you have all these complaints, and these complaints are happening in this situation, but not this situation,” she says. “I realized, ‘Okay, this can be much bigger.’”

This led to a Journal of Popular Music Studies article, “‘Let’s Get Loud’: Sounding Subversive Bodies at the Super Bowl” in which Love explored why election timing led to points of tension. But she went one step further and framed these controversies through the lens of branding—leading her to coin another term (“co-branded spectacles”) to represent the values communicated by the halftime show and game. As with the “circuits of spectacle,” when the “branded spectacles” of the halftime show and game are in conflict, that’s when friction flares.

“We live in a different world where we are OK with pretty much anything being co-branded,” she explains. “And then the second it looks strange to us, that’s when we say, ‘Ohh.’ And so you wonder if a lot of the reactions are football fans that are thinking, ‘This doesn’t belong on the football field.’”

Love is currently hard at work on a manuscript based on her research to date, while expanding her scope of research to how the Super Bowl pregame musical activities (which are also branded) further complicate these conversations. “That’s what I’m writing about, too: the way that music is used to paint a picture of America,” she says.

“That’s kind of who I am. I always love the path that nobody takes.”

—Joanna Love

Luckily, the cultural ubiquity of the Super Bowl—and the halftime show, commercials, and of course, the game—remain rich topics of conversation. “I’ll talk to my students about ideas that I’m thinking about, and they’re really into it,” Love says. “The day after the Super Bowl, they’ll say, ‘Let’s talk about it.’

“[And] I don’t know that there’s anybody in the U.S. that has no opinion about the Super Bowl—that has never, ever, ever watched it and has no idea what’s happening. That’s the unique thing also: It’s [one of] the last cultural events where people will come to the screen at the same time.”

 

Author note: Annie Zaleski is a New York Times bestselling author and music critic who has written books about Taylor Swift, Lady Gaga, Duran Duran, and the history of Christmas songs. Her work has appeared in The Guardian, NPR Music, Rolling Stone, and Record Collector.