2025 Super Bowl
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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 11.01 on Sunday night. We're recapping the Super Bowl and the halftime show with Kendrick Lamar on NPR's Pop Culture Happy Hour.

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This message comes from Intuit TurboTax. Now, taxes is matching with an expert backed by tech to get you the most money back at TurboTax.com. Experts only available with TurboTax Live. See guarantee details at TurboTax.com slash guarantees. Joining me is one of the hosts of NPR's Code Switch podcast, Gene Demby. Hey, Gene. What's good? What's good, Stephen? Hey, Gene.

We'll get to what's good in just a moment. Also with us, culture writer and critic Shamira Ibrahim. Hey, Shamira. 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...

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 40-22. Eagles quarterback Jalen Hurts 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 movement was like so comprehensive. It was so holistic. Yeah.

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... Yeah.

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

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 lapsed. 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 innate destructiveness at the sign of success, which is what I can deeply identify with.

I am in fact surprised that Gene 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 lamppost. 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. Gotta 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 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 hangoverish.

hanging on by their fingernails. And then once they got to the Super Bowl, they fell off the cliff. 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 of them 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 it, they're like, what are we doing now? I mean, that would be a historic amount of good luck over the course of three years. Well, in addition to what turned out to be a very lopsided football game, there was also a halftime show that felt like the culmination of a very lopsided beef. Oh, my gosh.

You had Kendrick Lamar coming out and kind of getting his victory lap, performing a Super Bowl halftime show with support from SZA, with kind of narration from Samuel L. Jackson. Salutations! It's your uncle, Sam.

And this is the Great American Game. Shamira, I'm going to start with you. What did you think of the halftime show? Well, what do you think about it? We kind of did see two drubbings on that field, right? You know? Oh!

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

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 and 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 presented

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 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 um by rapping and jogging at the same time

time, which I could never do. His cardio was on point. 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, G? I was just like fixated on his jeans. I was like, oh, is he wearing flare jeans? I was like, oh, wait, cut the little bell bottoms that have been happening. Picking him to begin with 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. Right. And he has music that's like, I would say, probably more danceable than music he performed tonight. And he went away from that. And I thought the, you know, 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 feel. I've seen Kendrick live at an outdoor concert once. He was incredible. Like, 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 a hip hop act, right? You know, I love the little Serena cameo. Serena cameo. Oh, absolutely. Which of course is like, you know, layered, like she's confident, she's a day drink, you know what I mean? Like, it's just, there was just so much pettiness in the performance. You've got to be a little impressed at the fact that

A marquee artist about to do a stadium tour has the opportunity to showcase the best of his catalog, to 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-avowed 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. That song is getting all these stamps of mainstream validation. I mean, mainstream validation. It was all over the Billboard charts all year last year. It's not like it wasn't mainstream before. But I was surprised how deep he went into the verses in that song. Yeah, absolutely. I also liked how he was showing a little leg. He's like, am I going to do it now? Am I going to do it now? Like little snippets sprinkled out. I was like, oh, he's trying to...

Everyone is here because they want to see how this goes on. And also, like, can he do that song? I was like, can you do this song at the Super Bowl? Hey, I'm tripping. I'm sliding. I'm riding through the back. Must have had a beat, bro. Beat, bro. He a freak, though.

There were so many intentional choices made in that respect, to your point, Gene. There was like the coquettish, like, oh no, I'm not going to do it. 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 in 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 bananas. That is absolutely one of the most crazy things I've ever 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 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

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 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 Ben Affleck with Dunkin' Donuts, which is more a testament to his Bostonian nature than anything else. Yes. Where the hell

and Matt and Tom. Forget them suckers. Matt Damon and Tom Brady don't have the heart of a champion. We got a new squad. Dunking sequel. Affleck's and Belichick. Dunkings! 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 wouldn't be advertised here because it dulled your prestige a little bit to actually 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, it's 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, 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 disappointing. I think the only ad that has actually stuck in my head, which says a lot, is Seal singing as a seal. Oh, boy. Which is a testament to how terrible this was. Oh, boy.

Yeah, the ones that stood out were nightmare fuel. Like, the seal as a seal was straight up nightmare fuel. There was a whipped cream ad involving tongues. I got up from the couch. I was like, what? This is disgusting. I felt like, oh, I'm somebody's dad. I'm somebody's old father. And 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 rec 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 ad for? And then it was like coffee creamer or whipped creamer? I did enjoy. I don't know if enjoy is the right word, but I was tickled, I guess. But yeah.

I think Angel Soft, it was a toilet paper company that said, hey, here's your bathroom break. I thought it was amusingly clever enough that I let it pass. But really, that just shows you how low the bar is more than anything else. Why are you still here? This is your potty-toonity. 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 Totino's 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. Rest in peace, Jagmoe.

We didn't know him as well as 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 that script. 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 women's sports advertisement, which wasn't trying to go for the humor. So there were no hee-hees out of me, 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 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. Nike has this very 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 like oh you're a woman you're always gonna you can't win so you may as well go win I was like that was I'm sorry I was like it worked it worked on me it worked on me it was like when the end of that Nike commercial was like Jordan Childs inverted doing like a one hand handstand I was like oh I too need to buy a sports bra like 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 PCHH. That brings us to the end of our show. Jean 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 Katziff 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.

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