"Super Bowl show vows to keep it clean"—and Tuneless

Nick Gillespie | January 28, 2005

Don't worry about wardrobe malfunctions at this year's Super Bowl. Instead, worry for your ears.

Organizers of the annual halftime debacle have foresworn Michael Novak's brilliantly insane notion of staging "a ten-year sequence of halftime shows that tell the great story of the Founding of our nation" and have instead dusted off the bloke who is rapidly becoming everyone's least favorite Beatle (if only because he is likely to live the longest), Sir Paul McCartney. (Ironically, wasn't it Paul's grandfather in Hard's Day Night who was emphatically clean?)

McCartney has darkened the interstice of the Super Bowl before, peforming his tuneless post-9/11 ditty "Freedom," a sonic bomb that makes Neil Young's "Let's Roll" seems like the second coming of "Hey Jude."

Other acts performing at halftime are John Fogerty (don't play the new album, John), Charlie Daniels (here's hoping he plays his great anti-ayatollah shoutout, "In America") and Alicia Keys.

Whole story here.