# Rihanna halftime show

**URL:** <https://boards.straightdope.com/t/rihanna-halftime-show/979715>\
**Category:** Cafe Society\
**Tags:** football-nfl, music\
**Created:** [February 13, 2023, 3:14pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/rihanna-halftime-show/979715 "2023-02-13T15:14:23Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Page:** 8

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**Author:** ![bump](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/7c8e57/32.png) [@bump](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/bump)\
**Post date:** [February 16, 2023, 4:05pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/rihanna-halftime-show/979715/141 "2023-02-16T16:05:34Z")

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> [@Happy\_Lendervedder](#):
>
> If you’re going for 21st Century performers

That’s just it; they _rarely_ go for currently popular artists in the modern Super Bowl halftime show era. It’s almost always some sort of very popular act with a long career, but never one at the height of their popularity. It’s very calculated to appeal to a very broad audience- I think the idea is that had they put Rihanna as the Super Bowl XLII (2008) headliner, she’d have been popular among a small set of viewers, while doing it in 2023, nearly everyone’s heard of her and heard of her music by now.

That, and they usually have a large enough catalog of hits to choose a medley of non-offensive ones that people will recognize. I mean, we didn’t hear Rihanna’s “S&M”, which IMO is one of her better/more catchy ones, probably because it would offend people. It might have been harder to pick a list of her songs that were hits AND unlikely to offend anyone in 2010.

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