Jennifer Lopez and Shakira performed at the Super Bowl last week, to great acclaim, great reception, and some controversy. “The what bowl?” you ask, being an East African with better things to pay attention to than America’s bastardization of rugby and its vulgar violation of the word “football”. Let me explain. When Americans say they are playing football, they are lying. What they actually have is a very, very, very confusing mess that I understand even less the more I watch it. This is probably why when their most important “football” game of the year is played, it is the commercials and the entertainment during the halftime intermission that garner more attention. Super Bowl commercials are watched on YouTube by millions who won’t even buy the junk being peddled and the entertainment? Oh, the entertainment! That’s another thing altogether! They don’t just bring out a few cheerleaders to dance around a bit, they get the biggest stars they can find to perform huge and magnificent spectacles. Enormous casts of dancers on massive stages give epic performances that will ring across the globe for months, even years to come. Racists and sexists are still reeling from the time Beyoncé told the ladies to ‘get in formation’, and that was a whole 2016 in the past. This year on the marquee, it was Shakira and Jennifer Lopez aka JLo, pronounced Jailow not Jillo. (Shakira pronounced Wow!) They did a medley of their respective resumes of hits, accompanied by what we can estimate conservatively was all the backup dancers in North America. There were thousands of booties, both male and female, up on that stage shaking away, so, needless to emphasise, the show was, well, rather a sexy one. This is where the controversy came in. There are a few people out there who think this is a bad thing. I do not know what kind of life you have to have had where, even in 2020 you still equate sexy with depraved, perverse, obscene and harmful, but the rest of us appreciate sexy. We applaud the positive contribution Jailow and Wow! bring to our lives and to the world at large. This life is hard and bitter and you never know who to trust. Everyone lies: our leaders lie, our teachers and parents lie, our children lie, even I can’t be trusted. But amidst all this, there is one pair of items that you can rely upon for absolute honesty, and those are Shakira’s hips. So how can you not be grateful for Shakira’s gyrations? Those upset by the affair focus most of their ire on the fact that there was a stripper pole in the show, and some parents were irked that their children saw it. I need not explain what a stripper pole is, of course, because if you don’t know, this article has already offended you enough, but that pole should not have outraged anyone at all. Look, you have two women who have been skimpily dressed their whole careers coming out to skimpily wear skimpy clothes as they replay medleys of said careers; you really should have hidden your children as soon as the MC said, “Pucho hens together foooooor…” That’s when you should have commanded, “Kids, go to your room.” If your children were still watching by the time the stripper pole came out, you are not parenting effectively enough. And you can’t expect Jailow to take over the parenting because, Oh oh oh ooohooh, she ain’t their momma, no. Besides, she didn’t even strip. She just twirled around the stick for a bit. No stripping means it was not a stripper pole, it was a dance-fully-albeit-skimpily-clothed pole. Her wardrobe didn’t even malfunction. My fellow wananchi wa Africa, I urge you all to watch the Super Bowl halftime show of 2020. It will entertain you greatly and make you proud to see what the Americans have grown from the seeds of Rhythm and Blues and the roots of Rock n’ Roll that they inherited from us. And as for the outraged American, if you don’t want your kids to see sexiness, don’t let them watch Super Bowl halftime shows. Send them downstairs to the bunker or “basement” as I believe you call it. They can come back when the second half begins to watch the wife-beaters and racists and tax-defaulters give each other concussions for their and your entertainment.
