Friday, January 31, 2014

Today's Happy Hour Soundtrack

A tune from the new-to-me Bruno Mars...


My pride, my ego, my needs, and my selfish ways
Caused a good strong woman like you to walk out my life
Now I never, never get to clean up the mess I made, ooooooh
And it haunts me every time I close my eyes
Poignant lyrics, no?

So.  I was reading this article in the NYT and got curious.  So we went out to the Tube o' You and listened to three or four of his songs.  Young Bruno is pleasant enough, I suppose, but I'm not in the market for a Michael Jackson clone.  That said, there's this from that article I linked:
Mr. Mars, 28, the best-selling singer-songwriter of hits like “Locked Out of Heaven,” “Gorilla” and “Grenade” and, as of last Sunday, a Grammy Award-winner for “Unorthodox Jukebox,” which won best pop vocal album, was an unexpected choice when the National Football League announced him in September as the halftime performer. 

{...}

“But as you go through your daily life,” Mr. Hamilton continued, “you hear more Bruno Mars music than many of the other artists who could possibly be approached. His music is omnipresent.”

Mr. Bongiovanni of Pollstar pointed to Mr. Mars as a highly successful and lucrative performer who still had plenty of room to grow. 

{...}

“Rather than a dinosaur performing,” Mr. Bongiovanni said, “people are going to see someone whose career is actually on the upswing.” 

With halftime artists like Mr. Springsteen or the Who, he said, “you couldn’t make a case for them heading toward a new peak.” For Mr. Mars, Mr. Bongiovanni said, “his best days are ahead of him.”
Mark Quenzel, who as the N.F.L.’s senior vice president for programming is involved in the booking of Super Bowl talent, said that Mr. Mars would help the halftime show fulfill its goal of reaching as wide an audience as possible. 

“You try to figure out who’s going to be entertaining to someone who’s 18, and who’s going to be entertaining to someone who’s 58 or 68,” Mr. Quenzel said. “Because they’re all going to be watching.”
Well... good on the NFL for this choice and I applaud them for doin' so, as I really do believe America has had enough o' dinosaur rock.  But Mr. Quenzel got one thing wrong: THIS 68 year old ain't gonna be watching.  It's not that I don't like football, I do... but the kinda football **I** like is usually played on Saturdays.  A pox on the NFL.

17 comments:

  1. Don't watch the halftime. Ever. It's all marketing BS anyway.

    But I won't watch college ball. Unless it's Army-Navy. Or Michigan. A pox on the SEC.

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    1. Ooooh. OK. It's ON!

      You don't have to watch the SEC to enjoy college ball... there's plenty of GREAT football in the Big Ten, Pac-10, Big 12, ACC, and even the Mountain West conferences to keep you occupied all day Saturday without going near an SEC game. And the NFL has NOTHING to compare with the big college rivalry games, like Michigan-Ohio State, USC-UCLA, Oregon-Oregon State, Texas-OU, and Notre Dame-anybody. Hell, even the SEC produces great rivalry games; this past year's Iron Bowl between 'Bama and Auburn was one of the best football games, EVER. I'm not a fan of the SEC either, with the possible exception of newcomers Texas A&M... I'll root for those Aggies any day.

      But when it comes to the NFL, I find myself in the awkward position of agreeing with those asshat liberals at The New Republic specifically when it comes to this (and note their criticism of "marketing BS"):

      The Super Bowl is America at its most steroidal, figuratively—if not also, in some cases, literally. The pre-game shows are longer than the game itself, and the game is hardly short. Last year’s lasted 4 hours and 14 minutes. That was partly due to a half-hour power outage, but over the past two decades the game has averaged 3 hours and 35 minutes. That’s about 20 minutes more than the average NFL game, which itself is too long considering that it requires viewers to sit through more than 100 ads, spread over 20 commercial breaks, all to watch a grand total of 11 minutes of action. But the game isn’t just overlong. The in-game TV graphics, already too bright and embarrassingly elaborate during regular-season games, are cranked up to epileptic proportions for the Super Bowl. International conglomerates drop $4 million on 30-second commercials that are never as funny or interesting as Twitter would have you believe. And then there’s the always forgettable (well, almost always forgettable) halftime show, which reliably features either a senescent rock band (The Who, Tom Petty, Bruce Springsteen, The Rolling Stones) or an insipid pop act (Bruno Mars, Nicki Minaj, The Black Eyed Peas) performing what amounts to a Girl Talk medley of their “greatest” “hits.”

      Yup... there you have it: what's wrong with the NFL all wrapped up in one paragraph.

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  2. Pigs versus Africans31 January, 2014 21:18

    Professional sports, like rock and roll, is just noise. Give me a good polka band am I'm happy in my schnitzel and bratwurst... I'd rather watch my cat eating a rat than see fat Africans making millions a game while being tempted to swill 3.2 light beer by their owners, when I have a thick brew with a one inch head beside my plate of pork.

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    1. A man after my own heart, sorta. While I DO like college ball... my first love is hockey.

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  3. I try to catch the commercials on the ewebs sometime later in the week. I'm afraid I have quite fallen from the net that commerce devised to ensnare man kind on Saturdays and Sundays after they gave up on going to church. Weekends are for sailing or golf or going to the beach....Well dammit! They were!

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    1. I'm with you on the commercials. There's absolutely NO reason to watch the Sooper Bowl since The Tube o' You came on the scene. I hear ya about getting out of the house, too. My weekends used to be taken up with long mo'sickle rides... sometimes near, sometimes far... as in a road trip. Except in winter, obviously.

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  4. I have yet to determine whether or not I will watch the game.
    It will be a last minute decision.

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    1. I'd have to be having a very acute case o' boredom, verging on the terminal, before I'd watch. Like I told SN1 last evening: it's a matter of principle with me.

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  5. Buck/

    About the SEC. Having grown up in Illinois I'll aver that, throughout the entire decade of the 50s, early 60s the Big-Ten was--top to bottom--the best conference in the nation. Even bottom feeders like Illinois, Indiana and Northwestern killed their same-level out-of-conference opponents from the PAC-10, SEC, etc. But all that changed towards the mid-sixties onward. Since then, top to bottom, the SEC has been the best conference. And what this means in terms of injuries playing tough teams, etc., is that any team that survives such a grueling schedule is automatically considered superior to those of other conferences. Take the top three/four teams from EVERY OTHER CONFERENCE and subject them to an SEC-like schedule year in and year out and see what their won/loss record would be. Guess what? Lots more losses. In the 50s it was just the reverse when during entire 50s/early 60s the likes of an Alabama scheduled teams like Chattanooga before the LSU game (to avoid injuries to key personnel) and Tampa after LSU (to rest up and heal) and even the likes of OSU and Michigan had to struggle against teams like Illinois and they weren't the only powerhouses w. Iowa, Minn, Wisc, and MSY all being Conference & Rose Bowl Champions during that period..

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    1. The SEC IS the dominant conference today, there's no arguing facts. But that doesn't mean we can't hate on 'em, yanno? We Murcans almost always root for the underdog and that means, to me, ANYONE playing against an SEC team.

      Cheer, cheer for old Notre Dame...

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  6. Talk 'bout hatin' ND is MY bugaboo old Hoss. Not only does their (largely undeserved) reputation allow them to recruit nationally, but they ( and most church schools) cheat as well. My Father observed over his 30 yr-career as Tennis Coach at Eastern Ill that that it was always players of the church schools (of ALL denominations) that cheated the most (Amateur tennis players use the honor system in calling close shots in or out in regarding the lines on their own side of the court)

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    1. Hearsay, Virgil... hearsay. ND graduates more football players than any other Div I school... and that's a fact.

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  7. A pox on the NFL and Div I football. The New Republic paragraph above partially explains why I no longer care for the NFL. This is coming from someone in whose household the Detroit Lions were followed religiously before the NFL was cool. Joe Schmidt was my first football hero. Like my dad used to say, Sam Huff (NY Giants) wasn't fit to carry Schmidt's jockstrap.
    I've also come to despise the corrupting influence of the recruiting process and TV money in Div. I football. It's now all about the money. For example, Rutgers and Maryland going into the Big Ten? WTF? Their inclusion is all about getting NYC, East Coast money or something. Again, WTF does that have to do with a great, old Midwest conference?
    My "Super Bowl" now is watching the Michigan state high school championship games. This is football played the way it was meant to be played. The only time outs are for injuries or the end of quarters. The kids just keep playing after turnovers, etc. In addition, the lower of the 8 divisions (meaning smaller schools) usually have a significant proportion of the players playing both ways on offense and defense. This year my team, Ishpeming, a school from a small iron mining town in the U.P. beat a team from a small parochial school in Detroit in a game that was more entertaining than 90% of the Super Bowls I've seen.
    Nice background story: http://www.freep.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=2014301190082

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    1. Very well said, TC. Div I ball is skating on VERY thin ice with me as well, but I've been a fan for so long I can't give 'em up. That was a great story about Coach Olson you linked, thank ya for that. Friday night football in the UP sounds a lot like any given Friday night in the Fall in Texas. Those folks are SERIOUS about high school football.

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  8. Ah well - not being a sports fan of any stripe I'd only watch the Super Bowl if a local team was playing. Since the Pats blew it, there was no motivation for me this year. That said I did watch the halftime show on U-Tube the day after and I will say - WOW to Bruno Mars. Superior performance on every level; but then again I do like him and his style. And Renee Fleming gave THE best National Anthem performance at a sporting event - ever. Bout time they went in the direction of classic performances rather than trying to satisfy the teeming masses.

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    1. OK, I have NO idea why it says "German Shepard" for me; Buck, this is Kris.

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    2. How strange about your identity. NO ONE knows what evil lurks in the heart of Blogger... NO ONE.

      I haven't sought out the halftime show on the 'net, but mebbe I will.

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Just be polite... that's all I ask.