For those wondering if Rihanna “ate” at the Super Bowl Halftime Show, the expression feels especially pointed considering most were curious as to whether Ri was sporting a food baby or an actual one inside her stomach as she materialized on a platform suspended in midair to deliver her first “live” performance since the 2018 Grammy Awards, where she was obviously able to move much more lithely as she cameo’d onstage for DJ Khaled’s rendition of “Wild Thoughts.” Back then, she was feeling an all-pink look—specifically an Adam Selman dress with 275,000 crystals sewn in and a complementing flower placed behind her ear. For this year’s unexpected reemergence, the color of choice was period red, as it has been for quite a few lately. Namely, Doja Cat at the Schiaparelli show during Paris Fashion Week and Sam Smith and Kim Petras during their Grammys appearance (you know, the one that allowed Madonna to cause such an uproar).
From the moment Rihanna “arrived,” it was clear she was making no attempt to foil the public’s speculation by not only rubbing her belly “nurturingly,” but also accentuating the bump with a red Loewe jumpsuit zipped down to just below her stomach, allowing it to better protrude with a form-fitting red bodysuit underneath—capped off by a red bra plate. It was decidedly “apocalypse chic.” And, no doubt, Rihanna might be raising both of her children in just that type of climate… not that it will much matter to a billionaire who can better “shield” her spawns from most people’s reality. In that rich person’s vein, Rihanna opted to open the show with “Bitch Better Have My Money,” which all of her fans have responded to in the affirmative by continuing to support her non-musical endeavors in the form of Fenty Beauty and Savage X Fenty.
Interpolations of “Phresh Out the Runway” briefly punctuated Rihanna pantomiming the “dirt off her shoulders” move as she then segued into “Where Have You Been” from 2011’s Talk That Talk intermixed with hints of “Cockiness (Love It)” from the same album. A.k.a. the song that has an A$AP Rocky remix featuring such increasingly canceled lyrics as, “Tell RiRi I go re-retarded on the remix” and “Cuckoo for your cocoa/Your flying fish is my favorite dish.” Sticking with the sonic theme of the Calvin Harris-oriented dance sound of the 2010s that solidified Rihanna as a reigning queen of the charts, she then transitioned into “Only Girl (In the World).” Which at least wasn’t co-produced by Dr. Luke (like “Where Have You Been” was, among other tracks on Talk That Talk). But Rihanna couldn’t stay away from Talk That Talk too long as she went back to said album to perform its seminal single, “We Found Love,” as fireworks burst forth from the, um, State Farm Stadium in Glendale, Arizona. And yes, it feels slightly like a troll on Rihanna’s part to say, “We found love in a hopeless place” at a football game. With hints of “S&M” thrown in, there was a moment where Rihanna let the microphone fall away from her mouth and cease to bother “hiding” that certain portions were lip synced with as little care as she “hid” her baby bump. But this is a maneuver she’s no stranger to, having also noticeably done it during a medley of her songs at the 2016 MTV VMAs (of which this performance slightly echoes, in addition to coming across like another Savage X Fenty fashion show clip).
It was throughout “We Found Love” that Rihanna employed the use of her eighty backup dancers for optimal effect, mimicking something out of the Never Been Kissed playbook when The Denominators, led by Aldys (Leelee Sobieski), show up to the prom in white jumpsuits as double helix DNA (the prom theme being “Made for Each Other”). While the dancers go all in on the choereo as a “Rude Boy” remix then plays, the camera eventually moves through them to reveal Rihanna lip syncing the signature line, “Come here rude boy boy, is you big enough?” A$AP has clearly answered in the confirmatory based on the presence of bébé numéro deux. A quick mention of “kiss it better” and Rihanna keeps the TikTok attention span pacing consistent as she subsequently offers up 2016’s “Work” (which Drake likely watched with a tear in his eye), the lead single from her last album, ANTI. “Wild Thoughts” followed as Rihanna taunted, “I don’t know if you could take it/I know you wanna see me nakey, nakey, naked.” A line that felt tongue-in-cheek in its goading nature… considering how clothed she was and how few people want to see a pregnant woman naked unless they have some kind of fetish. She then walks the runway flanked by her dancers while they actually dance as she takes it relatively easy. This isn’t shaming Rihanna (the only thing she should be ashamed of here is reneging on her original stance about the NFL) for knowing her limitations while pregnant, so much as a confirmation of her need to lean even further on the available “diversion” smokescreens of a live performance that lend it more flair than there actually is. This being more pronounced because she couldn’t participate as much in her condition.
After “Wild Thoughts,” Rihanna gave a brief snippet of “Birthday Cake” (because, again, she clearly favors Talk That Talk) before leading the audience into “Pour It Up,” the non-kid-friendly track that reinforces, among other damaging messages of pro-capitalism, “All I see is dollars signs” and “Money make the world go ‘round.” Once upon a time, Ye knew that was true as well—before he blew it all up for the sake of going on one too many anti-Semitic rants. Although presently invisible to the likes Jay-Z (who, surprisingly, did not join Ri onstage at any point for “Run This Town”), Rihanna is no stranger to legitimizing controversial people, as she recently did with Johnny Depp for the Savage X Fenty Vol. 4 fashion show. That said, she felt obliged to throw in something of a non sequitur track after “Pour It Up”: “All of the Lights.” Which was not a Rihanna song, but a Kanye one from 2010’s My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy featuring Kid Cudi and the Super Bowl headliner in question. It seemed like a “dog whistling” way to pay homage to Ye, as though she was saying, “I know you’re still out there.”
That message persisted when she transitioned into “Run This Town,” a Jay-Z song from 2009 that featured, of course, Rihanna and, you guessed it, Kanye. At the time, Jay had proudly declared of the song’s title, “We basically run this town. It’s myself, Rihanna and Kanye. It’s pretty much it.” In the present, it’s clear that neither of the three do (Rihanna making that apparent with this ultimately “phoning it in” performance, complete with “flexing” by briefly stopping to reapply some makeup from her own line). What’s more, Rihanna couldn’t help but come across as though she was ripping off Jay-Z’s wife with the pregnancy serve, for, like Beyoncé at the 2011 MTV VMAs alluding to her “with child” status by announcing at the beginning of “Love On Top,” “I want you to feel the love that’s growin’ inside of me,” Rihanna “unwittingly” gave new meaning to her lyrics from “Diamonds” (preceded by the penultimate track, “Umbrella”) at the end of the show. For instead of saying, “I saw the life inside your eyes,” she sort of just incoherently trails off after “inside.” And yes, the entire audience saw the life inside of her while she performed somewhat lifelessly (despite the expected ass-licking accolades from various media outlets that remind one of the age-old Ambular query: “Hello? Am I the only one who thought it reeked?”). And one does question how much she values the life inside if she was willing to perform on a precarious, visibly teetering platform raised, at times, sixty feet in the air. Then again, breaking a contractual obligation with the NFL sounds far more dangerous.
Additionally, it was also in the spirit of Beyoncé, who relied on the bells and whistles of a lot of backup behind her at the VMA performance where she made her pregnancy public, that Rihanna enlisted the scores of dancers dressed in white, hazmat-esque jumpsuits to do more of the heavy lifting that her own body oughtn’t be doing at this time. The illusion of “fanfare” was also added to by the constantly moving, suspended-in-the-air platforms that were an innovative technique designed to minimize “alterations” to the stadium’s grass. So no, it wasn’t about creativity, so much as practicality and serving the God of Football.
Thus, what Rihanna did for the Halftime Show, in essence, was act like a billionaire, delegating most of the responsibility to others (manifest during a moment when she stands in front of all her agilely gyrating dancers during “Work” in the “overseeing pose”) to make the final product appear as though she had “carried it off.” Which is all the performance did: “passed.” As such, there was nothing truly memorable about the show other than Rihanna’s reliance on the “party trick” of happening to be pregnant at the same time the event coincided.
