For Next Year’s Super Bowl 60, How About a Halftime Show Worthy of the Big Game?

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^{Somewhere, the Motown music hitmakers of the 1960s and 1970s, such as the original members of the Four Tops and the Temptations who have passed on, are surely rolling over in their graves at what soul and R&B music has devolved into when an incomprehensible and vulgar mess like rapper Kendrick Lamar’s song “Not Like Us” can win five Grammy Awards, as it did last Sunday night.}

^{Awarding it “Song of the Year” and “Record of the Year” doesn’t speak very highly of the music industry today or of the 13,000 Grammy-voting members of the Recording Academy, either, whose taste appears to be all in their mouths.}

^{“Not Like Us” is sonic entropy that I won’t deign to call music. I haven’t the slightest idea what Lamar is trying to say, because the lyrics are an incoherent, illiterate word salad that would make former Vice President Kamala Harris sound like a rocket scientist by comparison. From what I’ve been able to ascertain online, “Not Like Us” is basically intended as a “diss” aimed at rival rapper Drake.}

^{The song, if you can call it that, is replete with a flurry of gratuitous F-bombs and N-words. But as bad as that is, Lamar also put out a “gay remix” that is even more obscene, with explicit descriptions of sex acts.}

^{I don’t know how either version could have received any airplay on any terrestrial radio station that valued its FCC-issued broadcast license, and Casey Kasem surely would be disheartened by what “Top 40″ pop music has devolved into.}

^{All that to say, I’m fairly certain the producers and directors of the Super Bowl 59 telecast on Fox on Sunday night will be sure to have one finger poised above the seven-second-delay “bleep” button, unless there’s a sanitized “radio edit” clean version Lamar could perform at the halftime show on Sunday night.}

^{All of this raises a serious question: What was NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell—or whoever in the league’s C-suites chose Lamar as the big game’s halftime performer—thinking?}

^{The choice of a foulmouthed rapper for the world’s biggest show should earn the NFL the equivalent of a personal foul deserving of a 15-yard penalty.}

^{Why not pick a singer or singers who could appeal to a broader audience, one spanning multiple generations of viewers—an audience Forbes magazine estimates will be between 117 million and 120 million—who will gather around 65” plasmas at home or in pubs across the U.S. on Sunday night to watch the once-a-year spectacle that is the Super Bowl?}

^{While it’s too late now to call in a suitable replacement off the bench, there’s always next year (as the Washington Commanders and New York Jets are all too familiar with saying).}

^{Next year’s NFL championship game in February 2026 will be Super Bowl 60, and with the 60th being a milestone number, allow me to propose a halftime show worthy of the occasion: A Beatles reunion, of sorts.}

^{But not just a reunion of the two remaining members of the Fab Four by themselves, however. I would have Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr, both of whom are still recording and performing in concert despite being 82 and 84, respectively, be joined onstage for the 15-minute halftime extravaganza by their musician offspring—James McCartney, the late John Lennon’s sons Julian and Sean Lennon, the late George Harrison’s son Dhani Harrison, and Ringo’s son Zak Starkey.}

^{James McCartney, 47, is a guitarist and drummer who has worked with his father before and has released albums and EPs of his own. Dhani Harrison, 46, the spitting image of his late father, is a singer-songwriter who has performed at festivals, including Coachella. Julian Lennon, 61, a filmmaker and author as well as a musician, has recorded seven albums, most recently 2022’s “Jude,” a reference to the Beatles’ 1968 hit “Hey Jude,” which was written for and about him. Sean Lennon, 49, Julian’s half brother, has played in a number of groups, including his parents’ Plastic Ono Band and released two solo albums. Like his father a drummer, Starkey, 59, has toured with Ringo’s All-Starr Band and has performed and recorded with The Who since 1996.}

^{For Paul McCartney, it would be a triumphant three-peat at the Super Bowl: On Feb. 3, 2002, at Super Bowl 36, he performed a pregame song dedicated to the memory of the victims of 9/11 at the Superdome in New Orleans, where this year’s Kansas City Chiefs-Philadelphia Eagles contest will be played on Sunday. Three years later, on Feb. 6, 2005, at Alltel (now EverBank) Stadium in Jacksonville, Florida, he performed a four-song set of “Drive My Car,” “Get Back,” “Live and Let Die,” and “Hey Jude.”}

Ex-Beatle Paul McCartney performs during the Super Bowl XXXIX halftime show at Alltel (now EverBank) Stadium on Feb. 6, 2005, in Jacksonville, Florida. (Harry How/Getty Images)

^{If a Beatles family reunion weren’t enough starpower for the ages and worthy of the Super Bowl stage, the NFL could up the ante by also inviting the Beatles’ pre-Ringo drummer, Pete Best—who got the boot in 1962, but still performs occasionally as the Pete Best Band—to join them for a fence-mending reunion some 64 years later. (“When I’m 64,” anyone?)}

^{If the NFL really wanted to go all in and go for the extra point, it could also invite McCartney and Starr’s fellow British Invaders Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, and Ronnie Wood of the Rolling Stones.}

^{If the NFL already has performers booked for the 2026 halftime show, it should punt and reschedule them for 2027. After all, McCartney and Starr may be musical immortals, but they won’t live forever.}