This Week in Gossip (Feb. 16)

Kendrick danced, Pharrell's biopic was canned, and Beyonce has more things to sell to us

American Football Happened, People Booed, and Kendrick Lamar Was the Biggest Hater

(Image via Giphy.)

Look, I don’t know what American football is. I have no idea how it’s played and every time someone tries to explain it to me my eyes just glaze over and I can feel my brain trying to make a swift exit through my skull. I’ve committed myself to a sport already – go, Leafs, go – and have no space left in my head for this strange thing. But I do know that it was a good thing that the Philadelphia Eagles won the Super Bowl against the team with the racist name. Literally every American friend and colleague I have was rooting for Philly, no joke. None of them wanted Kansas City to win this thing for reasons relating to sports, politics, and just plain hating. That’s the magic of being into a sport.

For all of the usual suspects’ whining about culture “getting too political”, sports has always been rooted in that issue. The NFL is no exception, from fury over kneeling to anti-vaxxer players to the End Racism slogans being removed from the pitch. The President was at this game and had made it clear that he was rooting for Kansas City. He was booed and cheered, and narratives were written to reflect whichever side you were on. Trump is a weird cultural figure in that he’s a gross fascistic cult leader who also has a strange desire to be a talking-head celebrity. He’d rather be on his couch in Mar-a-Lago tweeting about this stuff. But he and his team were dishearteningly savvy in their ability to latch the hard-right agenda onto pop culture, from GamerGate to the “anti-DEI” rhetoric throughout cinema. I imagine Trump wanted to be there for Kansas City to win so he could latch himself onto their victory as a sign of his own power. Ha.

Taylor Swift, the girlfriend of Travis Kelce, was also there and a lot of people are making too much out of the fact that she got booed. She did look a bit startled by it but I’m not sure it needs to be turned into a Discourse moment. She got a lot of flack from football fans last year for “hogging the limelight”, as if being one of the most famous people alive was a thing she could turn off (but also she was very clearly pushing the Power Couple narrative with Kelce during that time of massive professional peaks for them both.) She got booed because people get booed. And frankly, I think it’s healthy for someone like her to not be obsessively adored every moment of their life. She’ll be fine. Or she’ll write six albums about it.

Frankly, my main excitement for the Super Bowl was the halftime show. Kendrick Lamar had perhaps the biggest year of his career in terms of pure popularity in 2024 with a new album and a slew of Drake diss tracks that defined a generation. YouTuber Todd in the Shadows said that the Drake/Kendrick feud was the real superhero story of 2024, the biggest cultural touchstone of the season, and I agree. So, seeing Kendrick sing “Not Like Us” and grin proudly as he said Drake’s name? Pure pettiness. I loved it.

The entire performance was beautifully done. Kendrick’s a very particular performer who is intentional about every choice, and you saw that here. You had Samuel L. Jackson as an Uncle Sam, the American flag made up of Black dancers, Serena Williams dancing, the “40 acres and a mule” mention, and the game controller staging. It was proudly Black, historically savvy, and super entertaining. And mean. It was yet another chance for Kendrick to stomp on Drake’s corpse. Of course all the racists hated it and screamed “DEI,” much in the same way they used to cry about political correctness gone mad. The thing about all of these dog-whistles is that you instinctively want to reply in ways that point out the factual errors but you know it’s pointless. Explaining to these creeps that a Pulitzer Prize-winning icon of rap is not a diversity hire is a waste of time. They just don’t want to see someone Black being Black on that stage. They don’t see it as American, even though the entire performance was explicitly about how Americanness doesn’t exist without Blackness. Maybe they’re just mad at Kendrick’s strident anti-child abusers stance in “Not Like Us.”

Anyway, well done to the birds. Climb those lampposts and party with Gritty for as long as you so desire.

What Happened With the Pharrell Williams Biopic That Was Canned Months Before its Release?

Did you know about Golden? It was a musical biopic about the childhood of Pharrell Williams. Michel Gondry of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind fame was directing it. The cast included Kelvin Harrison Jr., Halle Bailey, Da'Vine Joy Randolph, Janelle Monae, Missy Elliott, and Brian Tyree Henry. It was set for a May 5 release, but now it is no more. The movie has been permanently shuttered.