Super Bowl Preview

A portrait of the author in his fortress of baseball

If you don’t really like music, or care about the possibility of it’s function as a cultural document, and you just want to get midnight-gutter-nap drunk and shake that ass, then pop music is your answer. If you’d rather watch millions of dollars worth of shitty advertisements, a pop star who’s past their prime jumping around in a spray of fireworks, while a bunch of backup dancers in black-light makeup grind against a sea of invisible dongs, while you eat ground meat and fried potatoes, but you want to pretend all of that is somehow about football, then tune in to the Super Bowl this Sunday.

The average Super Bowl party attendee has more interest in cheese sauce than the outcome of the game. Most people watching the Super Bowl (or any football game really) don’t care about strategy, or a psychological showdown between men, or a game’s place in the history of a city, or Peyton Manning as an example of how perfectionism does not necessarily have to equate to self-destructive obsession (as in the case of a Michael Jordan or Tiger Woods). They just want to scream for a color.

American Football fandom is about pageantry, just like International Football (Soccer) is. Just replace singing songs, rioting and scarves with chanting “D-fense,” eating and hats that look like cheese. Yes, there are some people who actually engage with football’s unique brand of incredibly complex strategy, the subtle chess match deep within the game which is the closest football has to it’s own special virtue. But, unless crudely paraphrasing what little they have heard commentators explain over the sound made by crunching nachos resonating through their skulls, most fans don’t engage with strategy. They are solely consumed with the barbaric thrombo of testosterone and ego that are the game’s poisonous byproducts, which leave our culture mutilated in it’s cock wake.

This mania reaches it’s height at the annual Championship of American Football, the Super Bowl. And how fitting they call it “super” as I haven’t heard the word used in a non-sarcastic way since circa 1992. Just keep in mind that this game is not about people or sport, it’s just a lot of dopes taking a break from watching reality shows to feast on garbage while pretending they are part of some basic approximation of a thing they heard about. It’s a commercial for a diversion. It’s about creating such a quantity of hype and build-up and ritual that the game is just a part of the static that fills our lives. It is the cultural equivalent of packing popcorn. It’s the day before Monday.

[RA ROWE]