Hope I Die Before I Get Old

With a 30 second advertising spot going for $3 million, it’s clear that the SuperBowl is the biggest TV event of the year.

The WhoDat? on sports entertainment…

Pete Townsend of The Who speaking to Billboard:

The band’s halftime show will feature a “compact medley” of their greatest hits, most of which debuted five decades ago.

“We’re kinda doing a mash-up of stuff,” he said. “A bit of ‘Baba O’Riley,’ a bit of ‘Pinball Wizard,’ a bit of the close of ‘Tommy,’ a bit of ‘Who Are You,’ and a bit of ‘Won’t Get Fooled Again.’ ”

The band will segue from one hard-rocking song into another, attempting to appeal to their older base while also keeping younger folks entertained with the high-energy, hooks-only song sampling. “It works — it’s quite a saga, A lot of the stuff that we do has that kind of celebratory vibe about it — we’ve always tried to make music that allows the audience to go a bit wild if they want to. Hopefully it will hit the spot.”

Brought to you by the fine folks at Bridgstone Tires (NYT)

This year, the Who is headlining the show, a curious choice because the band has not released an album of new songs in four years and its first farewell tour was in 1982, before many people who will be watching the game were born.

and in the Wall Street Journal:

In some ways the graying of the halftime acts reflects the fleeting phenomenon of cultural consensus. Gone are the days when people more or less agreed on Elvis Presley (the impersonator Elvis Presto, halftime XXIII) or even Michael Jackson (XXVII). So the shows dig deeper, hoping headliners from the past have acquired at least some cross-market appeal.

BAH! I’m such a H8R! Music and sports… an obvious collaboration, and the courts and the U.S. Senate too, of course. ScrewDat!:

As far as trade marks for WhoDat are concerned, that’s Sal and Steve Monistere. Steve recorded the Who Dat chant in 1983, and using that chant, he recorded the original “Who Dat” single with members of the Saints offensive line and singer Aaron Neville (photo of the original single above). Then, together, the Monistere brothers immediately embarked on one of the most ingenious marketing campaigns in sports history. And the Who Dat Nation was born.

Will Bridgestone/CBS/NFL own rights to The Who medley? Do artists earn royalties when their music is played in arenas?
80% of PRO Artists Never Receive a Single Broadcast Royalty – Ever!

WE WILL ROCK YOU
BMI press release.

“We Will Rock You” has accumulated more than 3 million U.S. radio and TV feature performances from 1977 through the first quarter of 2009. BMI calculates that one million performances of a song (averaging three minutes in length) represents 5.7 years of continuous airplay. Using this formula, the U.S. radio and TV performances of “We Will Rock You” equal more than 18 years of continuous airplay.

Sounds like a U.S. Military torture method.

In the February 8 edition of ESPN Magazine, Seth Wickersham interviews Queen’s Brian May.

May woke up with the stomp-stomp-clap beat rolling around in his head. To accompany that big rhythym, he sat down and wrote depressing lyrics that described, as he says now, “the futility of man.”

One of the most famous songs ever, the sports anthem of our generation, took all of ten minutes to compose.

I love Wickersham’s closer:

We’re the ones who need the power of music to form a community because, let’s face it, our games aren’t enough anymore. We’re constantly tweeting or texting or checking our fantasy teams or staring at the shiny new stadiums that distract from the action.

There’s an online wager going now to wether or not a member of The Who will smash a guitar during the halftime show? I give that 10:1 odds. It’s pretty much Townsend™ brought to you by Bridgestone.