At Sunday’s Super Bowl, it wasn’t a “wardrobe malfunction” that got tongues wagging, but an appendage malfunction.
Madonna’s halftime show — which featured hip-hoppersNicki Minaj and M.I.A. clad in cheerleader attire and pompoms, singing along to the pop star’s new single,Give Me All Your Luvin’— was upstaged when M.I.A. (aka Maya Arulpragasam) extended her middle finger to the cameras. A record 111.3 million viewers saw the British rapper’s brief obscene gesture during the telecast, the most-watched TV program in U.S. history, according to Nielsen figures.
Oops.
NBC had a five-second video delay on the show but managed to blur M.I.A’s raised finger only after it appeared on air.
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People “flipping the bird” during football games is not rare, even on camera: In October, Green Bay Packerslinebacker A.J. Hawk was fined $10,000 for flashing his middle finger during a televised Fox game against the St. Louis Rams.
It just doesn’t usually come from the halftime entertainment.
“If you’re going to go all-in on the spectacle of performing on a halftime show in the Super Bowl, you should probably keep your middle finger down,” says Craig Marks, editor in chief of PopDust.com. “Who are you actually flipping off? It just seems out of place, and it’s not a good platform to try to be particularly rebellious.”
The Super Bowl is such a mainstream event, “things that at a typical performance would not make anybody bat an eye become the subject of a very intense focus,” says Rolling Stone contributing editor Anthony DeCurtis.
The rapper — who was one of Google’s most-searched subjects Monday — isn’t commenting on the incident, but such rude moments aren’t out of the norm for the music industry.
A shot of Johnny Cash giving the middle finger to photographer Jim Marshall during a 1969 performance at San Quentin Prison added to the Man in Black’s mystique. But when Kanye West interrupted Taylor Swift as she accepted a trophy during the 2009MTV Video Music Awards, his image wasn’t helped at all. “That made him look like a twit,” DeCurtis says.
Usually in the world of hip-hop, foul language and gestures can be a boon for artists (see: 2 Live Crew).
“She’s supposed to be controversial,” DeCurtis says. “M.I.A. is certainly not on the scale of Madonna or Nicki Minaj, and it might help (her career) now that people know who she is.”
Marks isn’t sure whether the Paper Planes singer’s errant appendage — a switch from the handgun motion she uses in the video for the new Madonna single — will help or hinder sales for her upcoming new album. (The first single was released Friday. The title? Bad Girls.)
But Chris Willman of Yahoo Music definitely sees it as a plus for M.I.A. “I don’t think she’s ever gotten this much attention before,” he says. “That’s the kind of publicity you can’t buy when you have an album coming out.
“Who would have guessed that Madonna would be an afterthought in what people are talking about after the show? Madonna might be more mad than any conservative groups.”
In the long run, the incident won’t be as infamous as Janet Jackson‘s, when the singer’s breast was exposed for about a second while performing with Justin Timberlake during the 2004 Super Bowl. The FCC fined CBS $550,000, but that was fine overturned by a federal appeals court.
“Nothing freaks out America more than nudity while the children are watching,” Marks says.
That led to a run of more “non-controversial” Super Bowl performers such as Bruce Springsteen, The Who and the Rolling Stones.
“Madonna to this day courts controversy,” DeCurtis says. “In a certain sense, if you’re asking Madonna, Nicki Minaj and M.I.A. to get up on stage, you’re getting what you asked for.”
Still, there were the next-day mea culpas. The NFL issued an apology for “the completely inappropriate gesture,” while NBC said in a statement that its delay system failed to catch the “spontaneous” middle finger in time. The Parents Television Council was not amused either, calling the gesture “a slap in the face.”
Marks suspects the gesture was more premeditated than spontaneous, seeing how M.I.A. looked directly at the camera when she did it.
“The only mystery is whether or not Madonna approved of her message, whether she knew she was going to do it, or whether she tried to stop her or not. Maybe she put her up to it, who knows?” he says.
“My instinct is that (M.I.A.) recognized the overblown ridiculousness that is the Super Bowl halftime show. (Maybe) she felt a little silly for being up there in a mock cheerleader costume cheering for Madonna and she just wanted to make her mark somehow.”
The action and the reaction, however, both seem equally juvenile to Marks. “It’s amazing that people care so much about such a small little thing, but that’s the Super Bowl for you.”
Says Willman: “Everybody’s seen a middle finger before.”
Contributing: Michael Hiestand and Elysa Gardner
