By Tom Shales
Friday, September 5, 2003; Page C01
American bad taste is the most powerful bad taste in the world. That seems to be what was really being celebrated on the Mall last night at an excruciating 55-minute rock concert ostensibly convened to herald the new pro football season and televised live on the struggling ABC network.
The event was deemed so auspicious that George W. Bush took yet more time off from fighting the war on terrorism to appear, via videotape, at the end of the concert and just before the game, in the manner of a TV huckster. He tried to make some connection between football and "the spirit that guides the brave men and women" of the military, much as the concert had done.
He also said pro football "celebrates the values that make our country so strong." Like what, violence and greed?
Then, in intense close-up, the leader of the Free World asked the trademarked rhetorical question, "Are you ready for some football?"
Some bureaucrat whose thinking cap had blown off authorized lending the once-solemn, or at least dignified, Mall to this very raucous and very commercial event. The show was a collaboration between the NFL, apparently trying to lure younger viewers to football, and, as the announcer said, "New Pepsi Vanilla and Diet Pepsi Vanilla, the Not-So-Vanilla Vanilla."
The not-so-musical music included a performance by bouncy sex bunny Britney Spears, whose vocalizing was clearly prerecorded and badly lip-synced -- but then who knew what the heck she was singing about anyway? Spears depended heavily on elaborate pyrotechnics and on manic aerobic-erotic choreography during her two numbers; dancers hurled themselves, cartwheeled, tumbled and even crawled across the stage.
At one point, she gamboled about amid, literally, great balls of fire -- apparently forgetting that Michael Jackson's hair was once set ablaze while he was filming a Pepsi commercial.
http://italy.indymedia.org/news/2003/09/369077.php
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