Page 21 - Florida Sentinel 2-18-22

Sports
Dr. Dre Leads Giant Win For
BEAUTY UNLIMITED
SAMANTHA
This week, it’s Samantha’s turn to be our Beauty Unlimited fea- ture, and we welcome her with enthusiasm and open arms. Saman- tha is a very confident young lady who is very much in touch with herself and those around her. she’s definitely not afraid of working hard, making the sacrifices, and just doing what needs to be done to get to where she wants to be. Congratulations to Samantha as this week’s Beauty Unlimited feature.
Hip-Hop In Electrifying, Ambitious
Super Bowl Halftime Show
Hip-hop finally came to the Super Bowl on Sunday when Dr. Dre led a team of his closest collaborators in a festive, funky, thoroughly trunk-rattling halftime show.
Decades into the genre’s domination of pop music — but not too soon for the fa- mously conservative National Football League — Dre took over the field at Inglewood’s SoFi Stadium, close to where the Grammy-winning rapper and producer grew up in Compton, alongside Snoop Dogg, Mary J. Blige, Em- inem and Kendrick Lamar for a nearly 14- minute spectacle that in- cluded some of the biggest rap hits of the last 30 years. 50 Cent, who hadn’t been announced in advance, also showed up to do his indelible “In Da Club,” which Dre co- produced.
The show, which came midway through the Los An- geles Rams’ hometown vic- tory over the Cincinnati Bengals, was a proud celebra- tion of Black L.A. from the get-go, playing out on a set done up with architectural replicas of Tam’s Burgers, Dale’s Donuts and the Comp- ton courthouse.
Dre and Snoop opened the production with “The Next Episode,” Dre dressed in all black and Snoop in Rams blue, then segued into “California Love,” 2Pac’s mid-’90s Dre-produced smash that shouts out Watts, Compton and Inglewood. On the field, dancers twirled be- tween lowriders shimmering in sparkling colors.
For “In Da Club,” 50 Cent started out hanging up- side down before descending into a mock nightclub popu- lated by gyrating women.
Blige was up next, singing the low-slung “Family Affair” — another Dre-helmed hit — and “No More Drama,” which she finished in a flourish of growly R&B vocals that had to have been among the rawest, most impassioned in Super Bowl history.
Lamar, widely regarded as the chief inheritor of the West Coast hip-hop tradition that Dre pioneered, ap-
Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg perform during halftime in Super Bowl LVI.
Kendrick Lamar performs during Super Bowl LVI.
pended a bit of his “good kid” to “Alright,” his unofficial Black Lives Matter anthem, which he performed amid a phalanx of dancers in quasi- military formation. The per- formance was sober and electrifying, though Lamar tweaked a line about how “po- po wanna kill us dead in the street for sure” to remove the explicit reference to police — a possible concession to the NFL, widely known to have kept a close eye on halftime
performers.
For Eminem’s portion
of the quick-moving show, he rapped a few lines from “For- got About Dre” before mov- ing into “Lose Yourself,” his Oscar-winning rely-on-your- self jam, for which he was backed by a live band that in- cluded Anderson .Paak on drums. Eminem finished his set by taking a knee, nod- ding to Colin Kaepernick’s much-discussed NFL protest from a few years ago.
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