This year, for the first time ever, the FIFA World Cup final featured an eleven-minute halftime hullabaloo, co-headlined by four megastar acts: Madonna, Shakira, Justin Bieber, and BTS. The lineup—theoretically a diverse parade of talent, with two of the three host nations represented—was curated by Chris Martin, of Coldplay, a self-appointed apostle of good vibes, whose anti-poverty platform Global Citizen helped produce the event. “It’s a chance to show how amazing all different kinds of humans are,” a grinning Martin explained to Elmo in a short clip promoting the show. (One presumes that his choices had something to do with showcasing diversity, though all four artists have traded fairly heavily in Western pop tropes, and each is indebted, in ways both explicit and coded, to Black American idioms such as R. & B., dance music, and hip-hop.) The video also featured a cameo from the Muppets’ balding erstwhile critics, Statler and Waldorf, who once again spoke for all of us: “Well, that doesn’t sound half bad,” Waldorf said. “Well, it doesn’t sound half good either!” Statler responded.
The show opened with Madonna, whose fifteenth album, “Confessions II,” recently débuted at No. 1 on the Billboard 200. At sixty-seven, Madonna has not backed off her signature sound: carnal, throbbing, come-and-get-it electronica. (On “Danceteria,” a new single, she sings, “This is how we start the party / Face to face, bodies all around.”) She performed “Music,” a hit from the summer of 2000, surrounded by neon lights and roller skaters, before being carted toward the field in a “Mad Max”-style dune buggy with a license plate reading MAESTRO; the front seat was occupied by the Brazilian soccer legends Ronaldo and Ronaldinho. She wore a pink-and-lavender corset ensemble, fingerless gloves, a silver whistle, knee-high purple boots, and a pair of those sunglasses that make a person sort of resemble a wasp.
Madonna was followed by Dr. Teeth and the Electric Mayhem, a band composed of Muppets, and the New York Philharmonic with the Simón Bolívar Symphony Orchestra, of Venezuela, conducted by Gustavo Dudamel in a bespoke jersey suit; together, they thrashed through a rousing instrumental version of the White Stripes’ “Seven Nation Army.” (My favorite part was when Animal, the best puppet drummer of all time, looking sharp in a sleeveless tee, hollered, “Sing!”) Then came BTS, enviably relaxed and strutting through “Dynamite,” the group’s first song fully recorded in English. Justin Bieber, who was introduced by Jason Sudeikis, appearing as the fictional soccer coach Ted Lasso, performed “Everything Hallelujah,” an earnest song about ordinary gratitude, which was, regrettably, turned into a meme earlier this year, and used by the White House in a schlocky TikTok video. I found Bieber’s seriousness strangely endearing: a solemn acoustic ballad was not the obvious choice for an eighty-thousand-person arena, but he performed it with impressive restraint. A barefoot Shakira—heels surely would have compromised the field—was accompanied by the Nigerian singer Burna Boy; they did a joyful version of “Dai Dai,” this year’s World Cup anthem. A children’s chorus from P.S. 22, in Staten Island, sang “We Dance,” a mawkish new Coldplay song, while plumes of rainbow-colored smoke rose from the edges of the stadium. The field was covered with a tarp that read “LOVE.” Digital banners advertised something called believeinlove.org. (I found the URL vaguely chilling; it directs visitors to a site where they can enter their e-mail and receive updates from Global Citizen.)
“Music makes the people come together,” Madonna promised at the top of the show. This was, of course, the premise of the entire enterprise: that music (and, significantly, celebrity) can serve as a kind of cross-cultural panacea, bridging, or at least briefly alleviating, ideological gaps. Love—“LOVE”—as a blanket corrective for evil has been the central focus of Martin’s work with Coldplay in recent years, for better or worse. Martin seems to have pure intentions, and perhaps he’s right that we could all really use a ten-minute break from thinking about the air-quality index and traffic-stopping diarrhea. But is it true? Did it fix us? None of the individual pieces of the show were flawed in any identifiable way—it was fine, whatever, superstars operating on this level don’t really screw up—but by the end I felt sort of nuts: spiritually rattled, existentially adrift, namelessly sad. It reminded me of a mike-drop scene from “Mad Men,” in which the advertising visionary Don Draper delivers a caustic mini-monologue about the ways in which our notions of love have been corrupted by corporations: “What you call love was invented by guys like me to sell nylons,” Draper seethes.
