Dr. Dre leads giant win for 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 famously 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, Eminem and Kendrick Lamar for a nearly 14-minute spectacle that included some of the biggest rap hits of the last 30 years. On Twitter, Questlove — the Roots drummer and director of the Oscar-nominated documentary “Summer of Soul” — called it “the most beautifulest blackest s— ever,” adding that the show was “the antidote for ALL the ‘Up With People’ness endured in the last 5 decades.” Public Enemy’s Chuck D tweeted that the performance was the best halftime show since Prince in 2007. To end the Super Bowl LVI show, the six hip-hop heavyweights convened at SoFi’s 50-yard line for a swaggering run through “Still D.R.E”; in contrast with Lamar earlier, Dre — who with his group N.W.A released “F— Tha Police” in the late ’80s — here preserved the song’s line in which he says he’s “still not loving police.” In SoFi’s parking lot before the game, 29-year-old Jason Gleeten, a lifelong Inglewood resident, said, “This is such a moment for Inglewood,” adding that, gentrification be damned, he wouldn’t sell his house for a million dollars. “As a woman, it was like, ‘Girl, hell yeah!’ Not just for women but this music represents our childhood in so many ways.” This year’s show was the third halftime — after the duo of Shakira and Jennifer Lopez in 2020 and the Weeknd last year — overseen by Jay-Z’s Roc Nation company.