Overheard on the E train to Queens, a spirited exchange between the kind of tatted-up fairy thugs that only exist in New York. A pair of menacingly androgynous toughs with New Era fitteds and facial piercings. They were discussing the Super Bowl halftime show, which I saw in real time for the first time ever last Sunday. Funnily enough, I found myself wondering the same thing:

Why are these two unique and outspoken young artists offering their necks to the vampire queen of pop?

I admire Madonna and her finely toned thigh muscles as much as is socially obligatory for a woman in her mid-20s with gay friends, but I was really sincerely bothered by the half time show, not the least for its uncanny resemblance to another headline grabbing Madge stunt a decade or so earlier. Come on, we all remember…

Then, too, Madonna performed with two much younger ladies also at the respective tops of their game, as M.I.A and Nicki Manaj clearly are. The most striking contrast (and how no one has managed to make a #Slatepitch out of this is beyond me) is that then, it was two over-produced whitebread teen queens, whereas Sunday it was a couple of self-made hip-hop icons.

Who also happen to be women of color.

(In case you think I’m making a fuss over nothing, all the back up dancers were also women of color. The men who bore the stage out onto the field? Brown, as were the faceless legion of football players who appear in the video for ‘Give Me All Your Lovin’. Cee Lo Green and LMFAO…not to beat a dead horse or anything, but it serves the point to be exhaustive.)

 Now, there’s any number of reasons it might be this way: above all, because M.I.A. and Nicki Manaj are two of the hottest items in pop culture right now, full stop. Hot is hot is hot, and if there’s one thing we can all agree on about Madonna, it’s that she knows hot when she sees it. 

And yet it nags at me, this feeling that something more squicky, or calculated (or at least, more indicative of the zeitgeist) is bubbling under the surface here. Mainly, what is Madonna even doing there? Whatever it is, in her Herculean effort to be ‘relavent’ and ‘edgy’, Queen Esther comes off faker than Lana Del Rey with her ‘Coney Island Queen’ and ‘Pabst Blue Ribbon on ice’ (yes, these are real Lana Del Rey lyrics. You can all die in a fire). It’s like she search engine optimized cool. 

Real cool would have been Nicki and Maya duetting it up all by themselves. But that would have required one of them to their hits scrubbed of drug smuggling and ass-licking and AK-47s, and who really wants that?