UK-based, globally acclaimed artist-designer Es Devlin designed the set for the Super Bowl LVI Halftime Show on Sunday, February 13, 2022 at SoFi Stadium in Los Angeles, with a quintet of stars comprising Dr. Dre, Snoop Dogg, Eminem, Kendrick Lamar, and Mary J. Blige. In the role of Dr. Dre's halftime show creative director Devlin honed in on Dr. Dre's hometown of Compton, CA to create 'The Neighborhood,' with local landmarks and a map of the town on the field.
"During our first zoom meeting, we showed Dre a number of projects as examples of directions we could chose to take for the half time show. Both Dre and Jimmy Iovine were drawn more to the studio’s art installation works than the shows. Dre has just had his portrait painted by Kehinde Wiley for the ‘Artists Inspired by Music: Interscope Reimagined” exhibition at LACMA and he was interested in approaching the Super Bowl project as narrative art installation as well as celebratory performance. We knew the halftime would be taking place in daylight - which might suit sculpture or parade more than light show," explains Devlin.
"The installation Dre was drawn to in the first meeting is a 2017 art work called Memory Palace - a re-imagined model city map of the world at Pitzhanger Gallery in Ealing, London, which plots the location of 73 millennia of significant shifts in human perspective. Dre was immediately interested in the idea of ‘placeness’. He sensed that Compton would be another protagonist in the work and that we could etch a map of Compton on the global Super Bowl stage," Devlin notes.
"The stadium floor cloth is printed from high resolution aerial photographs of Compton, supplied by Google Earth , with more detailed photographs taken by a local helicopter pilot," says Devlin. "We cast each of the buildings as characters in the narrative. The buildings are placed within the map along Rosecrans Avenue—although we have used artistic license by introducing a replica of the Audio Achievements Recording Studio at 1327 Cabrillo Avenue in Torrance, which featured in the 1988 movie Straight Outta Compton. The gut wrenching scene of Dre and the other N.W.A band members’ humiliation under the foot of a police officer outside this studio building motivated much of the music they went on to make inside.
"Anyone who has watched Straight Outta Compton or listened to the Kendrick Story, starts to understand what it took for these artists to survive the streets of Compton in the 80s, 90s and 2000s. Music was their refuge and the recording studio was the place where painful experience could be forged into music, poetry and a future. The recording studio is Dre’s link and meeting point with all the other artists. Much of the lived experience which informs the music heard during the show has passed through Dre’s desk and hands," Devlin points out.
Below, Devlin describes some of her influences for the set, which featured Compton landmarks:
"The Martin Luther King Memorial —seen at the south end of the stadium ‘street’—was built in 1977—conceived by trail blazing architect Harold Williams - (the only black student on his Ohio architecture course and in 1958 only the 9th African American architect to be licensed in California), in collaboration with Canadian sculptor Gerald Gladstone who was trained at the Royal College of Art under British sculptor Henry Moore. The planes of the memorial emulate the form of a mountain to reflect King’s statement that he had "been to the mountaintop." A quote from Martin Luther King is inscribed at the site: “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”
Tam’s Burger #21 at 1904 West Rosecrans Avenue is cited in Kendrick Lamar’s song ‘Element,’
‘I be hangin' out at Tam's, I be on Stockton
I don't do it for the 'Gram, I do it for Compton’
And he filmed his Reebok commercial standing on Tam’s roof. Another incidence of pain being crafted into art: the Pulitzer Prize winning poet / rapper recalls witnessing his second murder at Tam’s Burger when he was 8 years old: “Eight years old, walking home from McNair Elementary. Dude was in the drive-thru ordering his food, and homey ran up, boom boom—smoked him.”
The lowrider originated in the postwar 40s and 50s —Mexican-American war veterans, using engineering skills from their war years, adapted their cars to differentiate them from the ‘hot rod’ classic cars modified for speed. The low riders were weighted and adjusted to cruise at very slow speeds - ‘low and slow ‘ was their motto. Aztec figures and Mexican flags decorated the cars and they became the centre of social and community events as well as a cultural and political statement. A law banned the driving of such modified low riders in 1958, and in 1959 a customiser called Ron Aguirre developed a way of bypassing the law with the use of hydraulic Pesco pumps and valves that allowed him to change ride height at the flick of a switch.
Lowriders are a central part of Compton culture—the weekly Sunday Funday that until recently took place at Rosecrans Avenue and Compton Boulevard was a community celebration, families out with grandchildren and grandparents ordering from local foodtrucks, drivers showing off the rainbow parade of switching, dancing vehicles that they pour their life and soul into painting and adapting: as one OG rider was quoted as saying: “no matter what was going on in the streets the other six days of the week, for some reason on ‘Sunday Funday,' all of that was put aside. We just ride.” The show aims to achieve this cohesive celebratory West Side Story’spirit during California Love.
The Compton Courthouse—including its jail - also designed by Harold Williams - is the tallest building in Compton , visible for miles, Compton’s only skyscraper . It features in Straight Outta Compton as the place where Compton rapper Eazy E bails the young Dr Dre out of jail.
In the halftime show Detroit poet and rapper Eminem starts his performance of ‘Forgot about Dre’ hidden within the courthouse /jail as Dre listens from his recording studio. Eminem busts out of the building, sending pieces of it flying and makes his way over the the recording studio to join Dre and Anderson Paak and the rest of the band to perform his 2002 track Lose Yourself - the first hip hop track to win an Academy Award for best soundtrack as a cast of Compton school kids leap to their feet and flood the field. (The field cast are all drawn from local Compton and South LA dance and performance groups).
Both the MLK memorial and the Compton Courthouse feature on most murals illustrating Compton landmarks. The other defining feature in these murals is often a Compton Cowboy.
If you look closely at Snoop Dogg walking walking past the dancing waitresses in Tam’s Burger during the Next Episode segment of the halftime show you will see a Compton Cowboy proudly riding their horse past the window. The Compton Cowboys’ motto is “the streets raised us, the horses saved us”. They have been riding horses in the agricultural Richland farms area of Compton since the 1980s - often riding bareback - and finding the connection to the animals a positive influence on the youth within the community. There is a rich tradition of African American cowboys that they say is currently vastly under-represented : in the 19th century one in four cowboys were of African American descent and it’s the Compton Cowboys’ mission to forge their way into the rodeo competition circuit and increase representation of equestrians of African American heritage.
Through the window of the barbershop building a lowrider Chevrolet Impala switches up and down, and the lowriders parked on the printed streets get danced on by performers articulating the intricate footwork of the C-walk dance at the end of the show to Dre’s famous piano chord introduction to Still D.R.E.
Snoop Dogg starts the performance of Next Episode on the roof of a Compton house based on his and Dre’s 1992 Nuthin’ But a G Thang video. He makes his way downstairs through the living room whose walls feature his family photos. Throughout the show the occupants of the house evolve - first the band, then joined by Mary J Blige and 50 Cent sitting on the sofa.
Eve After Dark, 12823 S Avalon Boulevard, the center of the this composite Compton Street, was a club which opened in 1979. It was able to stay open til 5am - being within the unincorporated area of LA County - and therefore outside the rules of LA city. As recounted in Straight Outta Compton, Andre ‘Dr. Dre’ Young would spin records here for the local legendary World Class Wreckin’ Cru’ and the club had a backroom studio with an old four track desk on which Dre recorded Eazy E rapping N.W.A’s ’Boyz-N-the-Hood’ - arguably the first ‘reality rap’ track. It’s been described as "an anthem for the fatherless, brotherless, state-assaulted, heavily armed West Coast urban youth”, with lyrics that narrated a day in the life in this place at this time.
The New Yorkers take over as the camera leads us down to 50 Cent in the club–his entrance is a quotation of the video to his Dre co-authored 2003 No 1 hit ‘In Da Club’. By the time the camera leads us back up to the roof the entire west coast street has been taken over by Mary J Blige - often referred to as ‘the queen of hip hop soul’ and her rooftop dancers. One of the most moving moments in the show is arguably Mary J’s performance of No More Drama: You get the sense that all of the performers —many of them Compton residents - would join Mary J in her plea for ‘no more pain’:
“No more pain..
No more game..
No more drama..
No more tears..
No more fears..
Wanna speak my mind”
And many may feel the same exasperation that she manifests by falling to the ground at the end of her performance. The familiar LA sound of a helicopter overhead leads us from fallen Mary J to an army of men bent low in a grid of cardboard boxes. Cardboard architecture on the street is an apt evocation of LA in 2022…however the tone here is also celebratory as these boxes are branded, along with their inhabitants costume sashes: ‘DRE DAY”: here Kendrick Lamar is a contemporary artist paying tribute to the generation that precedes him.
The details of the buildings are unified by their tone: bone colored / shades of stone pale grey– like neon-lit museum pieces—to be remembered as a series of forms and frames for the human story within them."
Super Bowl LVI Halftime Show: Es Devlin Scores Big, Part Two.
Live Design's coverage of this year's Super Bowl LVI Halftime Show is sponsored by All Access.