tmt play The Super Bowl Finally Embraced Rap. Is There Also Room for Country?

The Super Bowl halftime show was at a low point in 2019. Despite an unrivaled television audience, Rihanna turned down the National Football League’s invitation to perform, keeping solidarity with Colin Kaepernicktmt play, the exiled quarterback who had repeatedly knelt during the national anthem to protest racial injustice.

The pop band Maroon 5 headlined instead, underwhelming nearly 100 million television viewers. Jon Caramanica, a music critic for The New York Times, called it “an inessential performance” that was “dynamically flat” and “mushy at the edges.”

The N.F.L. was quick to respond, courting Roc Nation, the entertainment company founded by the billionaire rapper Jay-Z, in an attempt to strengthen its music and social justice initiatives. Over the past six years, Roc Nation has prioritized hip-hop and R&B, bringing rap to the Super Bowl spectacle for the first time with a celebratory 2022 performance by Snoop Dogg, Dr. Dre,peso99 casino apk Kendrick Lamar, Eminem, Mary J. Blige and 50 Cent. Sunday’s show will feature Lamar and the guest star SZA.

“The N.F.L. needed to do something to bring life to what is supposed to be their signature event, and that was accomplished,” said Jemele Hill, a writer for The Atlantic who is producing an ESPN documentary on Kaepernick with the director Spike Lee.

An overdue emphasis on hip-hop and R&B — Usher and the Weeknd have also headlined under Roc Nation — means that other genres have been sidelined. Country music is ascendant culturally but has rarely been part of the Super Bowl; halftime shows by Coldplay and Lady Gaga feel long in the past.

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Among national universities, Princeton was ranked No. 1 again, followed by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard. Stanford, which tied for third last year, fell to No. 4. U.S. News again judged Williams College the best among national liberal arts colleges. Spelman College was declared the country’s top historically Black institution.

Calls for school crackdowns have mounted with reports of cyberbullying among adolescents and studies indicating that smartphones, which offer round-the-clock distraction and social media access, have hindered academic instruction and the mental health of children.

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