Numbers on the Board (September 2024)
“Numbers on the Board” is a monthly column inspired by Walt Hickey’s Numlock News, adapting that format for the music business. A dive into the numbers headlining and defining stories of interest.
14 - The number of different rappers who’ve played Super Bowl
When 2024 began, Kendrick Lamar would have seemed a longshot to headline the 2025 Super Bowl halftime show.
While Lamar is one of the most critically decorated, commercially successful rappers ever, he has often chosen the path of greater resistance in comparison to peers like Future, J. Cole, Travis Scott, and Drake (to say nothing of Kanye West, his only true analog from a critical standpoint, but whose creative and personal choices often confound).
On the heels of Lamar’s platinum-selling, hit-spawning, critical darling major label debut good kid, M.A.A.D city, he defied expectation with the densely constructed To Pimp A Butterfly, as much a masterpiece as a question mark. TPAB’s greatest commercial success is “Alright,” a mid-album song that evolved into a rallying cry for the Black Lives Matter movement in the middle of the last decade, outliving the rest of the album in the public imagination.
Lamar re-asserted his singular critical and commercial appeal with 2017’s DAMN., a thematically weighty album anchored by the biggest hits of his career to date. DAMN. famously earned Lamar the first (and only) Pulitzer Prize won by any rapper. It is the album where he assumed the mantle—the chosen poet who could also pack a dance floor. Regardless of his numerous, well-articulated protestations against being some sort of rap messiah, DAMN. seemed to rebut even its own author for a time. 2018 served a victory lap in the form of the Black Panther soundtrack, a full length set of songs Lamar executive produced and featured on heavily. It became nearly as big a sensation as the film itself, spawning three massive hits.
Four years later, Lamar returned with Mr. Morale and the Big Steppers, a double album rooted in Lamar’s self-discovery through therapy, a 73 minute exorcism with little unity in terms of sound or lyrical themes. In the run up to Morale and wake that followed, Lamar delivered scattered singles with his cousin and frequent collaborator Baby Keem, songs like “Family Ties” and “The Hillbillies” (itself the name of their informal group). These songs alongside Morale suggested Lamar’s exhaustion with the perception projected onto him and, in part, shaped by his output, a rejection of the titles “voice of a generation,” “the chosen one,” “the best rapper alive.”
And then came “Like That.”
Six songs into Metro Boomin and Future’s March 2024 album We Don’t Trust You, “Like That” feints with a prototypically languorous opening verse from Future, setting absolutely no expectation for the Kendrick feature that ripped open a long festering beef with Drake.
Weeks later, the salacious back and forth between Lamar and Drake built to perhaps the singular commercial crescendo of Lamar’s career: “Not Like Us.”
When Lamar posted a YouTube video of him leading a football drill in front of a massive American flag to announce himself as the Super Bowl LIX headliner, it felt simultaneously stunning and inevitable. The final act in a play that began with “Like That” (Or did it begin with “Buried Alive Interlude?” Or with “Control?”).
On the one hand, we simply don’t have a surplus of mathematically sound superstars to fill this particular spot. Jon Caramanica and Joe Coscarelli surveyed the landscape of theoretical Super Bowl headliners on a June episode of Popcast about the diffuse landscape of modern stars. They smartly appraise pop music and media at present as too decentralized and distracted to produce multiple obvious choices to fill America’s prime performance slot.
On the other hand, you can say whatever you want about Shaboozey’s “A Bar Song” or Sabrina Carpenter’s “Espresso” (and “Please Please Please”) or Chappell Roan’s “Good Luck, Babe!,” but starting one weekend in May, Kendrick Lamar dominated the summer. He generated headlines. He sparked rumors. He played a raucous, sold out, rapidly assembled Juneteenth arena show at Los Angeles’ Forum. He made a song rank with accusations of pedophilia into a global hit. He vanquished the most popular rapper ever. Even if only for a moment. Even if only in fans’ minds. Even if none of this drama means anything and we’re all going to be happy the next time “One Dance” comes on at a party.
For that and for his years of undeniable greatness, Lamar becomes only the 14th rapper ever to play the Super Bowl, and only the fourth to headline it (though we’ll unpack these numbers below).
To put this achievement in perspective, consider the evolution of the Super Bowl halftime show.
There have been 58 Super Bowls, with 2025’s marking the 59th. The first nine featured college marching bands as half time performers.
Super Bowl 10 (1976) was the first Super Bowl to feature a non-marching band, with conservative youth group Up With People taking the reins.
Super Bowl 25 (1991) inaugurated the modern Super Bowl halftime show, featuring a performance from seminal boy band New Kids on the Block. Since that performance, the Super Bowl halftime show has existed in constant existential flux, attempting to scintillate with stars of the moment, honor legends who still matter, and, above all, avoid being the lowlight of the game by Monday morning.
Since 1991, eight Super Bowls have featured rappers as headline or guest performers (with some notable question marks):
Super Bowl XXXII (1998): Queen Latifah, special guest
Super Bowl XXXV (2001): Nelly, special guest
Super Bowl XXXVIII (2004): Nelly, Diddy, split headliners (alongside Janet Jackson, Kid Rock, Justin Timberlake, and Jessica Simpson)
Super Bowl XLV (2011): Black Eyed Peas, headliner (and only notionally a rap group, but we will let this slide for the purposes of this exercise and for anyone who owned physical copies of their first two albums, as this writer did)
Super Bowl LII (2019): Travis Scott, Big Boi, special guests
Super Bowl LIV (2020): Bad Bunny, special guest (regardless of what language he performs in, the man raps)
Super Bowl LVI (2022): Dr. Dre, headliner; Snoop Dogg, Eminem, Kendrick Lamar, special guests
Super Bowl LVIII (2024): Jermaine Dupri, Lil Jon, Ludacris, special guests
When Kendrick Lamar takes the stage on February ninth, Super Bowl LIX will become the ninth Super Bowl to feature a rapper at its core, to say nothing of whichever guests (if any) he brings out. It is worth noting, as many have, that Jay Z’s Roc Nation partnered with the NFL in 2019 and has worked to “modernize” the Super Bowl halftime show further for the first time since Up With People’s moral mission gave way to the gods of popular consumption.
A closer look at the stats for rappers since 1991:
Number of Rapper Headliners: 4 (5 if you count the Black Eyed Peas as rappers)
Number of Rappers billed as “special guests”: 8 (if you include Bad Bunny, which you should)
Number of Rappers who’ve played the Super Bowl twice: 2, Kendrick Lamar and Nelly
Number of Rappers booked for Super Bowl halftime show since Roc Nation partnership: 10 (11 if you count Lamar twice)
Number of Rappers to play the Super Bowl halftime show ever: 14 (16 if you count Nelly and Lamar twice each)
A final thought here. When Beyonce played the Super Bowl in 2016, she preceded it by releasing her confrontational, spectacular single “Formation.” Surrounding her performance, she was labeled anti-police, accused of far greater political acidity than almost any other artist worth nine figures. Lamar is a deeply political artist, one who has used numerous national television stages to express his message, to say nothing of his albums (DAMN’s Geraldo Rivera-sampling intro, the aforementioned “Alright,” gkMc anchor “Sing About Me, I’m Dying of Thirst”) and album covers (TPAB’s beatdown on the White House lawn), some of the most bluntly political hip-hop of the last decade.
The NFL is a league that famously ran Black quarterback Colin Kaepernick out of its ranks for kneeling during the national anthem to protest police brutality. NFL teams, owners, and ranking executives exhibit numerous behaviors that suggest a smoldering plantation mentality.
Lamar’s selection begs the question: Has anyone in the league office listened to “Alright,” or will they be hearing it for the first time on February ninth?
20% - percentage of failing hard drives that back up the music of the entire music industry
In 2019, I pondered what the industry might have looked like if it embraced a certain segment of music pirates as an archival force. This particular flavor of question pops up now and again when a beloved blog dies or a massive repository like DatPiff.com, home of many beloved hip-hop mixtapes that never saw commercial release, gets consigned to the Internet Archive.
According to a story in Wired (originally from Ars Technica), 20% of the hard drives that back up the music industry are failing, unreadable and irretrievable. Worse yet, this issue was largely avoidable and threatens to worsen. Per Wired:
“Knowing that hard drives will eventually fail is nothing new. Ars [Technica] wrote about the five stages of hard drive death, including denial, back in 2005. Last year, backup company Backblaze shared failure data on specific drives, showing that drives that fail tend to fail within three years, that no drive was totally exempt, and that time does, generally, wear down all drives. Google's server drive data showed in 2007 that HDD failure was mostly unpredictable, and that temperatures were not really the deciding factor.”
Who knows what is lost?
Master recordings and digitized sheet music, no doubt, but what else? Cover art? Contracts? Metadata? How deep will the rabbit hole go by the time the last failing hard drive can no longer be switched on?
Questions of the profound lack of imagination for different forms of archivism will soon dead end in one, simple and blunt: How did we get here? How did we lose so much of the music that shaped us, our society, our creative output, our stars? Did we really think that digital means were more permanent than analog ones?
The likely answers, as ever, will be that hubris, laziness, and expediency led to half measures and imperfect solutions, depriving future generations of richer histories.
50% by 2030 - Live Nation’s target emission decrease
My first internship out of college was as a location scout for a film called Gods Behaving Badly that never saw official release. A mid-budget ($~30m) comedy, I was surprised and delighted when I arrived at my first day of work to find that the production had a green consultant. She brought bins for trash, recycling, and composting to every filming location, educated everyone from stars to surly teamsters as to what should go into which bin, and generally attempted to instill consciousness in the wasteful beast that is a set.
A large-scale music festival is like a film set on steroids, beer, adderall, and probably ketamine, depending on the featured genres. By the end of whatever unlucky weekend hosts it, the festival grounds have been violently trodden and churned with trash. Images of the catastrophic Woodstock ’99 spring to mind, a nightmare fondue of mud, feces, plastic, and fire. While we have larger environmental issues at hand than simply curbing festival waste, music is a phenomenally wasteful industry from top to bottom—recording studios, live shows, festivals, press junkets, or really any number of places that can consume power and play host to plastic trash.
Vaguely heartening news, then, that America’s largest promoter Live Nation is attempting to cut emissions by 50% by 2030. This goal takes root against the backdrop of popular festivals such as Lollapalooza turning to battery power for key electrical needs; from Billboard:
“Last month, the Lollapalooza 2024 mainstage was powered entirely by batteries, which kept the lights, sound and other power components on during performances by Chappell Roan, Megan Thee Stallion, SZA, The Killers and more. A rep for Lollapalooza tells Billboard that with this effort, the festival saw a 67% reduction in both fuel use and greenhouse gas emissions over prior years, when batteries had not been used. This equates to the sparing of 26 metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions, or the equivalent to five homes’ electricity use for a year. The use of batteries also saved over 3,000 gallons of fuel. Lollapalooza says this initiative made it the first major U.S. festival to power its mainstage on a hybrid battery system.”
Efforts like those at Lolla are surely late in coming, but they are buoyed by the increasing quality and decreasing cost of more eco-friendly technologies. Conventional diesel generators are still about five times cheaper than lithium batteries, “batteries are rechargeable and built to work for a decade or longer, so buyers can spread the cost out over time,” Greg Landa (CEO of CES Power, the industry leader in mobile power for festivals) told Billboard.
If festivals can align mission with profitability and not lose performance, there could be a snowball effect in adoption. Climate change is one “political” cause artists seldom fear speaking up about, so it would be prudent business for promoters to move in sync with many of the performers who fill their stages.
This sort of decision-making hopefully represents a broader shift in the industry that sees non-profit organizations like REVERB (and its Billie Eilish-backed decarbonization project) and for-profit companies like Good Neighbor Music (an alternative vinyl company that uses entirely recycled, non-toxic materials for production; I am, admittedly, an advisor, in largest part because I believe in its mission) uniting economic imperatives with necessary environmental action.
400,000 - voter registrations driven by Taylor Swift
I think often of the words of Nina Simone when weighing responsibility of artists in fraught social and political moments (so, perhaps, all moments):
“An artist's duty as far as I'm concerned is to reflect the times. I think that is true of painters, sculptors, poets, musicians. As far as I'm concerned it's their choice. But I choose to reflect the times and situations in which I find myself. That to me is my duty. And at this crucial time in our lives when everything is so desperate, when every day is a matter of survival, I don't think you can help but be involved.”
Somewhere in the last few decades—during America’s dumbing down, its move away from presence of public intellectuals like James Baldwin, Susan Sontag, Norman Mailer, Noam Chomsky (to name but a few), its governmentally sanctioned gutting of public education that left many kids bereft of music, literature, sciences, and arts—we drifted from the idea that artists should be mouthpieces for social change. We live now in the fading ebb of reverence for the politically charged art of the late sixties and early 70s. (There is much more to say on this subject, about both the changing landscape of the world and of entertainment media, but I think it can be most grimly summarized by Zadie Smith’s 2020 line from essay collection Intimations: “The people sometimes demand change, they rarely demand art.”)
Taylor Swift’s endorsement of Kamala Harris and Tim Walz will not likely cause onlookers to confuse her for a star activist like, say, Muhammad Ali, who lost prime years of his career as a consequence of his conscientious objection to the Vietnam War. It also does not suddenly make most of her art overtly political or socially minded. It does mark an unusually firm stance from pop music’s most carefully considered billionaire, and perhaps points to the evolution of an artist whose politics were once inscrutable and who now more openly speaks up for causes she believes in (such as LGBTQ+ rights).
Swift’s outspokenness drove 400,000 people in a day to register to vote, likely many more in the long tail of her debate night Instagram post and the chatter around her endorsement. While we have been conditioned to see politics as impolite business for commercialized pop stars, it seems artists like Swift and Beyonce (who has lent her music to the Harris / Walz ticket without explicitly endorsing the Vice President) understand their fan bases to be entrenched enough to weather any politically-driven storms. Perhaps they also understand their artistic legacies as larger than the pure craven commercial concerns assumed of every pop star racing to join the ranks of the billionaire class. Swift’s endorsement of Harris has not affected her popularity or credibility with her audience in the slightest. While we can’t yet tell if the Swifties have the mass to move an election, one would hope that this sort of outspokenness inspires other artists of varying scales (though I recognize that, to a great degree, Swift’s unparalleled success at this stage of her nearly 18 year career insulates her from much real risk).
(Note: I am also keenly aware that the above does not take into account the numerous smaller artists who have risked lost income, lost opportunity, and derision fighting for political and social causes in the social media era, most recently in the dark shadow of the suffering inflicted on Gaza by Israel.)
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