the golden rappers

It was funny that the Super Bowl halftime show was actually a party for a gang of middle-aged rappers;

three concepts, Super Bowl, rap and middle age, which are not usually used in the same sentence.

Dr. Dre, Snoop Dogg and Eminem made

history by starring in the golden minute of the American music industry with a handful of friends (Mary J. Blige, Kendrick Lamar, Anderson .Paak and 50 Cent) and a bunch of calculated nostalgia.

In the nervous staging that usually surrounds the event, each one performed their greatest hit, suitably cleaned of offensive language.

So the surprise, not exactly musical, was provided by Eminem, who before launching into

, a song from his movie

that earned him an Oscar when he was the most famous musician in the world, knelt down as he knelt in 2016 to protest police brutality Colin Kaepernick, today converted, calculated far from the centers of power in the NFL league, into an icon of the anti-racist struggle.

For a while it seemed that Eminem's gesture was improvised, and therefore a provocation, until someone remembered that this show is rehearsed ad nauseum in the days before and that kneeling was not a surprise to anyone .

It was the first time

had held such a prominent place in Super Bowl history.

And if an alien football fan had landed this Sunday at the gleaming SoFi stadium in Inglewood to watch the Los Angeles Rams win against the Cincinatti Bengals, he would have believed that

is what comes out of the head of a man named Dr. Dre, such was the leading role that the producer had from start to finish in a show staged to its greatest glory by the company Roc Nation, owned by another colleague, fellow rapper and businessman Jay-Z.

Halftime was opened by Dre sitting at the controls of his producer console.

On the roof of one of the four white single-family homes that formed the stage, a risky design that invited one to think of the dollhouse that Kanye West could have given Kim Kardashian when they were still celebrating Valentine's Day, Californian rap legend Snoop waited Dogg, dressed in a tracksuit (simple, but elegant, as Martirio would say).

He had that look of his always being just as comfortable.

Whether on the couch in his mansion or in front of an audience of 90 million viewers.

Together they performed their

(2000), whose lyrics read: "You know the West Coast is back, dickhead?"

And if there were any assholes left who didn't know about it, it was clear then.

Dre used the phenomenal platform he was given to pay homage to the funk-inspired rap

to be more fair to the master George Clinton) with which Dre, Dogg or Tupac Shakur conquered the world between the end of the eighties and the mid-1980s. the nineties

In those heroic times, Dre was a founding member of the NWA gang (

), in whose ranks there were luckier guys (Ice Cube) than others (Eazy-E).

Then Dre would become one of the most relevant producers in the history of rap (thanks, among other reasons, to the debut of Snoop Dogg or his collaborations with Eminem).

After that would come his career as a successful entrepreneur with a wide portfolio of businesses, ranging from headphones to streaming services.

The youngest of the group of friends was Kendrick Lamar, who was also the only one with a Pulitzer for musical composition (he won it in 2018, for his album

Lamar shares Dre's place of origin, the troubled neighborhood of Compton, in Los Angeles, and something else: he is also a member of the Aftermath label, owned by Dre.

NWA's creative pinnacle is an album titled

.

It was onerous to watch 50 Cent perform his early hit

at 46 years of hard work .

And it was interesting to see that the soul singer Mary J. Blige's classic

has improved with time and the experiences gained from life by its interpreter.

In the end, everyone gathered on stage to perform

Seeing them move as if in slow motion while the rest of the dancers gave a new meaning to the term anarchy, it was inevitable to think that

, a musical style that emerged in the mid-seventies that lived its golden age more or less 30 years ago, was born from youthful rage.

And that, as happened with rock stars, this is the generation with which their fans will learn that one is not young forever.

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