When the NFL announced that Super Bowl 50 will feature Coldplay as its halftime performer, the immediate follow-up question was whether the band could enlist a famous friend to join them. The answer, as we learned yesterday — and predicted when the Coldplay news first came out — is yes, and it’s Beyoncé.
Beyoncé and Bruno Mars join Coldplay for the Super Bowl 50 halftime show
Caroline Framke wrote about culture, which usually means television. Also seen @ The A.V. Club, The Atlantic, Complex, Flavorwire, NPR, the fridge to get more seltzer.
Well, and Bruno Mars, per Entertainment Tonight. But hey, let’s talk about Beyoncé.
Coldplay frontman Chris Martin has been friends with Beyoncé and Jay Z for years, through his ex-wife and America’s Coolest Mom, Gwyneth Paltrow. Before Martin and Paltrow split, the couples had been known to double date at soccer games and “contemporary eateries.” And now we know that Paltrow didn’t get all the famous friends in the divorce conscious uncoupling.
In November, Beyoncé and Coldplay released “Hymn for the Weekend,“ Martin’s take on a “club track” that quickly became something else once Beyoncé got involved. As Martin told the Wall Street Journal:
This melody came -- “drinks on me, drinks on me.” I presented it to the rest of the band and they said, “We love this song, but there’s no way you can sing ‘drinks on me.”’ So that changed into “drink from me” and the idea of having an angelic person in your life. Then that turned into asking Beyoncé to sing on it.
Behold, the magic of Beyoncé, who can turn “drink from me” from an incredibly creepy sentiment into an “angelic” one.
So for as much as we’d love to believe that Beyoncé‘s return to the Super Bowl halftime show is just an excuse to repeat her amazing 2013 set, “Hymn for the Weekend” is presumably the reason she’s joining Coldplay. But hey, if Super Bowl 50 ends with Beyoncé and Coldplay standing in front of a giant FEMINIST banner, as Beyoncé did at the 2014 VMAs, we’ll take what we can get.
Who run the world? (Beyoncé.)
