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Sheila E. says Justin Timberlake reached out to her after she tweeted that Prince didn’t want to be hologrammed and says she wants “people to know there was no hologram.” (Feb. 4)
AP
Considering Sunday’s Super Bowl was hosted in Minneapolis, not paying tribute to Prince during the halftime show would’ve been sacrilege.
Prince, who died in April 2016, wasn’t just Minneapolis’ own king of pop, he also gave the Super Bowl its best-ever halftime show performance in 2007.
Yet, it’s unlikely that Prince and his deservedly-large ego would’ve been satisfied with the treatment he received: a tribute from Justin Timberlake, an artist with whom Prince had a historically fraught relationship, during a show that fell woefully short of The Purple One’s legendary 2007 set.
There’s a reason why, when rumors spread last week that a hologram version of Prince would join Timberlake on-stage, that the late singer’s fans rioted. Timberlake had a history of mocking Prince in public, from taking a dig at the 5’2’’ singer’s height at the 2007 Golden Globes to dedicating an entire verse to dissing Prince on his song Give It To Me later that year.
There was no Prince hologram on Sunday, though a projection of the late artist performing I Would Die 4 U, projected on a stories-high white sheet reminiscent of the one Prince himself posed behind during his halftime show with his legendary phallic guitar left fans unsettled.
Yet, Prince devotees can take solace in the fact that their idol’s 2007 halftime show eclipses Timberlake’s in every way.
Review: Justin Timberlake’s ‘Man of the Woods’ can’t pull off its Americana-pop fusion
More: Why Prince fans are bashing Timberlake’s Super Bowl halftime performance
Prince sang his songs during his halftime show, while Timberlake let his backing tracks and background singers do the heavy lifting, following a disastrously garbled opening in which the sound was so muffled fans could barely make out Timberlake’s lyrics.
Between Timberlake willfully ignoring his Suit and Tie vocals in favor of kicking around his mic stand, and the singer desperately reaching for his high notes at the end of Mirrors, he was doomed whether he opened his mouth or not.
Prince also knew how to balance his classic songs with some innovative risks, ripping through faithful versions of his hits (save a few added guitar solos) before debuting a blistering mashup of All Along the Watchtower and the Foo Fighters’ Best Of You. Meanwhile, Timberlake’s attempts to remix his own pop classics resulted in the lurching rock arrangements of songs like My Love and Cry Me a River, the instrumentals further jumbled by a horns section behind him. As heard in the confused Americana-RB of Man of the Woods, Timberlake’s genre experimentations didn’t just doom his new album, but also Sunday’s show.
And Prince knew how to stick his landing, ending his halftime set with one of the greatest moments in halftime show history, his breathtaking performance of Purple Rain. What would Prince have thought that Can’t Stop The Feeling, a song from the Trolls movie soundtrack, capped Timberlake’s set instead of his duet with Prince?
In a moment that went instantly viral, Timberlake ventured into the stadium stands in the song’s final moments and took a selfie with a teenager who, nonplussed, immediately looked back down at his phone, the singer still performing next to him.
Somehow, we think Prince would’ve been more proud of that kid than anything else in Timberlake’s set.
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Though congressional Republicans agreed last week to back off the contentious politics of the Affordable Care Act this year, President Trump began Monday morning by stirring the health-care policy pot anew.
In a tweet shortly after 7 a.m., the president lashed out at Democrats, saying they “are pushing for Universal HealthCare while thousands of people are marching in the UK because their U system is going broke and not working.”
The president’s broadside essentially reprised an accusation that prompted Senate Republicans to block the confirmation of President Barack Obama’s 2010 nominee to lead the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. Don Berwick, a researcher on health-care quality and efficiency, ended up serving 18 months as acting CMS administrator before resigning. His offense from the GOP perspective? An interview he had given before arriving in Washington in which he praised aspects of Britain’s National Health Service.
Yet while Trump’s theme was familiar, his tweet was inconsistent with his own messages during his campaign and after winning election. In January 2017, five days before he was sworn into office, Trump said in an interview with The Washington Post that he was finishing a health-care plan that had the goal of “insurance for everybody” — a synonym for universal coverage. The White House never produced any such plan as part of the GOP’s intense and unsuccessful efforts last year to dismantle much of the ACA.
His accusation of Democrats’ favor for universal health care was a twist on the typical conservative attack on liberals’ policy leanings. Conservatives usually go after those at the other end of the ideological spectrum because some favor a single-payer health system, as Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) advocates. Under single-payer, the government would provide all health insurance, replacing the patchwork system of employer-based health benefits, a private insurance industry and various public programs, including Medicare and Medicaid. Other Democrats favor a less far-reaching “public option,” in which more Americans would gain access to government insurance alongside the private health plans.
In contrast, universal health care simply means that everyone has insurance, regardless of whether it is public or private. It is generally not a controversial concept.
Monday morning’s tweet did, however, catch the attention of Britain’s secretary for health and social care. The secretary, Jeremy Hunt, tweeted out a defense of the British system: “NHS may have challenges but I’m proud to be from the country that invented universal coverage — where all get care no matter the size of their bank balance.”
Read more:
Trump thought the British were protesting their health service. They weren’t.
The nation’s first Medicaid work rules loom, and many fear losing health coverage
Canada’s single-payer health system: What is true? What is false?
British health care: Free for citizens, low-priced for visitors. Is that the whole story?
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