MO TOWN….I don’t have much interest in this year’s Super Bowl (being mostly a basketball and college football girl), but I have been curious to see how my (kind-of) hometown Detroit handles hosting duties. A few years ago, it seemed like the incentive of hosting both the MLB All-Star game and the Super Bowl within the same year would be enough to get the city (and perhaps the state) to embark on an Extreme Makeover. Sadly, Detroit has mostly dropped the ball, opting for short-term cosmetic changes without fixing some of the underlying problems that have made it America’s third world city.
On the plus side, after an original musical line-up that inexplicably failed to include a single Motown star, Aretha Franklin sang the national anthem and Stevie Wonder is scheduled to join the halftime show.
For more on Detroit’s missed opportunities, read this Slate piece that I wrote with a friend of mine who is an architect in Detroit.
UPDATE: Apparently Stevie Wonder sang as part of the pre-game entertainment. Meaning that the halftime show was a Motown-free performance by the showing-their-age-Rolling Stones. It boggles the mind–would a Nashville-based Super Bowl halftime show fail to showcase country musicians?
