A Spectacle Too Big To Suck: Madonna's Halftime Performance in Screencaps and GIFs

Whether it's the fault of the Black Eyed Peas or a necessary mutation of the game's largesse, the Super Bowl halftime show is less a concert than a glittering spectacle of pop music celebrity. Your opinion about Madonna's age or Nicki Minaj's artifice or the infectious awfulness of LMFAO does not matter: it was crushed under the marching feet of eighty steampunk Trojans dragging the horny grandmother of pop onto a temporary stage.

This the only fact: Madonna is 53 years old. Everything else is an opinion, and therefore does not exist. For example, "Vogue" is horribly dated, and one of Madonna's worst hit songs. This is my opinion, and it was rendered moot by not-Will Ferrell performing acrobatics on a rope slung across the stage.

Madonna is 53. She looks pretty good for 53, which you may or may not agree with, because it is merely my opinion and does not matter. She is entirely too old to record a new song called "Give Me All Your Lovin'," likely too old to cartwheel around the stage, and most certainly too old to be thrusting her crotch in the face of a young man or jumping onto his shoulders. My opinion, reasonable though it may be, did not stop any of those things from happening.

One thing Madonna is the right age for: shuffling.

(NOTE: this GIF best enjoyed while listening to "Turkey in the Straw.")

Madonna is too old to be lifting entire pages from Gwen Stefani's career eight years ago, but Nicki Minaj and M.I.A. are not, and they at least brought some attitude to the song that Madonna is too old to be singing. But hey, if you're going to bring out the drum line, I can at least applaud Cee Lo Green as its rotund, be-sequined drum major. There is a line between mace and scepter, and Cee Lo blurs it: