Briefly, on Sunday night, America was united. The sports network ESPN published a map infographic – the kind we see on US election nights with states clashing red and blue, but this time, all 50 voted in the same direction. The issue? The Black Eyed Peas and their Super Bowl half-time show, a glitzy medley of sparkly costumes, Auto-Tune, and Slash riffing gamely along in a spangly hat. The verdict? Nationwide disapproval, it seemed.
As an outsider, the Super Bowl looks like pure event – a spectacular mash-up of sports and advertising and pop leading into an equally boggling festival of opinion, as social networks jam with postmatch analysis of every aspect. And loved or not, extravaganzas like the Peas' halftime show are an opportunity for pop to flaunt itself at a time when its status as a mainstream interest is called into question. A study last week suggested fewer than 3% of torrented files are music: is the stuff so valueless now that people hardly even bother stealing it?
Not quite. There are plenty of other ways to get digital music beyond torrents – YouTube, in particular, dwarfs other music access sites. And music stars still fascinate: of the top 10 public figures on Facebook, seven are musicians. Take out Michael Jackson and Bob Marley and five of them are even alive. Pop stars still make the best celebrities, even if they can't sell records in anything like the numbers they used to.
What can they sell instead? Stories. The musician who made the biggest impact on Super Bowl night was Eminem, who took the starring role in a Chrysler ad, Imported from Detroit. It's a simple ad, just Eminem driving round Detroit, ending up at a grand old theatre. The slow-build voiceover, all toughness and defiant pride, was the kind of thing speechwriters and ad men drool over. But it also drew its power from the intertwining stories it tapped. There's Chrysler's story, and Detroit's, Eminem's own, and that of his Rabbit character from 8 Mile – the ad's music kept threatening to break into his cathartic Lose Yourself. The more of the stories you knew, the more power the advert might have, and at their root they were all the same – comeback, redemption, turning flaws into glory. Enquiries about Chrysler's cars went up 1,200% after the ad.
Marketing people have a buzzword for the technique of telling a story over a variety of media: transmedia. The term started in academia, talking about the way cult sci-fi programmes and comics build up a shared universe. But it also applies very well to the way Eminem has always operated, shifting his audience's focus between real life, music, video and film – each offering a piece of the experience but none, even the music, complete in itself. Imported from Detroit fits into Eminem's story, and though its musical impact is mostly only implied, it's as true a snapshot of the state of pop as the Black Eyed Peas' overstuffed showmanship. The Peas were trying to amplify their music, Eminem was working to integrate his. The memory of Lose Yourself and the younger Eminem is the glue that holds the ad together. It makes something built to sell you cars work like a rock song or movie trailer.
Eminem is the longest-serving living performer on the Facebook "public figures" list. All the others – Rihanna, Lil Wayne, Justin Bieber and Lady Gaga – are transmedia pop stars to some degree, selling their music as part of their story, not as discrete art works. This isn't always bad – Lady Gaga in particular seems to have found a way of making sure everything she does improves everything else she does. But it allows adverts and brands to become part of that ongoing story a lot more easily, and it makes the quality of the records less important. Over the next few years, the big division in music might not just be between underground and mainstream, but between people who would prefer to ringfence music as an artform and those who are happy to let it become part of some huge transmedia stew.
