The uproar over Janet Jackson’s boob falling out of her top during the Super Bowl XXXVIII Halftime Show, sponsored by MTV, has already become the biggest and most memorable moment on television for 2004, and come Dec. 31, it will likely still be fresh in people’s minds.
Why? The boob wasn’t that great looking, and it was only a flash.
It wasn’t like Justin Timberlake had jiggled it, as Motown legend Diana Ross had jiggled Lil Kim’s pastied breast at the awards podium during 1999 MTV Music Awards.
In my opinion, that incident of breast jiggling would’ve been much more worthy of the outrage displayed by the angry parents whose children were scarred for life by seeing a flash of a so-so boob.
Most of the outrage expressed in letters to the editor at papers across the country and talk radio stations have been by parents with children watching the halftime show. They claim that their children were “exposed to adult subject matter” and that the kids were permanently affected by this.
While I don’t have kids, I can only imagine how I would’ve reacted if my children saw Janet Jackson’s sub-par breast on television.
Would it have been a slow-motion dash to dive in front of the television to prevent the shocking image from searing itself in my children’s eyes, permanently requiring them to wear thick glasses for the rest of their lives?
Would I have called in to the local CBS affiliate to protest my utter fury at their lack of discretion … over which WJHL had no control?
Would I have told my preacher to ask him to mention something in next Sunday’s sermon about the lack of moral decency by the new generation of Hollywood and music industry stars?
Or would I sit down with my children and explain to them what they saw: an over-the-hill singer that desperately tried to grasp the public attention for a comeback in her music career?
Jackson wasn’t the only has-been that was on stage that night. Most of the various “artists” lip-syncing at the halftime debacle became annoying to hear on the radio years ago, like Kid Rock and Puff Daddy (sorry, I refuse to call him P. Diddy, that’s just stupid).
Some of the washed-up music stars and their songs were so old in terms of pop culture that I did a double-take to see if I was actually watching the halftime show, not VH1’s Behind the Music. The biggest surprise about the MTV’s halftime show wasn’t Jackson’s “nipplegate,” it was the fact that MTV actually chose to play music, rather than an inanely stupid reality show.
In a sense, it quickly became a reality show, with Jackson’s boob-holder-thingy being voted off first.
Officials from Google, the largest and coolest search engine around, said last week that Janet Jackson was the single most searched-for subject in internet history. In case you missed out on the Halftime Show, my single most-despised winter event next to watching the Winter Olympics, you can look for it just about anywhere on the internet and judge for yourself how truly awful or over-hyped the incident really was.
TiVo, the television program digital recording service, also stated that this year’s Super Bowl Halftime Show was the most requested in their history. How sad.
Personally, I’m holding a boycott against future Super Bowl half-time shows. Not because of the stupid “wardrobe malfunction,” as Timberlake so laughingly called it, but because I have never seen a halftime performance that was worth a damn.
I wish NBC would bring back the Saturday Night Live Halftime Show for people who get easily bored during the real halftime show.
What really bothers me is how parents can talk about a ridiculously simple attention-getting ploy when there is so much more bad stuff going on in the country that can affect their children’s future, such as President Bush’s confusion between the meanings of a billion, trillion and million dollars.
With the national debt and budget deficit approaching all-time highs, the environment going to pot and anti-Americanism spreading all over the world, parents everywhere should wake up and realize that Jackson’s fleeting breast exposure is so insignificant compared to the biggest, most offensive and dumbest boob on televisions everywhere: George W. Bush.

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