Music

On the surface, the Super Bowl halftime show by Jennifer Lopez and Shakira was a party: exultant voices, shaking hips in glittery costumes, irresistible global rhythms. They danced and belted through a quick-cutting megamix of their hits, sweetly and determinedly uniting flirtatious sexiness with sheer mastery of rhythm, melody and motion.Yet the halftime show was also a no-nonsense affirmation of Latin pride and cultural diversity in a political climate where immigrants and American Latinos have been widely demonized. The explosive final segment began with Lopez’s daughter, Emme Maribel Muñiz, and a choir of children — some of them in lighted cages — singing Lopez’s “Let’s Get Loud” and a snippet of Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the U.S.A.,” as Lopez appeared wrapped in a feathered American flag cape that reversed to a Puerto Rican flag. It looked like recognition for both Puerto Rico and for the Dreamers, undocumented immigrants who are brought to America as children.Shakira and Lopez were Latina superwomen, smiling pop conquistadoras backed by phalanxes of dancers. They sang, shimmied and thoroughly outshone the brief appearances by their guests, both reggaeton stars: Bad Bunny, from Puerto Rico, and J Balvin, from Colombia.[embedded content]Both Shakira, on her 43rd birthday, and Lopez, 50, are multicultural success stories. Lopez was born in the Bronx but has reveled in her Puerto Rican roots, recording hits in Spanish and English while also thriving as an actress and a producer. (Her film and television company is pointedly named Nuyorican Productions.) Shakira made her way from Colombia to international pop stardom, drawing on globally assorted sources — the Americas, Africa, Europe and (flaunting her Lebanese ancestry) the Middle East — for songs about passion and uplift.Both of them sing most often about romance and desire; both of them use songs and videos to insist that even with stardom, they are still just “Jenny From the Block” or a Colombian girl-next-door who dances barefoot in the street. Both are also among pop’s most savvy beat-seekers, finding and combining rhythms old and new — merengue, rumba, cumbia, samba, paseo, rock, disco, hip-house, reggaeton — to keep fans dancing now.In some ways it was a no-brainer to book two multimillion-selling Latinas for a halftime show in Miami, where the city’s population is 70 percent Hispanic. It was also a kind of truce.Lopez and Shakira performed a year after many musicians spurned the N.F.L. over its treatment of Colin Kaepernick, the quarterback for the San Francisco 49ers who protested racism by kneeling during the pregame national anthem and was not signed to a team afterward. Last year, Jay-Z’s entertainment company, Roc Nation, entered a partnership with the N.F.L., including advising on performers for the halftime show, and joined the N.F.L.’s social justice initiative, Inspire Change, which this year included a Super Bowl spot about a police shooting. Shakira is a Roc Nation client; Lopez is not. But booking them steered the halftime show away from black-and-white racial tensions and toward the joys of motion and seduction.The N.F.L.’s pregame publicity had announced that there would be more songs than in any previous halftime show — but not more time than the allotted 12 minutes. With two headliners, that meant cramming a whole career into six minutes: more like greatest hooks than greatest hits.The upside was that each segment — Shakira first, then Lopez, then together — was a kaleidoscope of rhythms, a demonstration of how much Latin (and Afro-Latin) music has contributed to American pop. The downside was that individual songs barely registered, though Shakira let herself linger over two of her best blockbusters: “Whenever, Wherever” and “Hips Don’t Lie.” She showed off the interconnections of Latin music by turning “Chantaje,” a reggaeton song, into an old-school rumba and pushing “Hips Don’t Lie” toward samba; she dared to crowd-surf without missing a cue. She also invoked Arabic and later African rhythms, unwilling to confine herself to one hemisphere.Lopez placed herself as a New Yorker from the start, arriving on a skyscraper spire to sing “Jenny From the Block” and working through strenuous dance routines and wearing skintight leather and then even less. She perched on a pole, probably to remind fans of her role in “Hustlers” (for which she was snubbed by the Oscars); she did a slide on her knees that rivaled Bruce Springsteen’s stunt in 2009; she flaunted her famous rump. Lopez leaned on the dance-club part of her catalog of hits — a reminder that disco, too, has Latin roots.And “Let’s Get Loud” — mingled with Shakira’s “Waka Waka (This Time for Africa),” some Congolese guitar and some New York mambo — reached out to a wider world and more serious concerns than a one-night party. This halftime show was euphoria with a purpose. More

Andy Gill, whose slashing, dissonant guitar playing in Gang of Four inspired waves of post-punk to come, died on Saturday in London. He was 64.The band announced his death on its website. A band spokesman said the cause was pneumonia.Gang of Four’s music was stark and bristling, yet danceable. Reimagining punk, funk and reggae with analytical rigor, the band set telegraphic lyrics and shards of guitar noise against austerely propulsive beats and syncopated silences. Its brusque, angular style would directly or indirectly influence post-punk and indie-rock bands like Red Hot Chili Peppers (who chose Mr. Gill to produce their debut album), the Jesus Lizard, Nirvana, Rage Against the Machine, Franz Ferdinand and Protomartyr. Michael Hutchence of INXS once said that Gang of Four’s music “took no prisoners,” adding, “It was art meets the devil via James Brown.”Andrew James Dalrymple Gill was born on Jan. 1, 1956, in Manchester, England. He was an art student at Leeds University when he started Gang of Four with the lead singer and main lyricist Jon King, the bassist Dave Allen and the drummer Hugo Burnham. (It was named, mockingly, after the Communist Party leaders who ruled China during its Cultural Revolution years.) He and Mr. King, friends from high school, had used travel grants to visit New York City’s burgeoning punk scene in 1976.From the beginning, Gang of Four was determined to avoid all clichés, musical and verbal. “You could tell by listening to Gang of Four music that punk had happened. But it definitely wasn’t punk music,” Mr. Gill told the online music magazine Perfect Sound Forever in a 2000 interview.“Every part of it had to be radical. It was building musical tension in a precise way,” he told The New York Times in 2005. “It would be the juxtaposition of tight, fixed patterns that were very physically energizing and relentless, which would largely be supplied by the bass and drums, and the guitar, which would sometimes completely go along with that and sometimes not. If you took one of these elements out and made it ordinary, the whole thing would lose its authenticity.”The band matched its caustic music to lyrics that confronted sociopolitical power structures as much as personal impulses. Its debut single, “Damaged Goods,” released in 1978, was an anti-romantic song about sex and consumerism; its debut album, “Entertainment!,” released the next year, included “At Home He’s a Tourist,” an anatomy of alienation, and “Not Great Men,” a ground-level theory of history. Onstage, Mr. King would often add to the band’s percussive attack by slamming pieces of scrap metal.Gang of Four made an immediate impact in British and American punk circles. Its original lineup lasted for one more album, “Solid Gold,” and Mr. Gill and Mr. King went on to work with other musicians while Gang of Four’s music began adapting some pop elements. Its 1982 album, “Songs of the Free,” included “I Love a Man in a Uniform,” its closest approach to a pop hit, with backup choruses sung by the band’s bassist at the time, Sara Lee. In Britain, the song was banned from BBC playlists as the Falkland Islands war began.Mr. Gill and Mr. King led Gang of Four on the 1983 album “Hard” before going their separate ways. Mr. Gill, who had shared production credits for Gang of Four, produced other acts, including Red Hot Chili Peppers in 1984, and released a solo EP, “Dispossession,” in 1987.He and Mr. King regrouped to lead Gang of Four for two 1990s albums, “Mall” and “Shrinkwrapped,” before another hiatus, during which Mr. Gill returned to producing, including a 1997 EP by the Jesus Lizard, the Stranglers’ album “Written in Red” (1997), Michael Hutchence’s posthumously released 1999 solo album and the Futureheads’ debut album, released in 2004.Mr. Gill, who lived in London, married Catherine Mayer, a journalist who leads the Women’s Equality Party in Britain, in 1999. She survives him, as does his brother, Martin Gill.In 2004, Gang of Four’s original lineup regrouped, touring (including a performance at the 2005 Coachella festival) and releasing new recordings — on better equipment — of songs from its first albums. The full reunion didn’t last, but Mr. Gill and Mr. King made one more album together as Gang of Four, “Content,” in 2011 before Mr. King chose to give up touring. Mr. Gill continued to lead Gang of Four, with John Sterry on lead vocals.The group released two albums, “What Happens Next” in 2015 and “Happy Now” in 2019, still making political statements, and toured until late 2019. The band wrote that Mr. Gill had been listening to mixes of an unfinished album while hospitalized.Mr. Gill’s “final tour in November,” the band wrote in its statement, “was the only way he was ever really going to bow out: with a Stratocaster around his neck, screaming with feedback and deafening the front row.” More