“This is the worst idea in the world.”
So when Jennifer premiered her forthcoming Netflix documentary Halftime at the Tribeca Film Festival yesterday, audiences were surprised to find out she wasn’t too happy about sharing her time on the stage.
“We have six fucking minutes,” Jennifer told her music director, Kim Burse, in the doc. “We have 30 seconds of a song, and if we take a minute, that’s it, we’ve got five left. But there’s got to be certain songs that we sing, though. We have to have our singing moments.”
“It’s not going to be a dance fucking revue. We have to sing our message. This is the worst idea in the world to have two people do the Super Bowl. It was the worst idea in the world.”
For reference, solo performers typically receive anywhere between 12–16 minutes for their performances. In comparison, Prince put on a show for roughly 12 minutes, while Beyoncé hit the stage for 13 minutes.
The documentary also showed Jennifer having a preliminary conversation with the “Hips Don’t Lie” singer, discussing how they’d split their time. “They said 12 minutes. I got kind of a good confirmation that we could have an extra minute or two, so now we’re at, like, 13, 14 minutes. I think, Shakira, what we should have is you should have half the time and I should [have half].”
“If it was going to be a double-headliner, they should have given us 20 minutes,” Jennifer added. “That’s what they should’ve fucking done.”
She wasn’t the only one to voice her frustration about the NFL’s decision to hire two headliners during one time slot. Jennifer’s longtime manager, Benny Medina, also spoke out in the documentary, calling it “an insult.”
“Typically, you have one headliner at a Super Bowl,” Benny said. “That headliner constructs a show, and, should they choose to have other guests, that’s their choice. It was an insult to say you needed two Latinas to do the job that one artist historically has done.”
And just so there’s no unnecessary drama started, Jennifer’s irritation seems to be directed more at the NFL for not giving her enough time to put on the show she envisioned, rather than at Shakira for having to share the stage with her.
To learn more about Jennifer and everything that went into her epic Super Bowl performance, check out Halftime when it debuts on Netflix on June 14.
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