1 month ago
9
Erik Eastland from All Access, the company responsible for fabricating the stage for Sunday’s show, was the one who found what Lamar wanted. Eastland and his team located the GNX at a mom-and-pop car lot in Riverside, California, after a thorough search and at least one near mishap.
As anyone watching the halftime show knows, it worked. Right on cue, as Lamar rapped his way through “Bodies,” the car that Eastland found and gutted popped open to reveal a small army of dancers. It highlighted just one of four stages Lamar used during the halftime show. Each performance space was shaped like a button on a PlayStation-style controller, a performance intended to portray Lamar’s life as a video game.
That concept came from Lamar himself. Rodgers says she doesn’t know if the concept has anything to do with his highly publicized beef with Drake but will say that Lamar had a vision for what he wanted his show to be, and she made it her mission to execute it. “I think the [video game theme] was symbolic, his way to reach young people,” Rodgers says. “A lot of it is showing his journey, traveling through the American dream.”
Working with artists who know exactly what they want isn’t always a given. Some come to Rodgers and her colleagues and say, “What do you got?” she says. Lamar, Free, and Carson came to the table with the idea. Rodgers and her crew at Tribe Inc., which was founded by her husband, production designer Bruce Rodgers, and has been designing the Super Bowl halftime show for nearly two decades, just needed to make it work.
Fields are very important in the NFL. Two years ago, when the Rodgerses (both of them) did the Rihanna show, they created platforms that floated above the playing area to keep Rihanna off the grass. They caught a break this year; the Superdome in New Orleans has a synthetic field, which is far more resilient than the natural turf at State Farm Stadium in Glendale, Arizona.
“I don't know if it was stolen or not, but that's the kind of nonsense that we can run into,” Eastland says, recounting the story. “I think at the end of the day, it could have been a lot harder.”
Once he got the car from a used car lot in Riverside, he still had to gut it—something even he admits was “sacrilegious.” But, Eastland argues, the people who appreciate Lamar’s music and his passion for the GNX were “going to need to see the car and not a cheap imposter” during Sunday’s halftime show.
Still, I have to ask, could the car be put back together again? Sadly, no. It could go on tour with Lamar, Eastland says, but its days as a street-legal vehicle are over. Eastland says he’s lucky he bought the GNX before its appearance in the halftime show drives up its value on the used market even more. “I got to believe that the price for these things is going to go way up for a while.”
Lamar, and the GNX, now go down in history.
English (US) ·