Enlarge Christopher Polk/Getty Images

Madonna (center), flanked by Nicki Minaj and M.I.A., during a performance of her new single "Give Me All Your Luvin'" during the Bridgestone Super Bowl XLVI Halftime Show in Indianapolis.

Christopher Polk/Getty Images

Madonna (center), flanked by Nicki Minaj and M.I.A., during a performance of her new single "Give Me All Your Luvin'" during the Bridgestone Super Bowl XLVI Halftime Show in Indianapolis.

At the time, it seemed far less important than it does now. A middle finger extended for just a moment during the Superbowl halftime show threatens to dismantle an empire, after provoking a day-long round of condemnation (and occasionally support) by media watchdogs and pundits. All that money spent on dancers and acrobats, all the old hits revisited, Madonna's remarkable agility on those bleachers, overshadowed by what seemed like a bit of spontaneous sass. America, you're so lightweight. Want to spend time with really rude impudence spewed on television? Check out iCarly, on Nickelodeon virtually every night..

Monkey See

Madonna At Halftime: What It Takes To Last

But of course, this is the Superbowl, where inches can win or lose the game. It's hard to not wonder if maybe M.I.A. did know what she was doing. Her action read as a little bit of chaos dust thrown into Madge's carefully programmed overstimulation machine — not a surprise from the younger provocateur, who's joked about becoming a suicide bomber and never shown restraint when it comes to profanity. A revision of the trademark gun-firing gesture M.I.A. makes at the same moment in the "Give Me All Your Luvin'" video (she also does what offended Superbowl viewers in the clip, as she licks her lips, Material Girl style), the finger makes sense as part of her ongoing attempt to topple pop hierarchies from within.

Madonna hasn't issued a statement about the incident (nor has M.I.A.), but speculation abounds about her feelings, too. There's been a lot of huffing about disrespect, and some gleeful speculation that Madge must have approved, being an old hand at pushing boundaries herself. Both of these lines of thinking present a clear relationship between the two stars: Madonna is mom, and M.I.A. is the teenage brat acting out in ways that recall her elder's own crazy youth.

Realistically, this scenario's a stretch, since M.I.A. is 36 and a mother herself. Nicki Minaj, also featured on "Give Me All Your Luvin'" and offering some concisely nasty hip thrusts of her own during the halftime show, is nearly 30, twice the age of Madge's biological daughter Lourdes. Yet it's impossible to not think of Madonna as a parental figure now. She's finally grown into her divinely maternal name, and her collaborations testify to that.

Like her peers, Prince and U2, and her elder, Bob Dylan, Madonna is the rare pop star who's kept a viable career going long past the usual sell-by date (my colleague Linda Holmes celebrates Madge's longevity on the Monkey See blog today). These artists continue to make new music, but they're also busy guiding fans toward an understanding of the impact of their long careers.

Dylan is doing it through copious archival efforts, enlisting admirers like Martin Scorsese to shout his legend when he's not recounting it himself. Prince has become the reigning master of the retrospective live set, turning his concerts into rituals of remembrance and appreciation. U2 promotes its shatterproof band identity in its own myth-making tours and through projects like the recent Davis Guggenheim documentary about the making of Achtung Baby.

Madonna, ever the feminizing force in pop, is doing what all queen dowagers do: turning the world's attention to her heirs.

This Sunday the annual Grammy Award winners will be announced. One of the biggest categories is Song of the Year, which goes to a songwriter. Every day this week, we'll give you a little intel on one of the nominees. Today, Bruno Mars' "Grenade."

The Grammys love down-the-middle pop stars who appeal across genres and generations. They also reward industry insiders, and Bruno Mars is no stranger to the business.

Last year he had a bunch of nominations, but he won only Best Male Pop Vocal Performance. The Recording Academy drastically cut back on categories this year (its stated end being the "continued competition and prestige" of the awards), and one of the changes did away with the separation of male and female performers in the pop, R&B, rock and country categories. In the past, this might have forced female artists to compete in a boys' club. But pop is now so female-dominated that this year Mars is the only guy up for Best Pop Solo Performance.

Mars wrote "Grenade" with his very successful songwriting team, the Smeezingtons, plus three more songwriters. Pop songwriting is a group effort these days.

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Randy Jackson, Ryan Seacrest, Steven Tyler and Joe Perry at the Tonight Show's studios last month.

Kevin Winter/NBCUniversal/Getty Images

Randy Jackson, Ryan Seacrest, Steven Tyler and Joe Perry at the Tonight Show's studios last month.

In the land of American Idol, Steven Tyler defines rock and roll. "But of course," you might say, "How could he not?" The Aerosmith frontman brings a top-notch rocker resume to the table, toward which he gestures with his consistent carnal leering at nubile hopefuls, his yards of gauzy scarves and leopard skin, and the intermittent unleashing of his "Dream On" scream. He's a legend; he lives it. And the crowds go wild. As viewers of this season's now blessedly concluded audition episodes know, the chance to smooch Steven Tyler is a prize almost as fine as a golden ticket to Hollywood.

Go back with me now to Idol B.T. (Before Tyler). What was rock like on the show then? Not much like what he does.

True, Aerosmith's songs make regular appearances in the annual vocal battle. Michael Johns brought his full Aussie throat to "Dream On" in season 7, and Danny Gokey eviscerated it in Season 8. Adam Lambert took a ride through "Cryin'" that same year. But the band's Idol presence is mostly defined through performances of its 1998 ballad "I Don't Want To Miss a Thing," written by the Top 40 doyenne Diane Warren and largely considered the band's least "rock" song.

Successful rockers on Idol have mostly veered toward this softer edge, where the elegantly blow-dried Jon Bon Jovi rubs shoulders with the colorfully congenial Elton John. This is rock as pop — not confrontational noise made by iconoclasts, but steroidally enhanced grand melodic gestures crafted by songwriters who could have worked at the Brill Building. Fan favorites Chris Daughtry and David Cook added earnestness to the mix, borrowed from contemporary Christian worship music and post-Pearl Jam scrunge. Adam Lambert played hard with the formula. In general, though, Idol rock is the opposite of prime Aerosmith, which is raunchy and excessive, not something your mother would like.

During this season's audition rounds, the million kisses Tyler received from hyperventilating women of all ages made clear that moms and even grandmas have thoroughly rejected the old rock-pop split that once gave Aerosmith some of its oomph. So has Tyler, who's always been game to violate new boundaries — he's the guy who helped invent rock-rap, remember? Embracing his Idol role as the King of Rock, he's not only revived his own career yet again; he's expanding (or correcting, depending on your view of what rock should be) the show's very definition of the music and lifestyle to which he's been devoted for 40-plus years.

Enlarge Courtesy of the artist

Michael Telo.

Courtesy of the artist

Michael Telo.

NFL stars have been known to break it down in the endzone — we'll undoubtedly see a few dance moves in the vicinity on Sunday. But footballers elsewhere in the world have their own routine lately, set to the unofficial anthem of that game where you do it with no hands. It's called "Ai Se Eu Te Pego (When I Catch You)," Brazilian singer Michel Telo's Euro-smash of last summer. And it's sitting tight at Number 4 on the Brazilian charts.

These days, any time a footballer scores — outside America, so far — you can bet the players will be bouncing and bromancing round the pitch to the cheery strains of Telo's tune. So far, there have been 24 reported sightings of footballers freaking out to "Ai Se Eu Te Pego" — from the Russian Football League to AC Milan and Swansea, Wales. This particular footie fetish phenomenon (it's not the first time soccer stars have choreographed their celebrations to a pop hit) dropped when Real Madrid's Cristiano Ronaldo scored the first goal against Malaga in October of last year and broke into an impromptu victory dance with teammate Marcelo Vieira; now the song even has an all-football video featuring Telo with such masters of the ball as Ronaldo, Marcelo, Reus, Robinho, Pato, Boateng and Neymar, credited as the first player to have bopped to the tune in a game.

But it's more than just Telo's supple delivery or even the super-singalong hook that has made "Ai Se Eu Te Pego" so beloved. This pop ditty flaunts its roots; maybe no surprise as it hails from Salvador, Bahia, the most African part of Brazil, famous for its drummers. Written by two Bahians, Sharon Acioly and Antônio Dyggs of Os Meninos de Seu Zeh, the song's drum patterns mirror the "Bam Bam" riddim beloved in Jamaican dancehall.

The song was quickly adopted and recorded by a series of Bahia musicians. Realizing he had a monster on his hard drive, Dyggs took the song to golden boy Michel Telo.

The significance of Don Cornelius to American culture — and to the American culture business — is told nowhere more eloquently than in one brief exchange between Cornelius and singer James Brown, a story that Cornelius himself recalls in VH-1's excellent 2010 documentary Soul Train: The Hippest Trip in America.

Enlarge Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images

Don Cornelius, circa 1973, Los Angeles.

Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images

Don Cornelius, circa 1973, Los Angeles.

It was the Godfather of Soul's first appearance on Cornelius' then-nascent syndicated TV show — designed to do for soul music and black audiences what American Bandstand had long done for pop music and mainstream audiences. Brown marveled at the professionalism of the production, the flawlessness of its execution.

He turned to Cornelius and asked, "Who's backing you on this, man?"

"It's just me, James," Cornelius answered.

Brown, nonplused, acted as if Cornelius didn't understand the question. He asked it two more times, and Cornelius answered twice again: "It's just me, James."

That the man who wrote the song "Say It Loud — I'm Black and I'm Proud" and who recorded the soundtrack to the Black Power movement could scarcely comprehend that a black man like Cornelius both owned and helmed this kind of enterprise without white patronage is a testament to the magnitude and the improbability of Cornelius' achievements.

The Record

'Soul Train' Creator Don Cornelius Dies At 75

With Soul Train, which made its debut on one Chicago TV station in 1970 and spread quickly to dozens of American markets, Cornelius created the first black-owned nationally syndicated TV franchise. As such, Cornelius was the television analogue to black record business entrepreneurs like Berry Gordy and the precursor to future black TV mogul Bob Johnson, who founded the Black Entertainment Television cable channel in 1980.

Cornelius insisted on as much black presence behind the cameras as he induced in front of them, and he was one of the first black moguls to expand his brand beyond its origins: producing records (Cornelius was the executive producer behind the bubblegum-soul group Shalamar) and, eventually, award shows.

Cornelius' cultural impact, however, went beyond the confines of black business achievement. Soul Train became a Saturday morning staple for Americans of all colors and creeds (after Cornelius stared down a ham-handed copycat attempt by American Bandstand's Dick Clark called Soul Unlimited). The "Soul Train line," a regular feature of the show, popularized new dances and grew to become a real-life American tradition at weddings, celebrations and, yes, bar mitzvahs.

Songs We Love

The Best Of 'Soul Train'

Don Cornelius proved a truism about America and race that so few people, even today, understand: Black culture, expressed in undiluted form and unapologetically, will by virtue become accepted by the American mainstream. It's something that future rap moguls like Russell Simmons and Jay-Z understood instinctively. So it's a tragic irony that Soul Train's decline came with the dawn of the hip-hop era. Even though Cornelius shared so much spiritually with hip-hop's entrepreneurs, he was not personally able to appreciate the new genre and make his franchise relevant to the hip-hop generation.

With a sonorous intonation and an ever-expanding natural hairdo, Cornelius was resplendently himself, and thus inspired much parody. But it's heartening to know that America is beginning to see the man as more than an Afro and a deep voice. Last year, the set and memorabilia of Soul Train landed at the Smithsonian's Museum of African-American History and Culture.

Cornelius' reported suicide, alas, tells us something about the nature of American success. All the man's equity, affluence and well-deserved public acclaim were not, in the end, of enough comfort to salve his private pain — a struggle with illness, a nasty divorce.

To the people who make up the community that Cornelius created, the man is nearly a saint. We can see it now: the double line of dancers forming just beyond the pearly gates, awaiting the ingress of soul's earthly impresario.

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Don Cornelius posing for a portrait in 1973 in Los Angeles.

Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images

Don Cornelius posing for a portrait in 1973 in Los Angeles.

The host and executive producer of Soul Train has died. The Los Angeles police department reported that Don Cornelius was found dead at his home in Los Angeles Wednesday morning from a self-inflicted gunshot wound.

"The hippest trip in America," as Cornelius called it, aired every Saturday morning. The TV show began as a local program in Chicago in 1970 — before Afros were on billboards and hip-hop hit the pop charts. By the end of its second season, Soul Train had been picked up across the country, moved production of the national program to Los Angeles and was well on its way to becoming the place for many Americans to see black culture.

Soul Train invited R&B and soul musicians, like Al Green, Marvin Gaye, James Brown and Aretha Franklin, to perform their hits in front of a live — dancing — audience. The performances and the stylish kids in the audience changed the way the mainstream understood what it meant to be cool.

"There were trends set all the time in terms of clothing style, dances, hair — you name it," says Richard Steele, of Chicago public radio station WBEZ, who knew Cornelius when the show debuted. "One of the things about being black in America is back in the day it was very difficult to see yourself on TV."

And it was difficult for whites, Latinos, and Asians to see blacks on TV. "You'll hear people comment about how they used to watch the show to make sure they were looking right at the party on Saturday night, and also that they knew the latest dances," says Steele.

Cornelius, born on the South Side of Chicago in 1936, owned Soul Train, making him the first black owner of a nationally syndicated TV show. Cornelius turned the show over to a younger host in 1993, and Soul Train went off the air in 2006.

Enlarge Photo by Beezer

The Wild Bunch — soon-to-be Massive Attack — at the Dug Out Club in Bristol.

Photo by Beezer

The Wild Bunch — soon-to-be Massive Attack — at the Dug Out Club in Bristol.

Sinuous and mysterious as a plume of drifting smoke, a new sort of groove wafted two decades ago from Bristol, a bohemian university town in the west of England. Though its prime movers — Massive Attack, Tricky and Portishead — all loathe the term, the word "trip-hop" has become synonymous with the style created by Bristol bands like Massive Attack and Smith & Mighty. The sensuous groove fulfilled a timeless human need for a bass-heavy sound to touch the secret recesses of the imagination and lure our dreamworld onto the dance floor. Trip-hop was tailor-made for the moment — and it happens every night — when a bopper wants to get tender. Or when domestic listeners seek to wander within themselves.

Not all local grooves take flight, but trip-hop most certainly did. Over the next two decades it was re-imagined as chill-out, downtempo, illbient and lounge music. Its subtle tendrils have woven into music round the world: Washington, D.C.'s Thievery Corporation, with their exotic cosmopolitan edge; drifty Brazilian sounds like Ceu, whose dulcet lilt earned her maximum market penetration (a Starbucks CD); London's Ninja Tunes' artists like Bonobo and Berlin's techno-tinged Sonar Kollektiv. As music writer Simon Reynolds notes, "People like Flying Lotus and Gonjasufi on the West Coast are doing trippy hip-hop. Though it's not quite the same thing, they probably are the inheritors of the spirit of Massive Attack, Tricky, Earthling and DJ Vadim."

To qualify as true trip-hop, music has to share the sense of opiated mystery of Tricky's tantalizing mumbles on the classic album, 20 years old last year, that launched trip-hop worldwide, Massive Attack's Blue Lines. Its magical "Unfinished Sympathy," cast a spell over the world's clubbers. Produced by Nellee Hooper (later of Soul II Soul and Bjork, among many others) the well-timed sound was just one manifestation of a movement taking place in Bristol at that time.

Scene initiators included Smith & Mighty and the DJ collective The Wild Bunch, from which came Massive Attack and Tricky. The Pop Group's volatile post-punk added another element to the scene, later splitting into the savage free explorations of Float Up C.P. and horn-happy Pigbag.

Bristol fed off its slave port for hundreds of years; now it's one of Britain's blackest cities, culturally and socially. It's long been home to a West Indian community, and shebeens and sound systems were a way of life for all music-loving Bristolian youth. Being a port, Bristol was always awash in hashish and other plant-based mind-benders like marijuana — not to mention more macrobiotically sound, locally-grown life-enhancers like scrumpy cider and hallucinogenic mushrooms (legal back then) grown in the surrounding countryside — that undoubtedly fuelled Bristol's music scene.

Much of this musical experimentation took place at a club called The Dug Out. As Hooper has said, "The Dug Out couldn't have had a better location, at the top of the hill from St Paul's — the heart of the black music scene — and just down the hill from Clifton and the trendy punk/art scene. It was just dangerous enough for trendies to feel edgy, music cool and edgy enough to confuse and enthuse the dreads ... perfect!"

Enlarge Nicole Nodland/Courtesy of Universal Music Group

Lana Del Rey.

Nicole Nodland/Courtesy of Universal Music Group

Lana Del Rey.

Lana Del Rey is all anybody can talk about right now — anybody, anyway, caught up in the helium machine of hype-driven pop. I spoke to All Things Considered host Audie Cornish about Del Rey's accelerated rise to the top of the buzzy musician heap and how today's hype cycle can chew artists up before they've had a chance to hone their talent.

If you read music blogs or magazines like the The New Yorker, you know her story: singer-songwriter transforms herself in model fashion, takes a new name, signs to a major label, has a viral hit, fails on national television, is crucified by critics, comes to embody all we hate/love/worry about when it comes to young women/popular music/the Internet. Del Rey's first album under this name, Born To Die, officially comes out Tuesday, but she's owned the hype cycle for months, even if her balloon's already been popped.

Hype is helium: the monatomic force that causes a cultural product to exceed its normal boundaries, float upward, and crowd out everything around it. Hype works when an artist or art work hits an already partially exposed common nerve, setting off a mass discussion about issues that go far beyond whatever product started the chatter. Sometimes what's left behind after hype turns out to matter a lot: Nirvana's Nevermind. Sometimes, not so much: Axl's Chinese Democracy.

Lana Del Rey is a particularly polarizing figure for two reasons. Her persona relies on classic femme fatale allure, but without the usual "girl power" update — the sassy shake of the finger that makes a phrase like "put a ring on it" seem almost feminist. So women find her troubling; she embodies the worst part of being a girl. And her music — well-constructed and catchy, but also strangely incomplete, with lyrics that feel slapdash sung by an unpolished voice — is neither fish nor fowl, too awkward for corporate pop and too distant-feeling for indie.

She's what most of us desire and despise, all in one. That's agitating, so much so that the hype enveloping her and the backlash that usually follows have formed a pile-up, making her both a star and a pariah. I'm not interested in defending her, or pillorying her further; others have done both well, sometimes in the same think piece.

I'd just like to point out that Lana Del Rey is not singular, either in her music or in regards to the buttons she's pushed. She's actually fairly typical of what pop often gives us these days, simply with a different veneer, a different method of distilling key elements of the culture's sheet-rumpling dreams. Here's a list of artists who might not share her most obvious attributes, but who nonetheless belong to the same conversation we're having about LDR.