Super Bowl 2012 Halftime Show: Ridiculous Performance Sets Twitter Record

Madonna shot a music video, passed it off as a live performance and Twitter exploded. 

In fact, it exploded at record breaking levels. The peak Twitter activity for the halftime act came in at over 10,000 per second. 

Rosa Golijan of MSNBC.com reported that that number broke the Twitter record for a sporting event. Thankfully, that record did not last long, as the end of the game surpassed it. 

I say thankfully because it is nice that the record number of tweets per second for a sporting event actually happened while the sporting part of the event was taking place. 

Hang on, that might not be fair to Madonna. I'm sure that, in some countries, lip-syncing is a sporting event. 

Madonna seemed to give little effort at pretending that she was not pretending to sing. You can't really blame her for the lip-syncing, though. It would be hard to pull of that aerobic performance while singing, and therein lies the problem with the whole deal. Madonna has never been an artists whose songs became hits on the strength of the music alone. It was a package deal with her. 

There was no way she was going to be able to pull off the epic stage of the Super Bowl without having a huge production value to her performance. Hence the many guest spots, 100s of dancers, numerous outfit changes and giant stage. This was far more a spectacle than a musical performance, and it all teetered on the edge of chaos.

Especially when artist M.I.A. decided to flip off the camera in a desperate attempt to become relevant. And, judging by the Twitter reaction, it worked.