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Music

Prince Didn't Care About Rain

Superbowl 2007 producer: "So, Prince, you know it's raining for your Superbowl performance?" Prince: "Can you make it rain harder?"

Without fail, there are three things that happen at every Super Bowl. A man will kick a ball, several truck loads of nachos will be crushed into little crumbs on the floor, and some popstar or band or singer-songwriter will give a relatively lukewarm performance during the halftime show, which is forgotten almost immediately after the event finishes up. Y'know, like Coldplay's fart-ridden performance earlier this year, or The Black Eyed Peas in 2011, which featured will.i.am dressed as a human cyborg.

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With the news of Prince's passing yesterday, numerous clips are being shared across the Internet in absence of all of his music—he was a firm defender of intellecutal property rights, and as a result all of his music is exclusively on Tidal—and the 2007 Superbowl is one of many.

Why? Because it was different. Because the 2007 Superbowl featured a performance from the late Prince, who was one of the baddest, sexiest motherfuckers to ever waltz from the stamen of the mallow flower and into our earthly presence. In fact, Prince's performance was so special that on the day he was due on-stage, the Miami heavens opened into an unprecedented rainstorm. For the first time in something stupid like forty years, the Super Bowl would take place in pouring rain.

"I opened the curtains of my hotel room and I was like, 'Oh my god! It looked like a scene from Moby Dick'," says Bruce Rodgers, who was the Production Designer behind Prince's halftime show. "[We called up Prince and said] I want you to know it's raining. Prince was like, 'Yes, it's raining… Can you make it rain harder?'"

Perhaps unsurprisingly given Prince's vibrational field, that's exactly what happened. When he took to the stage at halftime, he performed in torrential rain—made all the more impressive by the fact his two back-up dancers were moving around in high-heeled shoes. At one point, Prince shouted to the crowd, "Someone take my picture, with all this rain inside." At another, he does the unthinkable: he makes the Foo Fighters sound good. But more than anything, he rocked the stage with an unmeasured level of badness. It's a half-time performance that can't be quantified in any sort of terms other than timeless.

Since pretty much anything involving Prince has been removed from the internet, one of the only videos of this performance exists in a potato-quality, yet no less impressive version which you can watch in full below.

But for full context, you're going to want to click here to see a high-quality highlight version, courtesy of the NFL—which we can't embed because those foolish football players won't let us—which gives an insight into how the performance went off without a hitch, despite initially scaring the shit out of the programming team who put it on.