Dr Dre, Snoop Dogg, Eminem, Kendrick Lamar and Mary J Blige’s half-time show – an all-timer

The supergroup of hip-hop and R&B legends delivered the most entertaining Super Bowl half-time show in years

Even by Super Bowl standards, an event in which the mythologising is as much of a sport as the football, this has been a particularly hyped half-time show. Three weeks before the fact, the NFL released a four-minute trailer, a third as long as the performance itself, which saw Dr Dre, the most important producer in rap history, assemble a superhero cast of 90s hip-hop and R&B legends: Eminem, Mary J Blige and Snoop Dogg as well as Kendrick Lamar, the great west-coast hip-hop talent of his generation, who went to the same Compton high school as Dre.

Yet, despite all that pomp, this felt like a different kind of half-time show, directorially and musically more inventive than the normal tropes of marching bands and fake fans on the pitch. There was more collaboration and smart interstitial set-pieces, all brought together by Anderson.Paak's impressive live band. Just before it began, the NBC hosts whispered it might be the greatest Super Bowl half-time show ever - it wasn't far off.