TThe Chicago Bears are 8-3 and on a hot streak. NFL standings this season. For fans who are used to looking forward to the division rival Green Bay Packers and looking forward to next season's prospects, this is a reason to smell the roses and indulge in a little self-importance. But even as fans eagerly await the Bears' first playoff appearance in five years, something that once seemed unthinkable with a second-year quarterback and a rookie head coach leading a team that had just five wins last year, no fan thinks the 2025 Bears will be in the Super Bowl – and not without a rap song to serve as a marker.
Before the Bears won Super Bowl XX in 1985, they tempted fate by recording the song “The Super Bowl Shuffle.” Although the song only reached number 41 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart. accompanying video came to rival Michael Jackson's Thriller in popularity as it appeared endlessly on television during the Bears' title run. “The song Super Bowl Shuffle went viral in an era before viral existence as we know it today,” says the song's engineer, Fred Breitberg. “It was a phenomenal thing and also a good record.”
The Shuffle is HBO's deep dive into 1980s music. (The film is about the same length as one of the classic VH1 episodes.) For younger viewers who may have a hard time understanding how a seven-minute dance rap song sung by prim football players could dominate the airwaves, understand that this was back when hip-hop was just taking off, music videos were making radio stars, and the '85 Bears were chock-full of flamboyant characters like Sweetness (the tail from Hall of Famer Walter Payton), Punky QB (Pro Bowler Jim McMahon) and Refrigerator (335-pound defensive tackle William Perry). It was a dizzying level of enthusiasm, reminiscent of the heady days of Beatlemania, at least in Chicago.
Of course, these Bears would never be as cute if they didn't back up these larger-than-life personalities with monstrously greater performances. Backed by a historic defense that produced four Hall of Famers, the Bears dominated in virtually every statistical category on that side of the ball and posted a plus-258 point differential, 110 points higher than the next best team. They swept through every opponent except the Miami Dolphins en route to a 46-10 rout of the New England Patriots in Super Bowl XX.
The Shuffle draws on interviews with key Bears players—defensive back Mike Singletary, leading receiver Willie Gault—as well as the producers, technicians and beatmakers involved in the song and video. This was all Dick Meyer's brainchild. Chicago a perfumer who started a record label as a joke and met Gault on the set of a music video in which the Bears receiver had a cameo. This was nothing unusual for Gault, a Renaissance man ahead of his time who tried everything from modeling to ballet to harness racing.
Fascinated by Gault's adventurism, Meyers pitched him an idea for a song in the style of We Are the World by the Bears, but Gault did not initially think it would happen as the season had already begun. But when Meyers said the proceeds would go to a Chicago charity for needy families, Gault agreed to rally a team behind the idea and convinced about 30 of his teammates to join the project after McMahon, Payton and Singletary committed.
However, the players knew that they were tempting fate. This was Chicago in the 1980s, after all. Baseball teams were still cursed, Michael Jordan only joined the Bulls and the Bears didn't win NFL title at 22 years old. In addition to the team jinxing itself, players were worried about the prospect of giving away bulletin board material to their opponents. “If we don't go to the Super Bowl,” Singletary says in the doc, “we'll be the biggest idiots alive.”
Meyers did his best to set the players up for success. He repurposed a song that was already in his catalog called Kingfish Shuffle, named after a character from the Amos and Andy minstrel show—in retrospect, a jarring choice for a team made up of mostly black players. Meyers rewrote the song to use the themes of the Bears season and gave us lines like They call me Sweet / And I love to dance / Running around a ball is like starting a romance and from the refrigerator: I may be big / But I'm not a stupid idiot. The players recorded their tracks in Meyers' basement recording studio the week before Thanksgiving. That's when Pro Bowl safety Gary Fencik and others began to reconsider the logic of singing about the Super Bowl with six games still to be played in the regular season. season.
Then it was time to shoot the video at Chicago's legendary Park West Theater, which was scheduled for December 3rd, the next day. the team's loss to Miami. The crew was not sure that the team would perform after the bitter defeat. And when they finally did a few hours later, it was without Payton and McMahon. (They were added in post-production after parts of them were shot against a blue screen.)
Video director Dave Thompson and his crew chief Mike Fayette worried that the players might be too depressed after the loss to Miami to provide a workable performance. But Singletary, nicknamed “Samurai” for his intimidating energy, rallied his players and even choreographed it, which became a great test for this group. The final version emphasizes the need to not focus on any dance move for more than two seconds. “That's as long as they can move their arms left and right,” Fayette said.
What started out as a haphazard obligation for many players has turned into a morale booster. “That was the most fun, working together in a completely different field,” Singletary says in the doc, reflecting on their noble choreographic endeavors. “There were guys who were understudies and teaching guys who were just starting out. We mixed in a way we never had before, and it became a unifying moment that brought us together, forced us to refocus.”
At the end of the day, there's no stopping The Super Bowl Shuffle. A week after filming wrapped, it was all over radio in Chicago, and all over television after that. You really had to be there, and I was there (even though I was only five years old at the time). I remember going to parties and birthday parties in later years and friends playing their 45 rpm records and VHS copies of the tune on loop. However, in 1985, the players were kicking themselves for going against their instincts and not tempting fate. But after a while, they began to see the song not as football stupidity, but as a standard to which they could be held accountable, like Babe Ruth calling his throw. When other teams began releasing copycat songs (not least the Super Bowl runner-up Patriots), the Bears knew they had taken the right approach.
The rest is football and music history. After the Bears pulled off the most lopsided Super Bowl victory in history to that point, The Super Bowl Shuffle was nominated for a Grammy for Best R&B Performance by a Duo or Group with Vocals at the 1987 awards ceremony—and (correctly) lost to Prince's Kiss. He also raised over $300,000 for charity (now about $900,000). But most importantly, it inspired numerous copycat songs by NFL teams over the years, although none carried the same cultural weight. If this season the Bears somehow manage to pull off the unthinkable and pull off a Super Bowl upset in Santa Clara this February, well, their fans will be shuffling through the streets again.
