The Super Bowl Shuffle at 40: how a goofy rap classic boosted the Bears’ title run

The Chicago Bears are 8-3 and soaring in this season’s NFL standings. For a fanbase that’s grown accustomed to looking up at the division rival Green Bay Packers and looking ahead to the next season’s prospects, it’s reason to smell the roses and indulge in some light strutting. But even as fans find themselves looking forward to the Bears’ first playoff berth in five years, something that once seemed unthinkable with a second-year quarterback and a rookie head coaching helming a squad that managed only five wins last year, no fan is thinking the 2025 Bears have a Super Bowl run in them – not without a rap song to lay the marker down.

Before the 1985 edition of the Bears romped to victory in Super Bowl XX, they tempted fate by recording The Super Bowl Shuffle. Although the song only peaked at 41 on the Billboard Hot 100 charts, the accompanying video came to rival Michael Jackson’s Thriller for popularity as it popped up endlessly on TV during the Bears’ title run. “The Super Bowl Shuffle went viral in an age where there was no viral existence like we know it today,” the song’s recording engineer, Fred Breitberg, says. “It was a phenomenal entity as well as being a good record.”

The Shuffle is HBO’s Behind the Music deep dive into the 1980s banger. (At 40 minutes, the film is about as long as one of those VH1 classic episodes, too.) For younger crowds who may struggle to appreciate how a seven-minute rap line-dance song performed by stiff football players could dominate the airwaves, understand: this was back when hip-hop was just catching on, music videos were making radio stars and the ’85 Bears were chock-a-block with colorful characters like Sweetness (hall of fame tailback Walter Payton), the Punky QB (Pro Bowler Jim McMahon) and the Fridge (335lbs defensive tackle William Perry). It was a dizzying level of enthusiasm that recalled the frenzied days of Beatlemania, in Chicago anyway.

Of course, those Bears never would have been so endearing if they hadn’t backed up those big personalities with monstrously bigger play. Anchored by a historic defense that produced four hall of famers, the Bears dominated in practically every statistical category on that side of the ball on the way to registering a plus-258 point differential – 110 points higher than the next best team. They steamrolled through every opponent except the Miami Dolphins on the way to a 46-10 clobbering of the New England Patriots in Super Bowl XX.

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The Shuffle draws on interviews with key figures on the Bears – defensive linchpin Mike Singletary, big-play receiver Willie Gault – as well as the producers, techs and bit players involved in making the song and video. All of it was the brainchild of Dick Meyer, a Chicago perfumer who started a record label on a lark and met Gault on a music video shoot in which the Bears receiver was making a cameo. This wasn’t unusual for Gault, an ahead-of-his-time renaissance man who tried everything from modeling to ballet to harness racing.

Bewitched by Gault’s adventurousness, Meyers pitched him the idea for a We Are the World-style song performed by the Bears – but Gault didn’t initially see it happening with the season already under way. But when Meyers said the proceeds would go toward a Chicago charity for struggling families, Gault agreed to rally the team behind the idea – and got about 30 of his teammates to join the project after McMahon, Payton and Singletary committed.

The players knew they were tempting fate though. This was Chicago in the 1980s, after all. The baseball teams were still very much cursed, Michael Jordan had just joined the Bulls and the Bears hadn’t won an NFL title in 22 years. In addition to the team jinxing itself, players worried about the prospect of serving up bulletin board material to their rivals. “If we don’t go to the Super Bowl,” Singletary says in the doc, “we’re gonna be the biggest idiots ever.”

Meyers teed up the players for success as best he could. He repurposed a song that was already in his catalog called Kingfish Shuffle, named for a character in Amos ’n’ Andy minstrel shows – a jarring choice for a team largely composed of Black players, in retrospect. Meyers had the song rewritten to draw on themes from the Bears’ season and gave us lines like They call me Sweetness / And I like to dance / Runnin’ the ball is like makin’ romance, and from The Fridge: I may be large / But I’m no dumb cookie. The players laid down their tracks at Meyers’ basement recording studio a week before Thanksgiving. It was then that Pro Bowl safety Gary Fencik and others began reconsidering the logic of singing about the Super Bowl with six games still to play in the regular season.

Then came time for the video shoot at Chicago’s fabled Park West theater, which was scheduled for 3 December – the day after the team’s loss to Miami. The crew wasn’t sure the team would show after the bitter defeat. And when eventually they did hours later, it was without Payton and McMahon. (They were added in post-production after shooting their parts against a blue screen.)

The video’s director, Dave Thompson, and his crew chief, Mike Fayette, worried that the players might be too depressed after their loss to Miami to deliver a workable performance. But Singletary, nicknamed ‘the Samurai’ for his fearsome intensity, rallied his charges and even directed some choreography, a big challenge for this group. The final cut makes a point of not holding focus on any of their dance moves for longer than two seconds. “That’s as long as they could keep their hands moving to the left, and keep their hands moving to the right,” Fayette said.

What began as a desultory obligation for many of the players wound up becoming a moral-booster. “That was the fun part, working together in a totally different realm,” Singletary says in the doc, reflecting on his noble choreography effort. “There were guys that were backups teaching guys that were starters. We mixed in a way that we had never had a chance to before, and it became a rallying point that brought us together, got us refocused.”

In the end, there was no holding The Super Bowl Shuffle back. It was everywhere on Chicago radio a week after the shoot wrapped, and then all over TV after that. You really had to be there, and I was (albeit just five years old at the time). I can remember going to playdates and birthday parties in later years, and friends playing their 45 rpm records and VHS copies of the tune on a loop. In 1985 though, the players were kicking themselves for going against their instincts not to tempt fate. But after a while, they began to see the song less as a football folly than as a standard to which they could hold themselves accountable, like Babe Ruth calling his shot. When other teams began dropping 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 delivered what at the time was the most lopsided Super Bowl victory in history, The Super Bowl Shuffle earned a Grammy nomination for best R&B performance by a duo or a group with vocals at the 1987 awards ceremony – and (correctly) lost out to Prince’s Kiss. It also raised more than $300,000 for charity (worth around $900,000 now). But most importantly, it inspired a raft of imitation songs from NFL teams down the years – although none of them would drive the same cultural heft. If this season’s Bears can somehow manage to pull off the unthinkable and engineer a Super Bowl upset in Santa Clara this coming February, well, their fans will be shuffling in the streets all over again.