“The Game Before the Game,” the new promotional commercial for Beats by Dre’s Solo2 headphones and the World Cup, doesn’t upstage the global event of the summer — but it comes close (spoiler alert: it’s as good as Beats’ Super Bowl commercial and the preview of Kendrick Lamar’s new song with Dr. Dre, and it’s waaay better than Pitbull and Jennifer Lopez’s milquetoast “We Are One (Ola Ola)”). The clip opens with Brazilian soccer player Nemar, Jr. on the phone with his dad, interspersed with sweeping panoramas of Rio de Janeiro’s lush coastline. After Nemar, Sr. encourages his son to run like it’s the last day of his life and like he’s a crazy man chasing happiness (the only two reasons one should ever take off running, really), the 22-year-old escapes the melee waiting for him outside his tour bus by putting on Beats headphones blasting “Jungle,” a soulful heavy hitter by Brooklyn’s X Ambassadors and British yowler Jamie N Commons.
Suddenly, everyone’s listening to the same song — originally, according to Billboard, the ad was set to run with a different “really huge track from a really huge artist” — on primary-colored Beats headphones, at parties in Spain with champagne and sparklers, in locker rooms and living rooms. Tucked between the soccer stars and the fans who will be watching them is a host of celebrity cameos: Nick Minaj reads a World Cup magazine spread in the bathroom; Serena Williams shows off her red, white, and blue nails; Weezy rocks a soccer ball chain; and LeBron James nervously paces his sunny apartment. See if you can spot them all, as Paste has done.
