I don’t care what happens going forward with Maroon 5, but I will never forgive them for the 2018 World Cup fiasco.
Remember that awful Hyundai advert that played continuously, with Adam Levine and his pals butchering a Bob Marley classic? Of course, you do – sorry for bringing it up again.
Fast forward to their Super Bowl performance, and the haters are back in a big way.
Pretty much every review has torn them apart, but let’s start with the Atlantic, with the headline “Maroon 5’s Halftime Show Felt Designed to Be Forgotten”.
Maroon 5, masterful at creating hits that take an active mental effort to distinguish from one another, did not enter this gig with the burden of great expectations…they did the minimum, which perhaps was one of the things that the M-shape of the stage stood for. The only storyline came in the form of the singer Adam Levine’s striptease…
Mild pyro, drone-lamp skywriting, a drum line dressed for a gay bar, an imported black choir: All are tropes from more spectacular halftime shows of past, and they were mostly deployed here in a subdued, budget-friendly fashion. The exception was the gospel singer whose geyser of a voice highlighted just what Levine hadn’t achieved all along.
His whimpery croon generally offers the only unique flavor in Maroon 5’s stews, but here its cloying tang was barely discernible. At no point did he convey that he wanted the folks at home to pause in their analysis of Brady’s shaky first half, though many of them no doubt did so anyways, for a moment, to sing along about the girl with the broken smile.
At this point, we’ll pop past the Guardian for their video highlights reel of the half-time show:
They didn’t dig the effort, either:
With an arsenal of pop hits at their disposal, the Adam Levine-led septet gave the fans at the Mercedes-Benz Stadium a pretty forgettable half-time show…
…as far as half-time performances go, the show itself was a pretty toothless, cookie-cutter affair, marked by the requisite pyrotechnics and some floating lanterns as Adam and co ran down a list of radio hits…
…the bar should be higher than the staid, run-of-the-mill jaunt we got from Maroon 5. True, it’s not always rainbows and butterflies, but it didn’t have to fall this flat.
Nice little lyrical reference coupled with a stinging takedown, there.
The Daily Beast was in a similarly unforgiving mood:
This year’s Maroon 5-led halftime show was so listless and pedestrian, the lion’s share of the 100 million people who tune in for the non-football elements of the Super Bowl were left, for the first time in years, actually craving the excitement of a sporting event so lethargic that two minutes of gameplay takes 20 minutes to actually progress…
There was nothing visionary or even cohesive about the production, with each new number an entirely different swing. Fire! Drumline! Gospel choir! Pimped-out rides! Floating lamps! Sex! Everything was thrown at the wall, and all stuck briefly, before falling off as the band hurriedly moved onto the next thing…
Maroon 5 stood still on stage, and one of them took off their shirt.
We’ve left Travis Scott and Big Boi out of this, with both having featured as part of the show, because the best and most brutal digs are aimed at Levine and Maroon 5.
That’s what you get for starring in that Hyundai advert, man.
Here’s a pretty cool timelapse of what the entire halftime show looks like compressed into 30-odd seconds:
#SBLIII Halftime Show Timelapse! pic.twitter.com/AzZvnrfv2q
— Super Bowl (@SuperBowl) February 4, 2019
Also, enjoy watching some of the better adverts from the Super Bowl.
[sources:atlantic&guardian&dailybeast]
