And boy did the night’s event send tongues wagging about how uneventful Bruno Mars’ performance was, even after rock gods the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ stormed the show in what seemed to be an attempt to inject some life into the whole affair.
Last year Beyonce rocked the Super Bowl stage so hard she caused a black-out, and the year before the queen of pop, Madonna, broke records after her performance reached more than 116 million viewers (which meant her show alone was watched by more viewers than the game itself). All the way back in 2004 – yes, ten years ago – Janet Jackson and Justin Timberlake’s performance was so intense it resulted in a wardrobe malfunction which to this day, we still fondly remembered as ‘Nipplegate’. So when Bruno Mars hit the stage last night with his backing band The Hooligans, social media was abuzz about this year’s choice of artist and how surprisingly tame and underwhelming the whole thing was.
Starting out with a drum solo, the singer plastered through his hit songs in a predictable fashion, covering Locked Out Of Heaven, Treasure and Runaway Baby, the latter being one of the more exciting parts of the performance thanks to some random old guy breaking through security and streaking across the field. In the end, what was meant to be Bruno Mars’ moment of glory got stolen by a frenzied onslaught of Give It Away by the Red Hot Chili Peppers who all but stole the limelight and pretty much owned the Half-Time gig, no matter how briefly.
And despite his best attempts to look surprised about the hijacking, chances are there was some genuine shock in Mars’ bewildered grin considering the ferocity with which the Chili Peppers delivered one of their biggest hits, almost as if to say, ‘This is how you do it’.
With his 12 minutes coming to an end, Mars wrapped things up with his Grammy-winning single Just The Way You Are, all in all making the Super Bowl 2014 Half-Time one of the safest and most professional looking/sounding performances in a long time (save the Chili Pepper’s appearance, thankfully). Despite the fact that Twitter saw plenty of comments like, “Consensus among 60-somethings where I am: Bravo Bruno!”, there was also a significant amount of positive feedback on Mars’ performance, including one very logical statement: “It’s impossible to follow Beyonce. The only other choice is to just retire the halftime show”.
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