[Stewart Meadows]

Maroon 5 Barely Leaves a Mark at the Super Bowl Halftime Show


Maroon 5 — a quasi-soul, quasi-rock, utterly funkless band — was the main attraction at the Super Bowl halftime show at Mercedes-Benz Stadium in Atlanta, likely the third or eighth or maybe 14th choice for a headliner.
(...)
And the band did no better during its 13 and a half minutes onstage, in a performance that was dynamically flat, mushy at the edges, worthy of something much worse than derision: a shrug. It was an inessential performance from a band that might have lost some moral authority if it had any moral authority to lose.

But what saddles Maroon 5 as a band — its propensity to pretend lithe things are thumping, its commitment to thinning out the soul and rock of the 1970s and 1980s until they’re so brittle they might snap — doomed this performance, which blithely skated through a half-dozen of the band’s hits.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/03/a...time-show.html