Bruno Mars' Super Bowl halftime show spiced by much-needed Chili Peppers

Singer delivered exactly what we thought he would – slick, unmemorable pop, ruffled only by his big, fratty brothers

He sings, he dances, he plays drums… Bruno Mars plays the Super Bowl. Photograph: Theo Wargo/FilmMagic

In a GQ interview last year, Bruno Mars’ most lucid moment came when he was asked what the secret to a good song was. He answered: “Hypnotize me in the very first three seconds, wake my ear plate up, give me something that I haven't felt before … and then punch me in the fucking face."

It was an uncharacteristically pithy and astute response. Mars, a former child Elvis impersonator, knows how to write a watertight hit but tends to evince a genial cluelessness about everything else – the world, his place in it, how not to get arrested, etc. His mugshot from last year, following his arrest for cocaine possession, is painfully telling. There’s the uncertain smile and vacant gaze of someone who doesn’t quite know how he found himself here, but suspects that they must, nonetheless, persist in attempts at ingratiation.

That might also describe the way he felt about playing the Super Bowl halftime show, the most illustrious gig in pop, so enormous that its organisers didn’t even pay Mars for that 12-minute performance – they know and he knows, that this is multi-million dollar exposure for him.

It’s a slot that demands an established star with epic wattage. Last year it was the truly peerless Beyoncé; in 2012 it was Madonna, and 10 years ago and most infamously it was Janet Jackson and her wilfully errant right nipple. Mars – diminutive, Fedoraed, a kind of Stepfordian pop-bot with all dials permanently set to “Inoffensively Entertain” – seemed a mystifying choice.

Many, in fact, were more than mystified – they were plain mean. The Puppy Bowl is an annual TV programme on the Animal Planet channel which features dogs messing around instead of men kicking footballs and this year’s halftime show was keyboard cat, the 2011 meme that functions as a coda to online failure. Dressed in a tiny Fedora, the cat bashed out Mars’ Locked Out of Heaven with his paws and from that moment, the sentiment “keyboard cat playing Bruno Mars was better than Bruno Mars playing Bruno Mars” became almost a tweet-cliché.

Mars may not be interesting, but he’s certainly a lot more talented than an animated cat. He began the 12 most important minutes of his career with a paean to a vagina: Locked Out of Heaven is his Police-indebted 2012 hit about “swimming in your water” being “something spiritual”. This didn’t feel like a spiritual experience but, sonically at least, the song seemed appropriately cavernous – a stadium belter that Mars and his fellow gold-suited Hooligans went for, accompanied by all the obligatory son et lumiere.

They followed with last year’s spry disco track, Treasure, in which Mars’ footwork was so fancy and so faultless that it was a little exhausting to watch. No dance move quite yells “I am trying as hard as I possibly can right now to entertain you” the way the splits does.

No need to look so scared, Bruno. Well – some need. Photograph: Rob Carr/Getty Images

And then, like a bullying big brother and his fratty friends crashing Mars’ recital, the reassuringly shirtless Red Hot Chili Peppers burst into proceedings to stomp and shout their way through Give It Away.

Throughout, Mars’ grin was tinged with bewilderment, as though he wasn’t quite expecting this, but was going to go along with it and be a good sport anyway. His 12 minutes ended, as everything decreed they must, with, Just The Way You Are, his Grammy-winning, non-biodegradable cornball of a hit about an insecure girl being pretty.

The lack of worldly nous so painfully obvious in that mugshot of his might just be the thing that makes Mars so good at what he does. He was exactly like you – and indeed the anxious, family-friendly organisers of America’s most watched television event – thought he would be: perfectly professional, slick as his pompidour and almost as dull as the football himself.

Bruno Mars to 'curate' Super Bowl half-time show: what are we in for?

It’s only been two years since the trilby-hatted crooner waggled his legs in America’s highest-profile performance, but with Uptown Funk in the bag, it’s no surprise he was invited back so soon

 

Golden touch: Bruno Mars gets his kit on at the 2013 Super Bowl half-time show. Photograph: Theo Wargo/FilmMagic

It isn’t all about nipple pasty slip-ups and flipping the bird. Though Janet Jackson’s 2004 “wardrobe malfunction” and MIA’s $16.6m stray middle finger in 2012 have come to define some of the more controversial recent Super Bowl half-time performances, we shouldn’t forget this sponsored spectacle’s humble roots. Long before Shania Twain bounced around in her rhinestone-studded push-up bra in 2003, marching bands provided the mid-game entertainment. Just marching bands. Without anyone famous lip-synching to a backing track. Those really were simpler times. Then New Kids on the Block ushered in a new pop- and rock-oriented era with their 1991 performance.

I’ve never felt more keenly aware of the half-time show’s tame, family-friendly past than when I read about the hopes for next year’s gig. The NFL has reportedly invited Bruno Mars, with his mind-boggling collection of trilby hats and shirts that don’t seem to button up to the top, to not only perform but also “curate” the show. With his track record as a songwriter, producer, Grammy winner and all-round music industry nice guy, it doesn’t get much more safe than that. Of course, there was also the huge chart success of Uptown Funk – shout out to all the wedding DJs who had to play it this summer – which no doubt cemented the NFL’s choice.

But wait. The idea of Mars dancing his little legs around the stadium may seem familiar because he last played the half-time show in February 2014. That’s strange enough, without considering what his “curation” would entail. Are we talking about a Brian Eno-style approach to building the lineups for festivals inthe UK, Australia and Norway? Or something more the lines of David Byrne’s Meltdown festival or Jay Z’s Made In America extravaganza, where Mars would help pick his friends and past collaborators as performers? Although this news all arises from an anonymous source speaking to Billboard, it’s interesting to think about how Mars would make his mark on a viewing audience that usually tips over the 100 million mark. And by interesting, I mean deeply depressing.
Bruno Mars’s 2013 Super Bowl half-time performance with the Red Hot Chili Peppers.

Mars no doubt has a deep knowledge of music, from pop and Motown to soul, R&B and classic rock’n’roll. His restless genre-shifting on 2012’s Unorthodox Jukebox shows that off to full effect. On the surface, a Mars-curated half-time show could pull in anyone from Jerry Lee Lewis and Damian Marley to Pharrell or the current incarnation of the Isley Brothers. But it could just as easily usher in appearances from the likes of Meghan Trainor and Charlie Puth in a sickly sweet doo-wop tribute, or Mumford & Sons – complete with their new amped-up sound. Now that Mars has ascended to another level of fame, he may opt for the populist choice and draft in the happy-clappy acts most likely to please casual music fans and their buffalo wing-eating families.

Mars’s first half-time show felt both celebratory – making him the only performer under 30 to headline the show in Super Bowl history – and weirdly incongruous, starting with a drum solo and ending with a cornball run-through of Just the Way You Are. Somewhere in the middle, the Red Hot Chili Peppers blasted through Give It Away with Mars, too. Like I said, weirdly incongruous.

That night Mars helped pull in 115 million viewers, the second-highest audience after Katy Perry’s 121 million last year. So maybe he’s being asked back because he nailed the numbers. Mars appeals to a broad demographic, from the aunties who dance to Grenade at family parties to the guys who sext Gorilla lyrics with the eggplant emoji. And cynically speaking, the Super Bowl half-time show mostly feels like an opportunity for advertisers and major labels to convince people to buy stuff, in between shots of bulked-up men throwing a ball around. As a commercial success, Mars makes sense.

Performers go all out on a spectacular, 13-minute set, but the half-time show is not designed as a place for avant-garde artistes and their muses. While I’m sure acts like the Flaming Lips, math rockers Battles or rapper Lil B (a Californian who is native to the area of Levi’s Stadium, which is hosting the Super Bowl) could pull in some fun left-field names if they were given the chance, the Super Bowl is still way out of their leagues. Mars, as polished and incessantly chirpy as he may be, could get people to tune in. And on a night like this, that’s what counts to theNFL.