The 2011 Super Bowl Halftime Show wasn't one I was looking forward to, but ... Fergie singing “Sweet Child ’O Mine”? You’ve got to be kidding me. I suppose the idea is to have Slash save the show for everyone out there who thinks that music has to have guitars, but basically, it just turned into Fergie doing bad Axl karaoke there for a while. The four-robots-rapping-badly thing that was going on before that was bad, but at least it was manageably bad.
The whole black-and-white Jetsons look isn’t well-executed, but it does make some sense for Black Eyed Peas. Will.i.am stole his whole look here from Kool Keith, but Taboo actually makes a lot of sense with the Lite-Brite retro-futuristic look, which suit his rigid, barely-human movements perfectly.
Usher is saving things a bit – the guy is a really convincing dancer, if nothing else. The mix still sounds horrible, though – I know stadium shows generally don’t sound good, but come on, it’s 2011, and the backing tracks don’t sound full at all.
And now the Dirty Dancing theme? What the hell? And now there are dozens of people dancing with boxes on their heads. This is nowhere near as weird and cool as it thinks it is. And while I’m not one of those who believes that music has to have guitars, the Black Eyed Peas are one enormous downgrade from Bruce Springsteen the last time the Steelers were in the Super Bowl.