In a year shaped by the coronavirus, a pop star with an affection for the grandeur and sheen of the most important 1980s pop found how to form an outsized affair small.
For almost all of his decade-long career, The Weeknd has been finding ever more ornate ways to duck the spotlight, becoming immeasurably famous and popular while maintaining a cool, skeptical, and effective removal from the tough, sometimes goofy spotlight of fame.
Out on the stage at the Super Bowl halftime show, though, there isn’t much one can do to cover. it's a locale that flattens nuance, sandpapers intent. It’s live and heavily vetted. for somebody whose songs often dive deep into traumatic and provocative material, but gleam so brightly and convincingly that it’s easy to miss the brittle soul within, it's an unlikely, almost vulnerable place to seek out yourself.
This probably explains why, at Super Bowl LV at Raymond James Stadium in Tampa, Fla., the Weeknd rejiggered the terms of the performance. What would ordinarily be a hyper choreographed spectacle with countless moving parts was instead something more focused and, at times, unnervingly intimate. albeit his music tends toward the maximalist, the Weeknd found several ways to form the performance appear small, a sort of secret whispered ahead of an audience that tops 100 million.
In a performance designed for at-home consumption, he focused intently on the cameras. Behind him was a band and a choir interspersed among a neon cityscape, and sometimes he was surrounded by dancers — their faces bandaged, keep with the fame-skeptic iconography of his recent music videos — but often, the Weeknd stood alone. His eye contact was intense. When he danced, he mostly did so in isolation. within the midst of a pyrotechnic affair, there he was, keeping his own time.
That was also partly the result of the unique circumstances of the event this year: a grand-scaled affair reimagined with pandemic restrictions in mind. instead of the standard stage setup — assembled at midfield, then rapidly disassembled after the show — the Weeknd performed largely from the stands, only descending to the sector for the ultimate jiffy of his set.
Wearing a glittery red blazer and spectator shoes with an all-black ensemble, he sometimes seemed like a cabaret mayor, a master of ceremony for a space-age function. He stuck to the most important of his many big hits. “Starboy” was vibrant, and “The Hills” had an imposing sweep.
After “The Hills,” he pivoted to something more peculiar, walking into an overlit labyrinth and performing “Can’t Feel My Face” amid a scrum of face-bandaged look-alikes. The camera was hand-held and unsteady, communicating glamorous mayhem that this event usually doesn’t dabble in.
Afterward, he tempered the mood with a number of his biggest-tent hits: the sunshiny “I Feel It Coming,” the oversized “Save Your Tears” then “Earned It,” his theatrical ballad from the “Fifty reminders Grey” soundtrack.
There could perhaps be no more fitting moment for The Weeknd to be headlining the halftime show: After almost a year of avoiding people, who better to line the terms of public engagement than pop music’s greatest hermit? That said, it had been jarring in the week to observe him poke his head out from the shadows, engaging during a terse, not wholly comfortable press conference, and yuk-yucking during a comedy sketch with James Corden.
There are some responsibilities of this level of fame that aren’t negotiable. Asked at the press conference whether he would temper his songs or performance in any way, given how lurid and graphic his recent videos are, the Weeknd insisted, “We’ll keep it PG for the families.”
Which is to mention, there was no mischief injected onto one among pop music’s grandest, most-viewed and most scrutinized stages — take, for instance, the raw carnal provocations of Prince’s 2007 rain-shellacked performance, or the fire-eyed political radicalism of Beyoncé’s takeover of Coldplay’s tepid set in 2016, or M.I.A.’s finger in 2012.
Mostly, as promised, he kept it PG, though he did add a sly grin and a small sashay of the hip during “I Feel It Coming,” and therefore the scattered mayhem during “Can’t Feel My Face” suggested much more sinister things than might be represented. His recent music videos have focused on the grotesquerie of celebrity worship, but that narrative was nodded to but largely sidelined.
This is the second halftime show produced partially by Jay-Z’s Roc Nation, in an appointment struck while the league was trying to deal with the fallout from its handling of Colin Kaepernick’s racial-justice protests. In recent years, the N.F.L. has seemingly perpetually been in crisis-response mode. This season was consistently challenged by the impact of the coronavirus.
Before the sport, the rock-soul singer H.E.R. performed “America the gorgeous,” injecting some Prince-minded guitar filigree. and therefore the anthem was a duet between the phenomenally gifted soul singer Jazmine Sullivan and the country stoic Eric Church, wearing a purple moto-Esque jacket as if to overemphasize the political and cultural middle ground the performance — sturdy, sometimes impressive — was so clearly striving for.
In the Weeknd, the N.F.L. opted for one among the few unimpeachable pop stars of the past decade, a uniform hitmaker with an ear for contemporary production and affection for the grandeur and sheen of the most important 1980s pop.
Only during the last few minutes, when he finally emerged onto the sector, did he acknowledge just how far he had come. Playing at that moment was a snippet of “House of Balloons,” the murky title song from his extremely murky debut mixtape, released a decade ago. At that time, the Weeknd was a complete cipher, a Toronto miscreant with an ethereal voice and 0 interest in sharing himself with the remainder of the planet.
This nod to his past was quick — a wink for longtime fans — and it gave thanks to “Blinding Lights,” his exuberant smash from 2019, which topped the recent 100 for four weeks. It’s a sterling song that evokes both an idyllic future and triggers aural sense memories of mega pop’s glory years. On the sector, he was surrounded by many Weeknd-alike dancers. within the beginning, he moved with them in lockstep. But because the song swelled, and therefore the dancers began to swarm in odd patterns, the Weeknd moved in his rhythm, holding the camera’s gaze, alone amid the chaos.
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