Usher’s Super Bowl half-time show review – a frenetic, daring nostalgia tour

The R&B star delivered a career-spanning performance, complete with shirtless crooning, high-energy dancing, and appearances from Alicia Keys, Ludacris, Lil Jon, will.i.am and HER

If anyone has the right to sit on a throne in the middle of Las Vegas, it’s Usher. The King of R&B, whose residency graced the city for 18 months, has earned his crown as an ambassador of near-peerless showmanship, luscious escapism and a good time. He’s an old-school performer, the kind to give and give, to one-up himself on a ceaseless quest to entertain. And so the 45-year-old resident star of Vegas (with all due respect to Adele) opened his Super Bowl half-time show – an achievement explicitly aimed as both a celebration of his 30-year career and a continuation of it – bedecked in regal white suit, flanked with circus performers, and meticulously, mellifluously hitting his marks.

The 15-minute show – an extra two on the normal runtime, to account for his vast catalog – was a frenetic and daring, if at times chaotic and uncharacteristically wobbly, display of showmanship from a performer who who has no reason to prove his bona fides but went for it nonetheless. His mic was live, dance moves locked and loaded, and, at one point, roller skates on. Ever the audience pleaser and libido disrupter – the show opened with a mock “U” rating from Apple Music, for risk of “gyrating” that “may cause relationship issues” – Usher turned the football field into a cornucopia of dance gymnastics and nearly sprinted through a nostalgia tour of hits.