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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

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. 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.

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