Super Bowl halftime shows ranked

The NFL celebrated the 30th anniversary of the Super Bowl by having Diana Ross sing a throwback medley, one that was heavy on the Supremes and other Motown staples but also featured Gloria Gaynor’s disco anthem “I Will Survive.” This is perhaps the quintessential synthesis of a Vegas show and marching band.

If ZZ Top’s appearance during the 1997 Blues Brothers Bash doesn’t count—and, really, who wants to remember that show—Aerosmith marks the first time a rock band headlined the Super Bowl Halftime Show. They’re here alongside NSYNC, teamed in the corny conceit of “The Kings Of Rock And Pop.” Both acts know how to deliver thrills to a big crowd—and Aerosmith’s recent single “Jaded” sounds surprisingly vital in this setting—but in 2001, neither Aerosmith nor NSYNC reigned over pop culture, a fact made painfully apparent by how Britney Spears steals the show with a brief appearance during a star-studded, climactic “Walk This Way.”

The most notorious halftime in Super Bowl history, the 2004 show culminated in the infamous “wardrobe malfunction” where Justin Timberlake tore Janet Jackson’s costume to reveal her breast (the incident became known as “Nipplegate”). It was all over in a flash but it made such an impression that nobody recalls how the show was absurdly overstuffed, featuring a grand total of six acts. Janet opened the show, then ceded the stage to P. Diddy and Nelly, who then turned it over to Kid Rock, who bellowed through “Bawitdaba” and “Cowboy” before all hell broke loose. Individual segments of the show work but, combined, the whole thing causes severe whiplash.

The last of the classic rock warhorses to headline a Super Bowl, The Who seem comfortable on the stadium stage, probably because they’ve virtually lived in such venues for decades. This performance is like a comfortable old blanket for both the band and the audience: they’ve all either heard or played “Pinball Wizard,” “Baba O’Reilly,” “Who Are You” and “Won’t Get Fooled Again” countless times and this familiarity breeds contentment.

Justin Timberlake returned to the Super Bowl in 2018 to make amends for Nipplegate. Having danced too close to the flame nearly 15 years earlier, the only surprise he delivered is opening with “Filthy,” a single pulled from Man Of The Woods, an album released two days earlier. With the new one out of the way, Timberlake ran through his hits, taking the time for a bit of a mawkish tribute to Prince. His showbiz instincts serve him well: it’s a clean, efficient set, one that moves so quickly there’s never a danger of boredom.

Hired to provide a bit of stability after the fiasco of 2004's Nipplegate, Paul McCartney fulfilled his duties expertly. Apart from maybe the opening “Drive My Car,” McCartney delivers no surprises: save the explosive “Live And Let Die,” it’s all Beatles, from a boogying “Get Back” to a singalong on “Hey Jude.”

Coldplay became one of the biggest bands in the world by giving the people exactly what they want. These crowd-pleasing instincts are so finely honed that they were smart enough to realize that what a 2016 audience would really want to hear are encore appearances from Beyonce and Bruno Mars, two recent Super Bowl Halftime headliners who return to upstage Coldplay with “Uptown Funk” and “Formation.” Nice guys that they are, Coldplay doesn’t seem bothered by this at all.

Where so many other Super Bowl Halftime Show headliners took great pains to please a crowd, Rihanna acted as if she couldn’t be bothered if she either satisfied or scandalized the audience; her entire goal was to turn the spotlight from the game to herself and her mastery of pop drama. She didn’t draft a single guest—in fact, she whittled down “All Of The Lights” and “Run This Town” so they had no trace of Kanye West, edits that highlighted her ruthlessly understated charisma. Those two singles were part of an efficient 13-minute medley where she ran through 12 or so of her hits, keeping an emphasis on her hot streak of the early 2010s. Pregnant with her second child, Rihanna relied on her backup dancers and a hydraulic stage to generate kinetic energy, a move that brought home how she’s a quiet, controlled center of gravity, a disposition that stands in stark contrast to such recent Super Bowl headliners as The Weeknd and Lady Gaga.

The presence of the grimy rocker “Rough Justice” pegs this Rolling Stones performance to the mid-2000s—they were out hawking their latest record, so they had to play their new single—but otherwise this halftime show could’ve been given at any point in the 2000s or the 2010s. It simply features the Stones doing a few of their greatest hits. They smartly don’t let the tempo flag, so it’s hard-charging rock and roll, the kind of thing that makes a halftime fly by.

Compare the Weeknd’s halftime show to, say, Michael Jackson’s from nearly three decades earlier, and it’s shocking to see how far the Super Bowl has come. Where Jackson’s crew seemed helicoptered into the game, the Weeknd seems completely separate from the proceedings, a production designed not just for television but to be broken up into bits to be digested on the internet (witness the Weeknd wandering through a hall of lights). This reversal places the Weeknd in unfamiliar territory for the Super Bowl: where most halftime acts are playing to the crowd, he’s expecting the audience to come around to meet him on his own terms.

Shakira and Jennifer Lopez split headlining duties in 2020, a move that seemed to suggest that neither singer could command the stage on their own. The resulting performance proved that untrue. Alternating between mini-medleys from the two headliners, the set was constructed as if Shakira and Jennifer Lopez were in competition, a design that gave their set palpable energy.

Thanks to the perpetually lost shark on her left, Katy Perry’s 2015 Super Bowl appearance became one of the first halftime shows to be cut up into memeable bits on the internet. Her candy-colored stage show seemed designed with the internet in mind but Perry also displayed the good sense to dedicate a sizable portion of her set to Missy Elliott, who came out and played three songs with the pop star, overshadowing both her host and Lenny Kravitz, who popped up earlier in the set.

Madonna’s halftime show helped set the stage for the release of MDNA, a cannily contemporary dance record featuring “Give Me All Your Luvin’,” a single with Nicki Minaj and M.I.A. Both artists share the stage with Madonna, as do CeeLo Green and LMFAO, the latter carbon-dating this performance to 2012. The guests hardly overwhelm Madonna. Instead, she seems like a carnival ringleader, completely in control of all the sounds and sights on her stage.

Out peddling Working On A Dream—his 16th studio album, released just days prior to the Super Bowl—Bruce Springsteen relied on all of his old showman tricks to deliver a rousing set of crowd-pleasers, playing the Super Bowl stage as if it was his own. The only slow point? That’d be “Working On A Dream,” which slows the momentum even though the E Street Band takes a full gospel choir along for the ride, but “Glory Days” provides a note-perfect conclusion for a Super Bowl set.

A born entertainer, Bruno Mars packed in a little of everything into his 2014 halftime set. He set the groove by pounding away on a drum kit all on his own, then he brought new wave to Vegas on “Knocked Out Of Heaven” all before jamming with the Red Hot Chili Peppers on “Give It Away,” ending the whole shebang on the sentimental note of “Just The Way You Are.” He delivered enough high-octane thrills to work his way back onto the stage a mere two years later.

Leave the spectacle for the other acts: the best working rock and roll band of their time decided to play the world’s largest stage by acting like it was the dive bar down the street, knocking out their greatest hits with no fuss and plenty of vigor. Unless you count Mike Campbell’s double-neck guitar, there’s barely anything here in the way of stagecraft, but that’s the charm of the show: Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers treated the Super Bowl like just another gig and sounded as great as they did on any given Sunday.

Give Usher credit for this: he upstaged Taylor Swift with ease. In the days before Super Bowl LVIII, all the chatter surrounded Swift attending the game to cheer on her boyfriend Travis Kelce, treating Usher’s halftime show as something of an afterthought, thereby giving the veteran R&B singer an opportunity to surprise with a dazzling show—which is precisely what he did. Working within the Super Bowl’s established framework of nonstop medley, Usher offered a reminder of the depth and consistency of his catalog, happily indulging in millennial nostalgia—almost all the hits from his 2004 album Confessions were aired, including “My Boo” with guest Alicia Keys clad entirely in sequined red—while simultaneously demonstrating he hasn’t lost a step by singing his vocals live, a feat that very few other halftime show performers have ever attempted. His voice supple and strong, Usher also acted as a cheerful master of ceremonies, flirting with the camera, reviving the glory days of roller-disco, and welcoming H.E.R., Lil Jon, and Ludacris to the stage, alongside a host of dancers, gymnasts, and marching bands. It was a warm, joyous spectacle, one of the best pure entertainments in Super Bowl history.

Opening with a medley of “God Bless America” and “This Land Is Your Land” felt like a politically charged salvo in the early days of the Trump administration, but Lady Gaga didn’t have protest on her mind during her halftime show. Pulling out all the stops—pyrotechnics, high-wire work, dancers, and crowd work—she offered something akin to a high-concentrate version of the Gaga experience, which was plenty intoxicating.

The performance that effectively is ground zero for modern Super Bowl Halftime Shows, Michael Jackson put spectacle and sentiment on equal footing during his 1993 set. Looking back, it’s slightly jarring to see him perform in the full glare of the Californian sun and it’s also evident he’s using tapes, yet these things ultimately don’t matter: he’s in full command of the crowd, whether he’s racing through the then-recent “Black Or White” or closing with the treacly twofer of “We Are The World” and “Heal The World.”

The easy joke is that Dr. Dre’s star-studded salute to hip-hop and its legacy is proof that rap is now old enough to be an oldies act. To be sure, the set featuring Dre, Snoop Dogg, 50 Cent, Eminem, and Mary J. Blige deliberately pulled nostalgic strings, especially when they nodded to the departed Tupac Shakur during “California Love,” yet it wasn’t only Kendrick Lamar that sounded fiery during this hip-hop revue. Everybody onstage recognized the import of performing the first all-hip-hop halftime show and they delivered a scorcher.

As one of the first major events held after 9/11, the Super Bowl faced a real dilemma: What act could possibly strike the right emotional chords after such an emotionally trying year? The answer was self-evident: draft U2, the masters of outsized sentiment. Opening with “Beautiful Day,” U2 immediately commanded the attention of the arena, then they performed a mesmerizing “MLK” as names of the victims of the September 11 attacks scrolled behind them—a gesture that continued through “Where The Streets Have No Name.” Remarkably, the tribute still seems moving decades later.

Prince played the Super Bowl as if the game hardly mattered to him—and, to be fair, it probably didn’t. Being at the game ignited his competitive streak, though, leading him to deliver a blitzkrieg performance where he blew through some of his hardest rockers (“Let’s Go Crazy,” “Baby I’m A Star”), then performed a medley of unexpected covers of Creedence Clearwater Revival’s “Proud Mary,” Bob Dylan’s “All Along The Watchtower,” and Foo Fighters’ “Best Of You” before closing with a majestic “Purple Rain.” At his best, there was nobody better than Prince, and he was at his best here.

Back in 2013, Beyoncé’s halftime show played almost like a career-capping set, not only taking stock of 10 years of solo hits but finding room for a reunion with Destiny’s Child. A decade later, the show seems designed as the closing of a chapter, a crowd-pleasing set that clears the deck so Beyoncé could challenge herself artistically. The existence of Beyoncé, Lemonade, and Renaissance hardly diminish the power of this halftime show, though. It remains a tour de force, an illustration of her range, and a demonstration of her white-hot intensity.