Every year the Super Bowl Halftime Show is always highly anticipated to be an elaborate over-the-top performance that everybody gets excited to watch. Not everyone particularly loves to watch the actual sport of football, but the halftime concert is fun for everyone. This year at Super Bowl LVIII in Allegiant Stadium Las Vegas, Usher was the halftime show performer! He had a super exciting flashy show with tons of impressive dancing, props, stage changes, and fun lights to keep the audience interested. 

This year there were mixed emotions about Usher being the performer. Some people were super excited since he has some nostalgic songs, while on the other hand, people recognized that he hasn’t released popular music in a long time. He has lost relevance in the music industry without having a mainstream popular song for at least a couple of years, so this halftime show is a way to remind everybody that he’s still around. Also, the halftime show is great publicity for him since he released a new album a couple of days before the game called Coming Home and is going on tour this year.

I would say he surprised the critics by performing with three costume changes, lots of flashy choreography, and numerous surprise guests including Alicia Keys, H.E.R., Will.i.am, Ludacris, Lil Jon and more. He is 45 years old and still had a super fun elaborate performance with multiple stages and dance moves which is very impressive.

Everybody was specifically excited that Alicia Keys was there to perform the iconic song “My Boo” from 2004. There was slight controversy over this since Alicia Keys had a voice crack on the first note that was later edited out from the official video of the performance on YouTube. Also, Usher’s seductive dance moves with Alicia Keys and motioning around her had a lot of people including me questioning if they had dated or not. The answer was that he just got married to someone else three prior to the show and she has been married for over ten years, so this rubbed some people the wrong way. People were even speculating that it looked like she was dancing away from him which might not be true, but is very funny.

There are a lot of expectations that come with being a Super Bowl performer and it is almost impossible to please everybody. There were a few things that disappointed fans starting with Usher not singing “DJ Got Us Fallin’ in Love” which is probably his second most popular song. I would assume he didn’t perform this since Pitbull is featured on this track and if Pitbull didn’t want to perform with him it would disappoint the crowd and/or be embarrassing for Usher. Another surprise guest that people wanted to perform is Justin Bieber who was in attendance at the Super Bowl but did not join Usher on stage. People wanted Justin Bieber to come out to recreate their iconic performance of “Somebody to Love.” 

Even though I don’t know many popular Usher songs and the only one during this performance I knew well was “Yeah!”, I still really enjoyed watching the halftime show. I love it when artists go over the top with backup dancers and different props to make the show as fun as possible, like Katy Perry’s halftime show which is my all-time favorite. I think Usher did a great job trying to keep the crowd excited with lots of fun things going on and different surprise guests which was interesting to see. It was also super cool that they had fans around the stages on the field dancing along which performed a fun concert vibe. Overall, even though Usher isn’t my favorite artist, I think he did the best he could to make his halftime show fun to watch and I was entertained by his performance.