It’s the year 2019 and we are so tired of Maroon 5. Somewhere around “Moves Like Jagger” it just got to be too much, and all the good grace Adam Levine garnered with Songs About Jane and that track on the next album where he says “fuck” in the chorus feels like it’s been eclipsed by, yeah, mostly “Moves Like Jagger.” It’s hard to believe there was a time when we’d love to have seen a modestly dressed Levine on the Super Bowl halftime stage with his band, prior to any Pitch Perfect cameos or corruptive public associations with Bingo Gubelmann.
I’d pinpoint 2003 as the best year to see the band play halftime—oddly, the year the Patriots were the reigning SB champs, defeating the Rams in the previous season—with Jane singles “Harder to Breathe” reaching ubiquity and “This Love,” “Sunday Morning,” and “She Will Be Loved” not yet receiving excessive airtime across rock and pop stations.
Actually, was there anything about last night’s Super Bowl that wouldn’t have been best set in 2003? As with Maroon 5, most of us have had enough of the Patriots—imagine how much less tedious it would’ve been to see them in a rematch against the Rams in 2003 instead of wasting a precious 2019 Sunday evening. What about Big Boi? Yeah, it was great to see him play to an Atlanta crowd, but what if he was debuting “The Way You Move” to a national audience, hyping the near-imminent release of OutKast’s most commercially appealing record? What about Spongebob? In 2003? Come on. Not to mention the fact that artificial intelligence was the subject of nearly every commercial last night—if I recall correctly, we were still sorting out Jude Law’s role as an android prostitute two years after A.I. hit theaters. Also, did we see Lil John a lot? Guess what year “Get Low” came out.
Does anyone know what Travis Scott was doing when he was eleven?
If you missed last night’s performance, please don’t watch it below:
