The Musical Box

madonna lightens up at a super bowl press conference last week. ap photo by matt slocum.

 If ever a star was born to play the Super Bowl, it was Madonna. And for the 15 speed-of-light minutes that she commanded last night’s halftime show, she proved why.

Eschewing all hints of controversy, the 53 year old pop matriarch offered a performance that wildly emphasized the visual and left nothing – especially her vocals – to chance.

From a technical standpoint, the show was undeniably dazzling, an overload of pageantry (she entered like a glammed up Roman empress to the electro beats of Vogue and vanished through a trap door enveloped by fog following Like a Prayer), dance and manufactured groove.

There was a marching band, but no discernible backup band. There was singing galore, but very little of it seemed live. But it was a stadium sized celebration all the same.

Vogue and the leaner dance crackle of Music (jacked up with a LMFAO cameo) were ideal picks for the set; the oddly G-rated cheerleading strut of the new Give Me All Your Luvin’ (aided by disciples Nicki Minaj and M.I.A.), less so. It all moved with warp speed precision, with Madonna appearing tirelessly athletic. It is a pretty safe guess, though, that all three songs were lip-synched.

The snippet of Respect Yourself that led into Like a Prayer, which threw Cee-lo Green into the mix in an impressive bit of network product placement (the season premiere of his popular talent show The Voice followed the Super Bowl), brought an earthier mood and groove to the set, and maybe even some actual singing. Hard to say for sure.

But then anything approximating a conventional concert profile has never been what Madonna is about. Sure, in some ways, it made you appreciate the 2010 warts-and-all smackdown of The Who. That set was ragged but real. But last night, Madonna opted for spectacle over spontaneity, pageantry over traditional live performance and supreme stage confidence over pop culture controversy.