The Top 10 best Super Bowl Halftime Shows ever

As you may know, the Super Bowl is the annual championship game of the National Football League (NFL), which is normally played in early February as a culmination of the season that begins during summer of the previous year. Any fan of the Super Bowl knows that the Halftime shows are very important for brands and public figures, because the Super Bowl audiences ascend to more than 100 million viewers, which means a great promotion to companies that project their ads and celebrities who act during the Halftime.

A huge showcase that makes this quarter of an hour one of the most sought-after in world music. The performances are made for the public in the stadium, but in reality everything is done for the spectator on the other side of the television in mind, so it is like a big video clip.

The best Super Bowl Halftime Shows of the last years

Now that we know on what the Super Bowl Halftime consists, we will review the best performances with this Super Bowl Halftime show list:

Michael Jackson (1993)

The King of Pop performed one of the top Super Bowl Halftime shows just at the time when he was at the peak of his career. Everybody loved his talent and his latest album “Dangerous”, in which he showed the audience his flair for the music. During this iconic performance, he stood still for 90 seconds and after that he started singing hits such as “Billy Jean”, “We Are the World” or “Black and White”.

Aerosmith together with NSYNC and Britney Spears (2001)

This unlikely union of artists made it to be considered one of the best Super Bowl performances ever. With the frenetic dances of NSYNC and the guitars of Aerosmith, while also Britney Spears and Steven Tyler sung as a duo the song “Walk this Way”.

Prince (2007)

The 4th of February in the Dolphin Stadium of Miami, the audience attended one that we can call the best Super Bowl Halftime Show ever. He started singing “We Will Rock You” and continued with songs such as “Let’s Go Crazy”, “Baby I’m a Star” and “Purple Rain”. It was raining during the performance, which resulted in making Prince’s Halftime Show one of the most dramatics and emotive of all times.

Lady Gaga (2017)

Lady Gaga started her splendid show flying over the audience. Afterwards, pyrotechnics, juggling, choreography and, above all, great successes in chains to try to sweep away in the shortest time possible. For almost 14 minutes, Gaga performed hits such as God Bless America, Poker Face, Born This Way, Telephone, Just Dance, Millions Reasons and Bad Romance, making her performance the second most seen Superbowl Halftime show in history.

The most controversial Super Bowl Halftime shows

After we’ve seen a list of the best Super Bowl Halftime shows ranked, we also want to make a list of Super Bowl Halftime performances which were controversial for different reasons:

The Black Eyed Peas (2011)

The Black Eyed Peas brought plenty of energy to their 2011 performance, but there was a very big incongruence between them and the other artists (Slash and Usher) who performed with them. Also the leather costumes that they were were considered by the audience as unnecessary and bizarre.

Gloria Estefan (1992)

You would say Gloria Stefan’s performance should be one of the best Super Bowl halftimes of all history, but the truth is that they added a bunch of Olympic figure skaters and people in winter-themed costumes who made the performance to a bizarre show.

The Red Hot Chili Peppers (2014)

The famous rock band were together with Bruno Mars the most expected Super Bowl Halftime performers of that year, but when they entered the stage, all their fans noticed their instruments were unplugged. They were really criticized because of the fact that they played over a recording of their own song.

Janet Jackson and Justin Timberlake (2004)

During the 2004 Super Bowl Halftime show, a 9/16 second flash of Janet Jackson’s nipple led to the United States government cracking down on media in 2004. Justin Timberlake revealed a breast of Janet Jackson which wasn’t supposed to be broadcasted on TV. This incident is known as “Nipplegate” and led to the invention of YouTube by Jawed Karim, who came up with the idea when he struggled to find a video of the incident.

Fun facts about the Super Bowl Halftime Shows

Now we want to highlight some of the Super Bowl live Halftime Show top stories

In 1989, the NFL hired an Elvis impersonator. Yes, that’s true! He did a magic trick during a performance of an Elvis song, which clashes with the concept of nowadays high-profile performances.
In 2012, M.I.A. gave everyone the middle finger and got sued for more than $16 million in 2012. In the middle of a great performance from Madonna, LMFAO, Nicki Minaj, and Cee Lo Green, the rapper M.I.A. gave the middle finger during her dance moves and the NFL sued her for $16.6 million.

Super Bowl Halftime Shows special effects

During the Super Bowl Halftime Shows, we have seen a lot of special effects in the performances of artists using lights and moving platforms, but also in the commercials, which are also very important for the event. Some commercials that have used special effects are “Babylandia” by Kia or the ad “The Man Your Man Could Smell Like” from Old Spice, which showed a lot of difficult camera movements.

Super Bowl Halftime Shows: other great artists that performed

Now that we have seen the best Super Bowl Halftime ever, we want to comment on the Half Time Show Super Bowl 2020, which was performed by Shakira and Jennifer Lopez. They were spectacular during the whole show and showed the rise of the latino artists above a lot of pop music. Apart from last year’s Superbowl Halftime, there are also other great artists that we did not comment on in this article, wich are: Madonna in 2015, Katy Perry in 2015 and Beyoncé in 2016, among others.