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" Before football season kicked off in earnest yesterday with its first full Sunday slate, Fox Sports made a big announcement about the event that&amp;#039;ll cap it off on February 2. Bruno Mars will be Super Bowl XLVIII&amp;#039;s halftime musical performer. As the news sent waves of puzzled looks and shoulder shrugs across the country, two things became immediately clear: First, that we&amp;#039;re running precariously low on extant classic-rock musicians, and second, that the cabal of brands behind the Super Bowl are willing to go to any lengths to avoid attracting the wrong kind of attention, even if it means avoiding the good kind as well. The Super Bowl halftime show is the most-watched televised musical event in the world, and the decision regarding who will perform it is based on a type of calculus aimed at identifying the exact middle of the road of American tastes. Ever since Janet Jackson&amp;#039;s 2004 wardrobe malfunction outraged the apparently millions of Americans who are still able to be outraged over a brief kinda-glimpse of an almost bare nipple, the powers that be have gotten increasingly ruthless about what acts they choose. Classic rockers, with their built-in cross-generational appeal and fully extinguished rebellious streaks, have been the go-to option ever since, although contemporary pop stars who are professional and/or mercenary enough not to put sponsor dollars at risk by doing anything out of pocket (Black Eyed Peas, Madonna) get booked every couple years to keep up the semblance of the show being in touch with modern times. The thing is that we&amp;#039;re running out of classic rock stars who are popular enough and physically healthy enough to carry the entire Super Bowl halftime, and the old-school show business producers who are most frequently tapped to run these things probably don&amp;#039;t know what to do with a fractured pop-music landscape where the Billboard Hot 100 is as frequently topped by an unknown performer whose song got used in an Internet meme as it is by a full-blown pop star. What are they going to do, book Baauer and PSY as co-headliners alongside a parade of Internet-famous cats? (Actually, that doesn&amp;#039;t sound bad...) Bruno Mars&amp;#039;s two defining qualities, at least as far as the people behind the Super Bowl are concerned, are that he writes contemporary music that references enough old music so that older demographics find it accessible, and that he&amp;#039;s not going to do something dumb and pull a Kanye with his moment under the biggest spotlight in the music world. Basically someone in an office somewhere crunched a bunch of numbers and determined that Bruno Mars is the blandest, most inoffensive pop star working.      If you want a good idea of what&amp;#039;s in store for Super Bowl XLVIII&amp;#039;s halftime, take a look at Bruno Mars&amp;#039;s performance from the VMAs a couple of weeks back. Most of the way through a night of confusing and occasionally flat-out bad ideas for stealing attention from other performers, Mars gave a capable, stunt-free performance that reaffirmed a few classical ideals of professional showmanship. It was also profoundly boring. Mars is a great singer and an even better songwriter, but he doesn&amp;#039;t have the catalog to support a whole massive production like the Super Bowl halftime, even if you throw in the hits he&amp;#039;s written for other people. And more importantly, even if he did, there&amp;#039;s just something deeply unexciting about him as a performer. Keep in mind that this is a pop star who made getting busted for cocaine possession seem kinda mundane. And this is exactly what the brands behind the Super Bowl love about him: He&amp;#039;s the anti-Miley who will most likely barely generate much water-cooler talk the day after, never mind some sort of scandal that could result in fines or depressed stock values. It doesn&amp;#039;t matter that he&amp;#039;s a B-lister with just two albums and four hits to his name. Instead of the wealth of major artists out there currently making works that might possibly alienate one segment of the audience or another (including the tons of rap and country stars that aren&amp;#039;t getting offered these gigs), we&amp;#039;re getting the guy with the Teflon-like ability to not stick to your brain. It&amp;#039;s so inoffensive that it&amp;#039;s offensive. They may as well go back to booking Up with People.      -- Miles Raymer is a music writer based in New York City who has contributed to the Chicago Reader, Vice, Pitchfork, and others. Follow The Culture Blog on RSS and on Twitter at @ESQCulture. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/entertainment/music/a24647/bruno-mars-super-bowl/>