Las Vegas Review-Journal (Sunday)
Reviews of Beautiful, iHeart festivals
Money falls from the sky, as if we needed to literalize the metaphor that these are the people who still make it rain in the music business, enough cash to carpet the floor of T-Mobile Arena.
But the the last of them at Friday’s iHeartRadio Music Festival was U2, rock’s best-loved agitators. A huge confetti drop of play money papered this giant celebration of corporate radio with bills bearing Donald Trump’s face and the motto “Make America Hate Again.”
“Are you ready to gamble the American dream?” Bono taunted after a video clip of Trump declaring “The American dream is dead” flowed into the opening song, “Desire.” “What do you have to lose? Everything?”
A few songs later, though, it was Martin Luther King Jr.’s face on the screen during “Pride in the Name of Love,” shifting the tone to one that better summed up the inclusiveness of a festival blurring musical boundaries.
Bono explained that he and his Irish mates fell in love with the United States “not just as a country, but as an idea,” a place that “holds sacred the idea that a man or woman is not defined by his ethnicity or religion.”
If that was “stretching your tolerance of freedom of speech,” as Bono put it, you still had a fireworks show. Drake being Drake, he didn’t need anything behind him but a massive display of vertical spotlights and pyrotechnics, as he told us he liked our style — “This might be the most energetic iHeart I’ve ever seen” — and proclaimed it an honor that iHeart was willing to “have a rapper here.”
Or maybe you prefer the silent type: Sia’s commentary-free performance art, with the enigmatic pop singer planted on a platform to the side of a 90-degree projection surface. An arena full of people watched from the sidelines of this “green screen” video studio as a quintet of dancers created the avant-garde visuals going out to all of TV/computer land.
The big takeaway from Sia’s show? It might look like a lopsided matchup, but don’t just assume the giant panda head stands no chance against the big red hammer.
Just about every act from Billy Idol to Drake, the ones who talked anyway, seemed willing to agree the evening could have been billed as “U2 with seven opening acts.” Even the added pre-show band, pop-rockers Los 5, noted it “seems impossible” to be playing on the same bill.
But there were plenty of other stylistic threads, from OneRepublic singer Ryan Tedder’s earnest vocal intro and piano-and-cello scoring of “Apologize” to Twenty One Pilots’ Tyler Joseph going all 1983 Bono and running through the crowd, then climbing a perch behind the arena soundboard.
The iHeartRadio fest exists to promote an app bundling more than 800 radio stations, in all formats, owned by the former Clear Channel Communications. But whether on purpose or by coincidence, the first night of the two-day event showed genre lines merging onto the top of a piano: Both Tedder and Joseph ended up on one, but only Joseph had a black ski mask.
Both Friday’s and Saturday’s shows were streamed and broadcast on live radio and video websites CWTV.com and The CW app. But hang on, you say, the title’s got “radio” in it.
If you were going old school and listening on one of 150 radio stations around the country, you couldn’t see the ski mask, the red hammer or the fireworks. Hmm, that’s rough. But maybe you were listening hard enough to hear that both pop-country hunk Sam Hunt and Twenty One Pilots’ Joseph also blurred genre lines with their spoken narrative intros to “Breakup in a Small Town” and “Car Radio,” respectively.
And if you’re still loyal to one age group or demographic, no matter how hard Billy Idol and Miley Cyrus tried to bridge them by singing “Rebel Yell” together? Hey, you could bail early. There was a shocking number of empty seats for U2 by the 11:30 p.m. homestretch.
But that sort of fits into the new freedom of custom radio, too. Take it or leave it, but the iHeart folk put on a colorful show that didn’t have that canned feeling of the Billboard Music Awards, where the audience feels like it’s at a talk-show taping.
Nope, red hammers and Trump dollars aside, Drake, Hunt and Bono didn’t need to do anything more than work that thrust stage into the audience and reach out to eager hands. It’s that star quality, as old as Top 40 radio.