Review: The Backstreet Boys ate a bunch of kids’ lunches at Wango Tango
“Here’s a newer song,” Adam Levine said, “for those of you not born before the other ones.”
Give the man credit for knowing his audience: Leading his band Maroon 5 on Saturday night at Wango Tango — the annual all-star pop concert presented by Los Angeles’ KIIS-FM (102.7) — Levine, 38, was addressing a crowd filled with kids too young to have witnessed the group’s ascent, long before the singer became a judge on “The Voice.”
“This song’s from 2002,” he said before “Harder to Breathe,” and he might as well have been introducing “Swanee River.”
Yet Maroon 5 has stuck around. The newer tune Levine promised was “Don’t Wanna Know,” a slinky electronic production whose success — it reached No. 6 on Billboard’s Hot 100 in February — seems to have surprised the musicians playing “our 14,000th Wango Tango,” as Levine put it.
“We can’t even believe we’re still here,” he added.
They weren’t the only veterans at Wango Tango, which typically showcases fresh sounds but which this year felt more like a testament to endurance.
Closing the five-hour concert, held at the StubHub Center in Carson, were the Backstreet Boys, whose AJ McLean pointed out that the group last played Wango Tango in 2001.
The pioneering boy band is now in the Las Vegas phase of its career with a residency at Planet Hollywood (where Britney Spears also holds down a regular gig). Here, though, the Backstreet Boys ran through old hits like “As Long as You Love Me” and “The Call” with the kind of muscle that rarely develops on the Strip; “Larger Than Life,” which interpolated a bit of Kanye West’s “Fade,” was actually harder-edged than it was nearly two decades ago.
Katy Perry and Miley Cyrus, two pop stars with plenty of style-hopping hits behind them, each turned up at Wango Tango to show off her latest reinvention.
For Perry, that was the aggressive raunch of “Bon Appétit,” a brand-new single in which the now-short-haired singer deploys more food-based double-entendres than seems possible inside four minutes.
The song isn’t great; in fact, it may be terrible. But you had to admire Perry’s conviction as she writhed lasciviously before a wall of video screens flashing images of glistening fruit and soft-serve ice cream — a bold turn from the touchy-feely self-help jams of her 2013 album, “Prism.”
Four years ago, Perry’s bawdy display would’ve been expected in a performance by Cyrus, who was then testing the sexual limits placed upon a former Disney Channel star.
On Saturday, though, Cyrus was playing “Malibu” — a strummy midtempo love song about sitting “under the sun with my feet in the sand” — in concert for the first time. So instead of twerking she skipped blithely across the stage, tossing her long locks as multicolored balloons bounced around her.
Then, just to drive home the all-natural rebrand she’s selling, she belted a very strong rendition of Dolly Parton’s “Jolene.”
Even with all these lifers on hand, Wango Tango made room for some of the flash-in-the-pan acts that keep Top 40 radio moving. There was Machine Gun Kelly, the scowling hip-hop lightweight who brought out Camila Cabello (formerly of Fifth Harmony) to do their corny “Bad Things” duet.
There was Hailee Steinfield, the actor turned pop-star wannabe whose “Most Girls” borrowed textures from any number of recent hits without adding any detectable personality.
And there was Cyrus’ younger sister, 17-year-old Noah, who made a bigger impression with her nutty headgear — a visor similar to those famously worn by V. Stiviano — than with her deeply forgettable “Stay Together.”
“Whoa, oh, oh, oh,” she sang, “Nothing lasts forever.”
She said it, not me.
Twitter: @mikaelwood
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