Reactions and Thoughts: Panic! At The Disco Concert and Super Bowl Halftime Show

Hey guys! So there are two recent events that I want to talk about and I didn't feel like writing two separate posts, so they'll just both be in this one. We all saw the uneventful Super Bowl Sunday evening, or at least the halftime show. Even if you didn't see it, you probably heard about it. So I'm going to talk about that and give my thoughts, although not as in depth as I did last year. I'm also going to talk about an event I had just recently attended. Panic! At The Disco came to my city this past Monday evening for the Pray For The Wicked Tour and I had gotten a pair of tickets as a Christmas gift. So I'll talk about the concert and what I thought of it.


I'll start with my thoughts on seeing Panic! At The Disco live for the first time. I've been a fan of them for quite a few years now and this is the first time I've actually had the chance to see them live. It was very exciting going into it. The opening acts were Betty Who and Two Feet. I was not familiar with Two Feet before the show, but I have enjoyed some of Betty Who's work in the past. She was the one who started the show and performed for about a half hour. I thought she did a great job and was very entertaining. She's a great singer and was actually a great dancer as well. She performed a few of her songs ending with her debut single, Somebody Loves You. So I really enjoyed that. Two Feet then performed a bunch of songs I didn't know, but it was very interesting nonetheless. His voice was pretty good and it was entertaining to watch him.


Then came Panic! At The Disco and the opening is probably the best opening I've ever seen. There was a 10-minute count down before (Fuck A) Silver Lining started playing and then right before the first chorus, Brendon Urie just jumped up from under the stage and started performing and it was so energetic and so fun. It was the perfect song choice to open the show. Don't Threaten Me With A Good Time came next. I never actually got into the song when Death Of A Bachelor was released, but now I thoroughly enjoy and seeing it performed live definitely helped. I still love the "I make these high heels work" line. Then we got Ready To Go (Get Me Out Of My Mind) from Vices & Virtues, followed by Hey Look Ma, I Made It, LA Devotee, Hallelujah, and Crazy=Genius. I really enjoyed all of them even though I never thought Hallelujah was that good of a song. But the performance of it was really good. Then we got some older Panic! classics like The Ballad Of Mona Lisa and Nine In The Afternoon, both of which are great songs.


A little bit later into the show, we got Dancing's Not A Crime, which I've called one of the worst songs on Pray For The Wicked, although it wasn't bad by any means. While there are still much better songs from the album, I find it quite enjoyable now. Originally, it felt a little overproduced, but now that doesn't bother me. It's just a fun song. After that was This Is Gospel, which I know is a fan favorite and definitely one of my favorite Panic! songs of all time, especially the piano version that is on YouTube. I really enjoyed the performance of that. Then Brendon went off the stage and was walking through the crowd while singing Death Of A Bachelor. I was far away from the stage, so he didn't come near us, but it was still cool to watch and the man really has an insane vocal range, which was shown many other times throughout the show. He then made his way through the crowd to the other end of the arena where there was a piano. So he did a short cover of I Can't Make You Love Me by Bonnie Raitt and that lead into the Pray For The Wicked closer, Dying In LA, which is a very beautiful song in my opinion. As he was performing with the piano, the platform was getting lifted and carried him with the piano all the way back to the stage, which I thought was very cool. Everyone also had their phone flashlights on and it looked very pretty. Dying In LA was definitely one of the highlights of the entire show because I thought it was very beautiful.


After returning to the stage, Brendon started talking and mentioned something about how he always wanted to be friends with Hugh Jackman, and I immediately knew what was coming next. For those who don't know, Hugh Jackman is also known as The Greatest Showman himself. So Brendon performed his cover of The Greatest Show, which was amazing. After that was Girls/Girls/Boys from Too Weird To Live, Too Rare To Die, which the LGBTQ community has interpreted as a song above equal love and that kind of stuff. When my brother and I found our seats before the show, we found little orange hearts in our cup holders that said to shine our phone flashlights through the piece of paper during Girls/Girls/Boys. I didn't get it at the time, but when the song started playing, it made sense. Different sections of the audience had different colors, so when lit, it was one giant rainbow. Brendon also had his big rainbow flag, which I loved. There was also colorful confetti and the screen at the back of the stage was a rainbow. It was all very pretty and I can only imagine how amazing it was for all the other LGBTQ teens in the audience. Definitely another big highlight.


Immediately after was King Of The Clouds, which in my opinion is one of the best songs from Pray For The Wicked. It was very cool performance because the stage became a stage of clouds, showing that he is the king of the clouds, which I thought looked really cool. He also showed his voice and range very nicely here especially. Great song and great performance. Next was High Hopes because it just had to be performed eventually. It's still a great song even though has played the hell out of it these past several months. It holds up very well, which is a good thing. The performance of it was very enjoyable. After that was a song that I for some reason did not think would be performed, which was Miss Jackson. Objectively, the song seems pretty basic in comparison to Panic!'s other work from Too Weird To Live, Too Rare To Die, but I just find the song very enjoyable and I loved the performance of it because between LOLO's second verse and the final chorus, we got a great drum solo from Brendon and it was very entertaining.


Next was the second to last performance of a Pray For The Wicked song, which was Roaring 20s. I never found this song particularly amazing, but I really like Brendon's vocals on it. The performance of it was very energetic and fun and helped make the song even better for me, which is a good thing. After that Brendon did his cover of Bohemian Rhapsody, which he introduced as the greatest song of all time. While I personally don't think it's the best of all time, it's definitely up there because it is quite amazing. Usually I'm pretty critical of covers of iconic songs. But I've always liked Panic!'s cover of Bohemian Rhapsody quite a bit. It's obviously not as amazing as the original. But Brendon without a doubt has the range to be able to sing the song well, especially during the bridge. He performed the first half of it on the piano before the band came back in. He sounded amazing and it was very enjoyable, so I consider it another highlight. Then immediately after was Emperor's New Clothes. I love the song and I thought the performance was epic. He even put on a crown, which just went so well with the song. As I said, his range was incredible. I absolutely loved it because it was so much fun.


Then it came down to the last three songs. This part of the show was very enjoyable, partially because Brendon took his shirt off. So it was very enjoyable for my eyes. But anyway first was Say Amen (Saturday Night), which was amazing of course. It's still a great song that I have loved since its release and the performance was no different. Then of course was I Write Sins Not Tragedies, which is easily one of their biggest hits. I believe Brendon introduced it as the song that got it started for them as it was their first massive hit. The performance was fantastic and it's such an iconic song for the band that there's no way one could've not enjoyed it. The big closer for the show was Victorious, which I thought was a good choice because the song is very energetic. Brendon sounded great as did the band. It was fun, loud, and a great way to close out the show.


I thought the entire show was honestly incredible. Brendon Urie was fantastic and shout outs to guitarist Mike Naran and bassist Nicole Row. The show wouldn't have been nearly as amazing without the great touring members. As far as the set list went, I thought it was a great list. There are apparently two different set lists as the tour has been doing on since July of 2018. So there's a 2018 set list and a 2019 set list. They're both pretty similar except going into 2019, they removed Nicotine from the set list, which is unfortunate because it's a great song. But they replaced it with The Greatest Show, which is fine because that's a great song too. They also never performed The Overpass despite it being the best song from Pray For The Wicked. But everything else about the show was amazing enough that it just didn't matter in the end. I still had an absolute blast. My brother even got me this cool little doll when he went to check out the merch. His name is Beebo and he's supposed to be a little Brendon Urie, but he has his own Instagram account. I think he's a cool little souvenir. Here's a photo of him (yes, I know I look tired as hell because I took this right after the show).

I took practically a million photos during the show and I posted some of them in an Instagram post if you wanna check that out (and follow me if you want). Instagram only allows me to post ten photos at a time, which is kind of annoying, but whatever. Overall, I thought the show was fantastic. They brought so much energy and it was a lot of fun. Brendon Urie is an amazing performer and watching him made me think of how amazing it would've been if Panic! At The Disco performed at the Super Bowl Halftime Show because this man is a naturally born performer. He can handle any audience and I think he would've been amazing. But anyway, this concert was amazing and I was surprised I still had my voice the next day because I belted out almost every song as loud as I possibly could. It was amazing and I didn't want it to end. The entire concert gets a perfect 5/5 from me. It was sensational.



Moving on to the less interesting topic, we have the Super Bowl Halftime Show, which was handled by Maroon 5, Travis Scott, and Big Boi. I just want to note that Maroon 5 were clearly very desperate to get rappers to join them because that's clearly how you stay relevant these days since rap has become such a big genre. There's also an article I read a while ago where Adam Levine said that rap music is objectively better than everything else, which is absurd, but that's another discussion I won't get into now. I don't have a lot to say about this halftime performance because there honestly wasn't very much to it. I'm usually pretty nice when judging halftime performances because I understand that performing at the Super Bowl is a hard thing to do. I liked Justin Timberlake's halftime show last year quite a bit despite many criticizing it. But let's be real here, Timberlake did a much better job than Maroon 5 because he is actually a great performer.


The show started with Harder To Breathe and This Love, which is great because I wanted to hear some of the older hits. Adam didn't sound great, but the band sounded okay and I really liked the guitar solo at the end of This Love. But then we got the weird SpongeBob transition into Travis Scott performing Sicko Mode. This was not very interesting at all, although it was quite amusing watching a man as white as Adam try to dance like Travis. Girls Like You was okay only because the gospel choir was interesting. Adam didn't sound very good. Then came She Will Be Loved, which was the only part of the whole performance that I actually liked because I thought it was pretty with all the lanterns. I also really love the song. But then it just went downhill again because we got Big Boi, who was not very good, and then Sugar. Moves Like Jagger was okay, but not that good. And then it just ended.


So to sum up my thoughts, I don't think it was awful, but it felt underwhelming and short. Lady Gaga two years ago put on a performance. Justin Timberlake last year put on a performance. Maroon 5 did not really do that this year and I just thought the show was boring. I understand that they tried and performing at the Super Bowl is hard to do, but it just didn't do anything for me and it's kind of sad because I do really like Maroon 5. But Adam Levine is just not a performer and this didn't work out as well as it should've. Is it the worst halftime performance in history like people are saying? I don't really know. But I do know that it was one of the most underwhelming and disappointing, although I didn't exactly go into this with high expectations. Lady Gaga and Justin Timberlake put on great performances without needing any special guests and Maroon 5 couldn't do that with special guests. So this performance was not very interesting at all, but I do give them credit for trying. So it gets a 1.5/5 from me.


So yeah. Those were my thoughts on the Panic! At The Disco concert and Maroon 5 halftime show. One was much better than the other. Hopefully next year, we get a better performer like Rihanna or Panic!. But that's all I have for you guys today. I hope you enjoyed and I will see you all again soon with my next countdown review post.