The Rolling Stone Blog

Black Eyed Peas To Headline Super Bowl XLV Halftime Show

By | The Rolling Stone Blog – Thu, Nov 18, 2010 9:18 AM EST

The Black Eyed Peas have been confirmed as headliners for the halftime show at Super Bowl XLV, according to the Dallas Morning News. This report comes two months after unconfirmed reports that the hip-pop act would headline the NFL championship game, which will be played at Cowboys Stadium in Dallas on February 6.

The Peas will represent the Super Bowl's first foray into pop music after the "wardrobe malfunction" involving Janet Jackson and Justin Timberlake that took place during Super Bowl XXXVIII in 2004. In the years since that incident, the halftime show's bookers relied on artists with a lot of back catalog — Paul McCartney, Prince, Tom Petty, Bruce Springsteen — to bridge the gap between the big game's halves.

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But after the Who's performance during Super Bowl XLIV's halftime show in February, Fox Sports president David Hill vowed that when the big game moved back to his network in 2011, the musical entertainment would get younger.

"I'm watching [the Who] going, 'Oh no, please,' " Hill told the Los Angeles Times in March. At the time, he expressed a preference for a country act to headline the halftime show, given that the game was in Texas and that his job required him to be immersed in NASCAR, which Fox also televises.

Despite that, though, the Peas taking the halftime slot shouldn't be a surprise — they shared a bill with Tim McGraw for a celebration of the 2009-2010 NFL season's launch, and Peas singer Stacy "Fergie" Ferguson duetted with Marc Anthony on the national anthem before a contest between the New York Jets and the Miami Dolphins earlier this season. Peas leader will.i.am also debuted his reworking of Bob Dylan's "Forever Young" in a Pepsi commercial that aired during Super Bowl XLIII in 2009.

The group's sixth album The Beginning comes out November 30. Its lead single, "The Time (Dirty Bit)," debuted at No. 12 on the just-released edition of the Billboard Hot 100.

Black Eyed Peas to play Super Bowl XLV halftime show at Cowboys Stadium [Dallas Morning News] 

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