Musical acts bare their souls at iHeart

The future collided with the past. Sneakers were immolated. A burly Southern whisker farmer played a rock-opera classic originally sung by a British unitard aficionado. A pint-sized pop star showcased a voice positioned somewhere between Grande-ur and agitation. A leering, long-haired DJ hurled baked goods at folks. And all everyone could seem to talk about afterward was a certain rapper’s butt.

That was a mouthful.

It proved to be just as much of an earful.

Much like its host city, the two-day iHeart Radio Music Festival is posited on willful overindulgence, a belt-loosening buffet of music, sales pitches, promotional opportunities and intramural back slapping, with Friday’s concert at the MGM Grand Garden spanning four-and-a-half hours and 11 performances.

“Here we are all in Las Vegas because we love listening to the radio, don’t we?” show opener Taylor Swift chirped. And while she certainly wasn’t being disingenuous, neither was she merely speaking the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, so help the ever-present gods of marketing.

Artists were here to flog new albums and/or tours, and the festival’s organizer, radio behemoth Clear Channel Communications, launched the event, now in its fourth year, to promote its iHeartRadio Internet radio platform.

Between sets, commercials hawking whiskey and car insurance were shown on the video screens that bookended the rotating stage. Also shown were taped clips in which various acts saluted other artists on the bill, such as DJ-producer Steve Aoki, the aforementioned cake flinger, testifying to his newfound love of Brit boy band One Direction, who were scheduled to appear on Saturday.

Speaking of Aoki, he represented the continually growing prominence, pull and market share of electronic dance music.

Over the past couple of years at the festival, DJs were relegated to a platform in the back of the arena where they played abbreviated sets as a good portion of the crowd departed to refresh their beers.

Aoki, though, performed on the same stage as everyone else and took full advantage of the moment, spending as much time outside the DJ booth as in it, animating his music with a physical bearing as elastic as the pulsating bass lines he conjured on his laptop.

He brought out Black Eyed Peas singer-rapper-producer Will.I.Am. to drop bouncy rhymes over synth lines that swerved to and fro haphazardly, as if attempting to dodge oncoming traffic, and later Fall Out Boy bassist Pete Wentz for some “white raver rafting,” which consisted of Wentz clambering aboard an inflatable watercraft and surfing atop the crowd.

If this is the future of the arena concert experience — all jackhammer beats delivered with pneumatic force, dazzling visuals and luminous laser lights — veteran hard rockers Mötley Crüe reveled in more vintage conceits: leather-clad dancers bending themselves into X-rated pretzels on stripper poles and more pyrotechnics detonated than in the entire Michael Bay film oeuvre.

It was like the Fourth of July with boobs.

Currently ensconced on their farewell tour, the band compensated for singer Vince Neil’s buried, hard-to-discern vocals with enough bursts of flame and sulfurous, nostril-stinging explosions to bring the crowd to the front lines in the war on subtlety and fire codes.

On the subject of flammable materials, there were Usher’s sneakers, which he set ablaze after a dance-off with surprise guest Chris Brown, who joined him for “New Flame” during a combustible, show-closing mix of horn-fired soul and futurist R&B underscored with EDM flourishes.

Aplomb of a different sort, that of the emotional variety, powered Coldplay’s performance.

“I’m gonna give you my heart,” frontman Chris Martin sang on “A Sky Full of Stars,” a song that accelerated from a plaintive strum to a dance floor dervish.

And by “give,” Martin meant fire the thing at you like a bullet exploding from the barrel of a gun.

Then there was the full-bodied bluster of Southern rockers Zac Brown Band, who turned in one of the evening’s most invigorated showings with raucous covers of Led Zeppelin’s “Kashmir,” Charlie Daniels’ “Devil Went Down To Georgia,” during which singer/guitarist Brown and fiddler Jimmy De Martini seemed to duel over who had the faster fingers, and a set-closing take on Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody.”

Those were the dudes, but the ladies commanded just as much of the spotlight on Friday, from an unannounced appearance by a pregnant Alicia Keys, who performed a stirring rendition of new song “We Are Here,” to a transitioning Taylor Swift. She played the first single from her upcoming new record, “1989,” which has her distancing herself further from her already tenuous country roots with the throwback ’50s girl group swing of “Shake It Off.”

Less convincing was pop’s starlet of the moment, Ariana Grande, who has a monster voice but sometimes lost control of it, letting it soar up, up and away, like a balloon escaping a kid’s grip.

Too often, she ended up sounding shrill and almost painfully high-pitched.

Grande’s a talent, but far too enamored with vocal gymnastics, the singing equivalent of a self-indulgent guitar solo, an expression of technical prowess that does more to distract from a song than move it forward.

An actress as well as a singer, Grande seems to be playing a role, that of come-hither chanteuse, one that she doesn’t appear to be fully comfortable inhabiting as of yet.

There are no such qualms when it comes to supremely self-possessed rapper Nicki Minaj, whom Grande joined on Minaj’s “Bang Bang,” bumping backsides at one point.

Minaj is akin to a verbal escape artist. On songs like “Super Bass” and “Did It On ’Em,” she seemed to enjoy tying her tongue in knots and the challenge of then freeing herself from the ensuing tangle of words.

She toggles between pop savvy and swaggering testimonials to herself as a boss both on the streets and between the sheets.

“Can I get ’hood, for like, six minutes?” she questioned at one point, before “Beez in the Trap.”

Minaj was being polite.

She didn’t have to ask.

And she certainly didn’t wait for an answer.

Contact reporter Jason Bracelin at jbracelin@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0476. Follow on Twitter @JasonBracelin.