The guys flirted, flattered, implored, made promises and pined over lost love. The gals topping the bill praised themselves and, more often than not, gave guys the brushoff or a kiss-off. The guys capered all over the stage, working hard to impress the primarily female audience with their manly vitality. The women were choreographed, flaunting both their preparation and their bump-and-grind skills.
That’s how it went at the iHeartRadio Jingle Ball on Friday night at Madison Square Garden, the annual gathering of Top 40 acts formerly known as the Z100 Jingle Ball, promoting and promoted by the pop radio station WHTZ (100.3 FM), also known as Z100.
Stations in the iHeartRadio network are presenting Jingle Balls across the country for the holiday season, many with a lineup largely similar to the one at Madison Square Garden. But this show, four hours long with 16 acts, was the flagship.
The concert was broadcast nationwide on radio, webcast live at Yahoo Live and is soon to be edited into a two-hour television special for the CW Network. It was headlined by Taylor Swift, who has the current No. 1 hit, “Blank Space” and who, with ideal timing, spent the first minutes of her 25th birthday, on Dec. 13, performing onstage to happily screaming, dancing fans.
The pop song fantasyland is a refuge from the real world, which has growing concerns about campus rapes and other sexual harassment and assaults. Young women are the most avid Top 40 listeners; the concert was full of teens and preteens, some of whom were probably being treated to their first concert by the parents who brought them.
On the Jingle Ball stage, women were amorous, desired and in charge. While men promised romance in songs like OneRepublic’s “Counting Stars” or pleaded for more togetherness as Sam Smith did in “Stay With Me,” women delivered songs with titles like “Break Free” (Ariana Grande), “Bang Bang” (Jessie J. and Ms. Grande), “Burning Up” (Jessie J.) and “Boom Clap” (Charli XCX).
“You can look boy, but don’t you touch,” the Australian rapper Iggy Azalea spat out in “Beg for It,” haughtily tossing back her head.
She was fast, cutting and assured; for a young pop audience, it didn’t matter that she got so much of her act from Nicki Minaj and Missy Elliott.
Coming out of country and pop, instead of hip-hop, Ms. Swift isn’t that confrontational; she proceeds with poised self-confidence, smiling zingers and songs that bounce along in major chords. “Blank Space” gets ready for a romance that is “gonna be forever, or it’s gonna go down in flames,” and goes on with cynical anticipation: “Wait, the worst is yet to come.” When Ms. Swift sang “down in flames,” flash pots behind her flared on cue.
Unlike most of the other women on the bill, Ms. Swift had a huge live band, complete with horn section and backup singers. Iggy Azalea, Ms. Grande, Jessie J., Rita Ora and Meghan Trainor used recorded tracks or a DJ. That suited their music, which seeks a radio-friendly convergence of R&B, hip-hop, four-on-the-floor dance music and — somewhere in the distance — girl-group pop.
There was also another convergence: The Swedish producer Max Martin, who has been writing hits since the mid-1990s, when he supplied songs for the Backstreet Boys and Britney Spears, had a hand in Jingle Ball songs from Ms. Swift, Jessie J. and Ms. Grande.
A former teenage actress who moved into pop, Ms. Grande was an effortless trouper onstage, with a high, creamy voice holding just enough bite to grab a radio listener’s attention.
Men brought bands. 5 Seconds of Summer, from Australia, plays mischievous but smoothly tuned pop-rock on its album, and it drew joyful squeals and singalongs throughout its set — especially during “Amnesia,” which bemoans how an ex-girlfriend has forgotten the narrator’s suffering.
Onstage, the group went for a simulation of punk: black T-shirts, walloping drums, blaring guitars and unkempt vocals. The 16-year-old Canadian songwriter Shawn Mendes, an Internet sensation, had a huge part of the audience with him demographically, although he had only his acoustic guitar for backup. “Something, I feel it happening, out of my control,” he sang, and he may be right.
Sam Smith, a cherubic English singer, writes lovelorn ballads that wallow in dependency; he sings them in a supple tenor that moves into a richly androgynous falsetto, while his band gazes back toward vintage soul.
But for all his purity of tone, he sounded more studied than soulful. OneRepublic can chime like U2 or thump four-on-the-floor beats behind sentiments like “Losing sleep, dreaming about the things that we could be.” Its leader and singer, Ryan Tedder, worked the stage and raced into the audience, posing for selfies with fans.
Maroon 5 took the stage to high-voiced jubilation, and Adam Levine — the band’s singer, lately a coach on “The Voice” — hit all his high notes, to no avail. The band made songs like “Maps” and “Animals” so repetitive that conversation replaced attention.
Pop runs on repetition and familiarity, but it needs something more than a hook played again and again.
It needs a jolt, a startling image, an arresting voice, a key change, a personal revelation. At this year’s Jingle Ball, those belonged to women. Ms. Swift, Iggy Azalea, Ms. Grande, Charli XCX — and to 5 Seconds of Summer, which was removing itself from pop’s artificial perfection.
Everyone else was treating a concert like a radio show.
