Black Eyed Peas Rock Super Bowl halftime with Usher, Slash

It lasted only 12 minutes. But the Black Eyed Peas had some surprises to offer in their halftime performance at Super Bowl XLV.

The four Peas made a grand entrance, descending together from the rafters, and were often accompanied by hordes of glowing dancers.

Guns N’ Roses guitarist Slash joined them for the GNR hit “Sweet Child o’ Mine” (with Fergie singing lead) — Slash wore a glittering top hat, Fergie wore glittering shoulder pads. Elsewhere in the miniset, she sometimes seemed strident when she was trying to be soulful, but she did fine here.

Usher, who also descended from the rafters, sang, danced and stole the halftime show by leaping over will.i.am, and into a split position, during “OMG.”

The Black Eyed Peas touched on a lot of their big hits: “I Gotta Feeling,” “Boom Boom Pow,” “Where Is the Love?”, “The Time” (their adaptation of the “Dirty Dancing” anthem, “(I’ve Had) The Time of My Life”). There were some minor technical glitches — the sound occasionally went out for a moment or two, at least on TV (who knows what it sounded like on the field). And while it’s true that when there wasn’t something spectacular going on, visually, they didn’t offer much in the way of vocal dynamics, it’s also true that there was usually something spectacular going on, visually — those hordes of glowing dancers really were pretty cool — so the 12 minutes passed very quickly.

It was a solid B performance — but nowhere near an A.

Booking the Black Eyed Peas was something of a departure for the Super Bowl, which in recent years has favored classic-rockers — the Who, Bruce Springsteen, Tom Petty, Prince, Paul McCartney and the Rolling Stones have headlined the last six Bowls.

“Glee” star Lea Michele sang “American the Beautiful” before the game, and Christina Aguilera handled the national anthem. Aguilera sang with bluesy grit but fumbled one of her lines, leaving out “O’er the ramparts we watched, were so gallantly streaming.” She unintentionally subbed a line from earlier in the song, “What so proudly we hailed at the twilight’s last gleaming,” and messed that up as well, singing “watched” instead of “hailed.”