iHeart festival finishes with a fervent flourish

About 20 minutes before she flew through the air, looking like Peter Pan if Peter Pan was a Zumba instructor with steel-belted biceps, Pink bellowed out the evening's guiding principle.

"I love when it's all too much," she howled through a hyena smile on "Raise Your Glass," the first song during her show-opening set on the second night of the iHeartRadio Music Festival on Saturday at the MGM Grand Garden.

It was a nod to excess, as was the event itself, with 20 acts, many of whom can and have filled this venue on their own, performing for a combined 12-plus hours over two days.

Pink, a rogue adrenal gland in high-heeled boots, provided a welcome burst of energy after the previous night's show stretched well past 1 a.m.

"I'll be excited for all of us," she beamed between songs that doubled as pop pep talks, her tunes alternately posited on getting through hard times and getting loaded.

It was the latter note that she sounded on "So What," a tipsy, set-ending kiss-off that Pink performed while spiriting across the arena rafters, elevated in a harness, doing back flips and singing upside down.

Country guitar hero Brad Paisley then attempted to one-up Pink on the topic at hand by giving first-person voice to booze itself.

"Since the day I left Milwaukee / Lynchburg and Bordeaux, France / Been making the bars lots of big money / And helping white people dance," he sang on "Alcohol," a bar room sing-a-long abetted by Paisley's Chatty Cathy guitar, which he made sing almost as beautifully as he did.

From Pink to Paisley, much musical terrain was mapped in the show's first hour, which was the larger point of the festival.

Hard rockers young (Linkin Park) and old (Aerosmith) performed alongside Latin heartthrobs (Enrique Iglesias) who smooched audience members and mingled feel-good Euro pop with contemporary dance music.

Speaking of which, DJ-producers also had their moment here.

In recent years, electronic dance music has become a rising influence in pop music, but as Calvin Harris' set demonstrated, now it's officially become pop music - at least the kind that Harris creates.

Harnessing bright, squiggly synth lines into concise, tightly arranged, vocal-driven tracks, Harris seems to craft his songs with the airwaves in mind, and it's working.

His hits "Feel So Close" and "Let's Go," where he was joined by R&B crooner Ne-Yo, had the crowd up on its feet, singing lustily.

The other electronic musician on the bill, Deadmau5, he of the massive LED mouse helmet, took a decidedly different approach.

He favored dense, turbulent rhythms, beats that pounded the body the way a boxer works a heavy bag and less of a reliance on vocals, at least until the end of his set, when My Chemical Romance singer Gerard Way took the stage to lend his voice to the doomsday electro of "Professional Grievers."

The best and most unexpected festival collaboration came when R&B survivalist Mary J Blige was joined by Prince, clad in banana-yellow pants and massive gold shades shaped like a blindfold, who played guitar on a cover of Chaka Khan's "Sweet Thing" and then dueted with Blige on his "Nothing Compares 2 U," with Blige testifying on the mic like someone near tears.

The belle of this particular ball, Taylor Swift, performed next.

She's aww-shucks incarnate, still acting surprised when people cheer for her.

"I need a little more reassurance," she said to the crowd, encouraging their encouragement, as she strapped on a banjo for the bruised ballad "Mean."

Swift's maturation in the public eye is being managed carefully - no Miley Cyrus-style sudden bursts of salaciousness here - and at age 22, she seems in no hurry to rush things.

To wit, when Swift performed "We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together," the lead single from her forthcoming new album "Red," it's shout-along chorus was the sound of 10,000 teen girls singing in unison into their hairbrushes in their bedrooms.

If this show doubled as a survey of just about every mainstream radio format, Pitbull's headlining set compressed them all into an indefatigable pastiche of hip-hop, dance, Latin music and even rock (his thunderous backing band played snippets of Lenny Kravitz's "R U Gonna Go My Way" and Guns N' Roses' "Sweet Child O' Mine," peppered with the only double bass drumming of the weekend).

Rapping in a sharp, fleet-tongued cadence, Pitbull doesn't try to be the best rhymer, rather, he always serves the beat, skilled at complementing his surroundings rather than overwhelming them.

He's a star in his own right, but he's also one of pop's premiere sidekicks, as evidenced by an opening salvo of hits recorded with T-Pain ("Hey Baby"), Chris Brown ("International Love"), Shakira ("Get It Started" ) and Marc Anthony ("Rain Over Me").

A man with a pneumatic pelvis, Pitbull put a lot of energy into songs about kicking back.

"They can't / They won't / They never will stop the party," he chanted feverishly as the show neared its conclusion, as if he could simply out-hustle Sunday morning, which had come to end this party, if not his.

Contact reporter Jason Bracelin at jbracelin@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0476.