LA Radio: Pop Meets Club Music At Wango Tango

Calvin Harris performs (Andrew Hrera photo)

KIIS 102.7 FM Wango Tango's sold-out 2014 edition was held Saturday at the StubHub Center in Carson, according to a LA Times review.

Ariana Grande

It  featured appearances by more than a dozen acts, including Shakira, Maroon 5, Ariana Grande and Zedd. All had come to perform their hits — quickly — as a kind of quid pro quo meant to ensure future airplay.

"I got 20 minutes," Calvin Harris said as his set at Wango Tango came to a close, and that was all he needed.

Careful not to offend his host, the Scottish DJ was complaining ever so mildly about the brevity of his slot at this annual pop-music extravaganza put on by L.A.'s Top 40 radio powerhouse KIIS-FM.

If the hurried ring-kissing left Harris feeling crowded, though, he needn't have worried. Short as it was, his set, which came about halfway through the six-hour event, provided Wango Tango's first real eruption of energy.

As he did at last month's Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival, Harris was hitting a sweet spot at the intersection of radio pop and club music, with sticky choruses laid over stomping beats that might have banged on for hours in other settings.

Shakira, atypically dressed down in jeans and a T-shirt, moved her body like no robot can in "Hips Don't Lie" and "Can't Remember to Forget You." Ed Sheeran enlisted the crowd as backup vocalists in "Sing," which the British folkie played as a one-man band, thumping the body of his guitar for percussion.

Grande peppered her effervescent pop-soul songs with lively vocal runs, while Adam Levine of Maroon 5 strutted across the stage like any number of peacocking frontmen before him.

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