Between his years of faux-feuding with Blake Shelton on The Voice and even more years of waxing falsetto as the frontman for Maroon 5, Adam Levine is used to dealing with smack-talking from fans and naysayers. Which is exactly the kind of reaction the pop rock star received after a video went viral from the band’s recent performance at L.A.’s Hollywood Bowl, in which a fan rushed the stage and embraced Levine, prompting quite the specific reaction.
For anyone who might not have seen the increasingly shared concert video, you can check it out below, with Adam Levine’s most-discussed moment happening a little after the 3:30 mark.
As the band was in the middle of performing their monster hit “Sunday Morning,” a woman suddenly got up on one side of the stage and grabbed an unsuspecting Adam Levine as he was in the middle of singing. Which is where the debate over his reaction begins. Though he doesn’t physically throw the woman off of him or anything, as soon as she’s taken away by security, Levine immediately reacts as if he just came out of a haunted house where he’d stuck his hand into what he thought was a bowl of meatballs posing as eyeballs, only to realize they were all actually eyeballs. Or, if that’s too much, like he walked through a spider’s web made out of ghosts.
It was clear that Adam Levine was quite put off by the moment, in that he also arbitrarily knocked down his microphone stand before jumping back into the performance. (Power to the band for keeping things going without interruption.) But those sharing the video online have made it sound as if Levine burned all of his clothes and then entered a decompression chamber at NASA after the incident. Considering we’re still in pandemic times, with live performances still serving as more of a novelty than an everyday event, it’s not that hard to understand why Levine was skeeved out by the interaction.
Still, the Maroon 5 singer personally responded to everyone calling him out and saying he thinks he’s better than the fans. Taking to his Instagram Stories, Levine said:
So I just wanted to address the Hollywood Bowl incident thing, a fan coming up to me on stage. I have always been someone that loves, respects, worships our fans. Without our fans we don't have a job; I say that all the time to our fans. To think that anyone would believe that I thought our fans were beneath us or less than us makes my stomach turn. That's just not who I am. That's not who I've ever been. So I just need you guys to know, I was really startled. And sometimes when you're startled you have to shake it off and move on, because I’m doing my job up there. And you know, it’s what I pride myself on, so I need to let you guys know what my heart is, and my heart is that connection that exists between the band performing on stage and the fans. I hope that we can all understand that.
Imagine if you were on the job doing paperwork, yardwork, physical tasks, etc., and some random person came around a corner and hugged you. Would that automatically spark a completely calm and leveled-out reaction? Or would you wonder WTF was happening, immediately assuming that person was carrying the plague? Okay, it would probably be somewhere in the middle of those two extremes, but still. Not that Levine is unfamiliar with surprising people who weren’t expecting it.
If anything, perhaps this will convince other risk-taking fans that it’s probably not worth running and surprising a celebrity you love with a hug, since that person could then act as if he or she was just touched by a walking-and-talking shit monster. Which probably isn’t good for the ego, or anything else.
Adam Levine, whose return to American Horror Story’s universe feels like it has to happen one of these years, did have his own on-stage flub a couple of months ago in the midst of performing Maroon 5’s hit “She Will Be Loved,” saying it was the first time in 20 years that he’d made a mistake with that track. Will the former Voice coach return to the show this season, similar to how he returned for its Season 20 finale earlier this season? Fans will just have to wait and see...while keeping their hands OFF of Levine's body.
