In the days and weeks leading up to Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl halftime show, a nervous kind of hype swept America. The 31-year-old artist is, by some measures, the most popular working musician in the world. But because he almost exclusively performs in Spanish and has spoken up against ICE, right-wing commentators suggested he was too political for the time slot, while branding him with various scary synonyms like “provocative” and “divisive.” Just a few hours before the show, the influencer Jake Paul called him “a fake American citizen performing who publicly hates America.”
During his performance on Sunday night, Bad Bunny had an answer for that last one: “God bless America,” he announced. But his entire performance rebuked the notion that he is some culture-war proxy being foisted upon an American public that wants its stars to shut up and sing. Yes, he filled this show with slogans and symbols signalling Puerto Rican and Latino pride at a time when federal agents are menacing Spanish speakers and President Trump has declared English to be the national language. But fundamentally, the halftime was a blast: an instant-classic, precisely detailed, relentlessly stimulating medley rooted in the good-old-fashioned pleasure principle.
Bad Bunny opened in what looked like sugar cane fields worked by dancers dressed in the straw hats of jíbaros (Puerto Rico’s rural farmers). Against this pastoral backdrop, Bad Bunny stood looking modern and fly, in a boxy white shirt patterned like an NFL jersey. He was rapping in Spanish to his smash “Tití Me Preguntó,” but the pigskin he held in his hand and the tie around his neck conveyed a clear message to any viewer. He was here for business. He was here to play ball.
Play he did. As he walked through the tropical hedge maze, he passed by whimsical set pieces including a coconut vendor, a dominoes match, and a construction site manned by—how to put this respectfully—hot girls. This was the first of many awooga visuals to come—mass twerking, a fleeting shot of guy-on-guy grinding, and Bad Bunny executing his trademark crotch thrust. If any of this inspires scandal, it’ll be the healthy kind, giving America a break from fascism discourse to rehash now-quaint-seeming dustups caused by the likes of Elvis, Janet Jackson, and Prince (the originator of what’s becoming a hallowed tradition of Super Bowl halftime crotchroversies).
Really, what does it say about the state of the nation that the sight of good looking people doing slinky choreography feels … refreshing? It’s not like the much-publicized conservative cultural wave of the 2020s has rolled back pop culture’s reliance on raunch. But this performance’s wealth of gyration seemed subtly throw-backy and weirdly wholesome. Maybe that was because the smiles on everyone’s faces conveyed sexiness without porniness. The dancing and costumes took me back to being a young teen watching the airbrushed sultriness of early 2000s MTV and being intrigued by the world that allegedly existed somewhere outside my home.
Bad Bunny was indeed trying to take viewers out of their home, and into his. The sheer volume of references to Puerto Rico defied any notion that the island is a minor player in American culture; rather, we were reminded that it’s a powerhouse domestic and global exporter. Puerto Rico gave us the archetypal reggaeton hit, Daddy Yankee’s “Gasolina,” which popped up for a few moments tonight. Its musicians helped invent salsa music—which provided much-needed syncopation when Lady Gaga appeared to sing her normally plodding hit “Die With a Smile.” It gave us the square jaw and honeyed voice of Ricky Martin, who sang as well. And it gave us the night’s headliner, who nodded at the significance of his own success when he handed a Grammy to a boy who looked like he might grow up to one day be, well, Bad Bunny.
Eventually, the energy of the performance shifted from party to statement piece—yet smart stagecraft made that shift feel climactic rather than deflating. Exploding power lines evoked the electrical outages that have plagued Puerto Rico in recent years. For most of the show, Bad Bunny had been mugging merrily to the camera, flaring his eyes and making hammy gestures to illustrate his words. But now anger seemed to twitch in his face as he rapped his song “El Apagón” (“The Power Outage”). Through affect alone, he got across a sense of betrayal that many Puerto Ricans of his age—commonly called the “crisis generation”—have spoken of feeling after a string of political scandals and natural disasters amid ongoing gentrification by mainlanders.
That message was, indeed, political. So was his culminating statement of “God bless America,” which he followed by listing countries in North and South America, thereby asserting the transnational nature of the culture that he represents. Pushing toward the camera with throngs of drummers, he closed by holding up a football with a message on it: “Together, We Are America.” It was a pointed message but also a conciliatory one, a unity slogan. Some people were going to look for a fight anyway. “Nobody understands a word this guy is saying,” complained Donald Trump on Truth Social, minutes after the performance, “and the dancing is disgusting.”
Great Job Spencer Kornhaber & the Team @ The Atlantic for sharing this story.
