There’s a certain amount of chatter and speculation that surrounds any Super Bowl halftime show performance regardless of who’s performing it, but you’d have to be especially unplugged from the news cycle to be unaware of the attention surrounding Bad Bunny’s set at Super Bowl LX: The Puerto Rican superstar made history with the first halftime show to be performed entirely in Spanish, just a week after he made more history at the Grammys when his album DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS became the first fully Spanish-language record to take home Album of the Year.
In an ideal world, those two facts would be celebrated by everyone, but unfortunately our current political climate is one where xenophobia and racism are so prevalent that a halftime artist performing in Spanish instead of English is somehow controversial — so much so that Turning Point USA organized an alternative “all-American halftime show” headlined by Kid Rock. (It’s worth reminding people that Puerto Rico is part of America, and Bad Bunny, like all Puerto Ricans, is a U.S. citizen.) Bad Bunny, whose real name is Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio, famously refused to tour the mainland States on this most recent album cycle over concerns that his concerts would be targets for ICE raids, opting instead for a residency in his homeland that boosted Puerto Rico’s economy by somewhere between $400 million and $700 million.
So yes, there was an added layer of pressure on Ocasio heading into Sunday’s performance, but he rose to the occasion, delivering one of the most memorable and impressive Super Bowl halftime shows in years. Instead of meeting negativity with negativity — or even mentioning Trump or ICE by name — Bad Bunny’s set was a celebration of Puerto Rican culture. His elaborate set pieces included sugar cane fields; a piragua cart; a casita that featured celebrities like Pedro Pascal, Cardi B, Jessica Alba and Karol G; a table of old men playing dominoes; exploding utility poles meant to represent the island’s failing power grid and a joyful wedding reception (which featured a real-life couple who had invited Bad Bunny to their nuptials getting married by him). Ocasio was joined by Ricky Martin and Lady Gaga, and he even incorporated his recent Grammy win into the show, handing his award to a young boy watching his acceptance speech on TV. Eventually, he said “God bless America,” before naming all of the countries that make up the Americas as dancers carried the different nations’ flags and a message that read “The only thing more powerful than hate is love” appeared on a screen behind him. He capped it all off by holding up a football that read, “Together, we are America” and spiking it into the end zone.
It’s hard to imagine how anyone could possibly have a problem with that messaging. As journalist Mariana Atencio pointed out on X, “The Super Bowl halftime show didn’t feel like a protest. It felt like a homecoming. Bad Bunny could have gone another route. He could have used the stage to confront. He could have named names. He could have turned the moment into a culture-war headline. Instead, Benito chose something far more powerful: a celebration of Latino identity as it actually lives and breathes in the United States, and in AMERICA.”
But even if you strip away all the political context, Bad Bunny’s performance was a stunning artistic achievement that involved, as reported by Wired, 9,852 theatrical pyrotechnics and nearly 400 costumed extras — including some dressed as those sugar cane plants because carting all that foliage onto the field would have been impossible. (Yes, those were people in there!) It was an incredibly cinematic performance, one that involved a lot of movement from set to set and some creative camera angles and dolly shots. One can only imagine how many hours and hours of rehearsal it took to nail the whole thing down.
And while his performance was obviously a love letter to Puerto Rico, you don’t need to speak Spanish to simply enjoy the music. As Seahawks wide receiver Jaxon Smith-Njigba put it while attempting to sing along to “DtMF” ahead of the game, “I don’t know Spanish, but I feel what he’s saying.” J.J. Watt posted a similar sentiment on X: “Did I understand a single word of it? I did not. Was it a vibe? It was.” Bad Bunny’s popularity — and the true success of his halftime show — is a testament to the fact that music is a universal language. Like all the best art, it’s a reminder that regardless of where we’re from, we’re more similar than we are different, and that’s a lesson we need to heed now more than ever.
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