Bad Bunny’s All-American Super Bowl Halftime Show
Bad Bunny arrived on the Super Bowl stage wearing a silver trenchcoat and a matching do-rag. He delivered a perfectly incendiary verse in which he declared, “Viva la raza!,” and then he disappeared—and no one really seemed to mind. The year was 2020, and Bad Bunny was appearing as a special guest of Shakira, who was one of the halftime show’s two headliners. (The other was Jennifer Lopez.) Back then, he was neither a national obsession nor the subject of fierce political debate; when he declared, “Viva la raza!,” he was saluting the Texas-born professional wrestler Eddie Guerrero, who had adopted that phrase as his rallying cry. This year, Bad Bunny returned to the Super Bowl as both the halftime headliner and the event’s main newsmaker, often overshadowing the players who were ostensibly the top attraction. (He has more than fifty million followers on Instagram, which is about a hundred times as many as Sam Darnold, the Seattle Seahawks’ quarterback.) Bad Bunny is a Puerto Rican star who performs almost entirely in Spanish, who endorsed Kamala Harris in 2024, and who has been critical of Immigration and Customs Enforcement. And yet the news that he would be this year’s Super Bowl headliner transformed him into something he had never really been before: a divisive figure. In early October, not long after the halftime-show announcement, President Donald Trump described the N.F.L.’s decision to host Bad Bunny as “absolutely ridiculous,” though he also claimed that he’d “never heard of him.” Shortly afterward, Turning Point USA, the conservative student network, said that it would produce a competing concert, the All-American Halftime Show—an attempt, perhaps, to upstage the upstager.
That is probably not possible, at least not right now. Bad Bunny has spent the past decade creating one of the most irresistible bodies of work in all of popular music, and turning himself into an equivalently transfixing performer, singing and rapping in a cool and deceptively casual voice that can make almost any rhythm sound as if it were created just for him. And on Sunday he put on what might have been the best halftime performance in Super Bowl history: a riot of machine-tooled beats and swaying melodies, accompanied by so much dancing and so many different scenes—from a sugarcane plantation to a miniature nail salon to a handful of malfunctioning electric poles, to evoke and protest the island’s rolling blackouts—that when it was over, scarcely thirteen minutes after it began, viewers might almost have forgotten the appearances by Lady Gaga and Ricky Martin.
The set moved backward in musical history, opening with the loping rhythms of reggaetón and ending with the exuberant clatter of traditional drums, as Bad Bunny sang the chorus of “DtMF,” the title track from his most recent album, “DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS” (“I Should Have Taken More Photos”), which last weekend won the Grammy for best album. Before he walked off the field, he spiked the football he had been carrying during the show—an unnecessary gesture, but not at all an unearned one.
Bad Bunny is just about as popular as it is possible for a musician to be: he was the most listened-to musician on Spotify last year, and in three of the five years before that. (In the other two years, Taylor Swift was No. 1.) This partly reflects the huge size of the Spanish-language audience—worldwide, only Mandarin has more native speakers. But it also reflects his ability to reach listeners through sound, rather than sense. The funny thing about the Bad Bunny controversy is that, before a few months ago, many of his English-speaking fans probably hadn’t ever bothered to look up translations of his lyrics. In the days before the Super Bowl, Pat McAfee, the former punter who is now a brash ESPN host, enthused about “Chambea,” a decade-old Bad Bunny hit; the title refers to loading a gun. “No idea what he’s saying, but it’s fuckin’—it’s great,” McAfee said.
Like so much of the best pop, Bad Bunny’s music feels inclusive and exclusive at the same time. Last summer, instead of going on tour, he stayed home, playing thirty shows at the José Miguel Agrelot Coliseum, in San Juan, with the first nine reserved for locals, and the next twenty-one open to Bad Bunny-loving tourists from around the world; he later added a thirty-first, which was streamed live on Prime Video and Twitch. What made his Super Bowl performance so memorable was the mixed message it delivered. As a Puerto Rican, Bad Bunny is wholly American, but not uncomplicatedly so: the light-blue flag he raised over his shoulder is associated with Puerto Rico’s independence movement. The most dramatic moment of the show came near the end, when he led a parade of national flags, with the U.S. flag in front. “God bless America,” he said, and then he clarified that he was referring to all of the Americas: “Chile, Argentina, Uruguay,” he began, listing the countries in rough geographic order, from south to north, ending with the U.S. and Canada. Depending on your point of view, you could think of Bad Bunny’s triumphant set as a tribute to the power and capaciousness of American popular music—or as a pointed critique of it.
If Bad Bunny’s show was partly a meditation on who ought to be considered part of the American mainstream, then so, in a way, was the alternative. A few days before the Super Bowl, the country singer Brantley Gilbert wrote, on Instagram, “We’re celebrating 250 years as a country, and it’s been more than 20 years since a country artist has been asked to play the Super Bowl halftime show.” (In 2003, the Canadian country singer Shania Twain was one of two headliners, alongside the California band No Doubt and, as a special guest, the English musician Sting; by nationality, that year’s performance was much less American than this year’s.) Gilbert was one of the four headliners of the All-American Halftime Show, all of them country artists of some kind, led by the rapper turned country firebrand Kid Rock. Compared to the Bad Bunny extravaganza, this was a strikingly modest and conventional concert, though not an unpleasant one. The balladeer Lee Brice performed a memorable new song about how old values were slipping away: “It ain’t easy being country in this country nowadays,” the chorus went. And Gilbert sang a subdued version of “Dirt Road Anthem,” a country-rap hit that was partly inspired, he has said, by “Po Pimp,” the silky 1996 anthem by the Chicago hip-hop group Do or Die. Country music is a peculiarly American hybrid, embodying a self-consciously traditional identity that must keep changing, as the nation itself changes. The concert was billed as a celebration of “FAITH, FAMILY, & FREEDOM,” even though its biggest star was a guy who once rapped, “I’m rockin’ up on the mic with no consideration for your church or your family.”
There is something depressing about the idea of dueling halftime shows, with viewers expected to tune in to one or the other depending on which politicians they vote for. The All-American headliners seemed to sense this, and so they insisted that theirs was a message of unity, notwithstanding their involvement in an enterprise designed to split the year’s biggest viewing audience in two. Then again, the Super Bowl is unusual precisely because it brings together so many people to watch the same thing at the same time. Once it’s over, we can go back to our tribes—and tribalism, no less than faith or family or freedom, is an all-American tradition, especially in music. Politicians dream (in vain, usually) of winning big and enduring majorities. But, for even the most popular musicians on the planet, success tends to be partial: the huge audience you build will probably remain a relatively small portion of the population. Part of what we cherish about popular music is the way it reflects our fractured world back to us. It seems possible that American discord helps explain the incredible power and diversity of American pop, a category that includes the sounds of Nashville and also, no less, the sounds of San Juan, at least for now. One nation, endlessly divisible. ♦