Bad Bunny Celebrated America

The Super Bowl halftime show is a giant, overstuffed program that is about celebrating its own overstuffedness. It's a maximalist entertainment spectacle set in the middle of the most maximalist entertainment spectacle in sports, where football is stretched out over five hours in order to show people commercials where society's most famous people hawk society's worst products. Thus it makes sense that halftime performance duties are usually bestowed upon the biggest pop stars of the moment, though assigning that title has become more difficult in our fractured and fractious culture. What made Sunday's event so interesting is that, for the first time in a couple of years, there actually was no doubt that the Super Bowl halftime show was performed by the biggest pop star in the world.

Bad Bunny, the Puerto Rican rapper, singer, and all-around superstar, has become the biggest artist in a global cultural zeitgeist no longer dominated exclusively by English-language music. He is extremely popular all over the world, including right here in the U.S., a country traditionally dismissive of artists that don't conform to a straitjacketed idea of "Americanness." The strain of all these tensions was evident the moment Bad Bunny was first announced as this year's performer. The usual suspects in the culture war pounced on the choice, accusing the NFL of the capital crime of felony wokeness, robbing these true patriots of the chance to celebrate "real America." This reaction was best encapsulated in two things: firstly, Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson wondering aloud why the NFL couldn't have settled instead on a performer like Lee Greenwood, the octogenarian singer best known for 1984's "God Bless the USA"; and secondly, the decision by Turning Point USA, the right-wing dumbass debate club, to program an alternative halftime show headlined led by spiritually octogenarian rapper-turned-country-artist-turned-MAGA-mascot Kid Rock. Not exactly finger-on-the-pulse stuff. Meanwhile the NFL was itself stuck in its own cycle of nostalgia, opening Super Bowl 60 with multiple renditions of the national anthem and a Green Day performance of "American Idiot," to remind us, even in protest, that we are trapped in the Bush era redux.

But for all the contrived controversy over the presumed America-bashing act of singing in Spanish, Bad Bunny's night was one of celebration. It was a culmination of his ascendence as the biggest star of his generation. He turned the 49ers' field, previously the site of what had been an almost unwatchably bad half of football, into a fantasia of Puerto Rican and Caribbean culture, traversing between sugar cane fields, storefronts based on real businesses like LA's Villa's Tacos and NYC's Caribbean Social Club, men playing dominos and women at nail salons. Through elaborate stage design and intense choreography, the performance presented a people's history of the Caribbean, with both intellectual rigor and visceral, joyful exuberance.