Bad Bunny brings Puerto Rico to the Super Bowl halftime show

At a clip of wide fearfulness and distrust successful the United States, Bad Bunny offered a loving and optimistic imaginativeness of the American acquisition during his halftime amusement astatine Sunday’s Super Bowl LX astatine Levi’s Stadium successful Santa Clara.

Leading an expansive and multigenerational unit of singers, dancers and musicians, the 31-year-old Puerto Rican superstar followed up his historical medium of the twelvemonth triumph astatine past weekend’s Grammy Awards with a engaged and colorful show that drew lines betwixt the accepted people forms of his autochthonal land and the throbbing reggaeton beats that person made him an icon to young radical astir the globe.

The archetypal all-Spanish-language halftime amusement successful Super Bowl history, Bad Bunny’s amusement transformed the gridiron into a bid of settings including a tract filled with laborers, a bodega, a wedding enactment and a casita similar the 1 the vocalist built his fashionable 2025 San Juan arena residency around. The show included astonishment appearances by Lady Gaga, who sang a salsa-fied mentation of her deed “Die With a Smile,” and Ricky Martin, who joined Bad Bunny for “Lo Que Le Páso a Hawaii.” Karol G and Pedro Pascal were among those dancing connected the field.

Bad Bunny referred to his Grammy triumph with a young lad watching his acceptance code connected a TV; helium besides invoked Puerto Rico’s past of powerfulness outages during his opus “El Apógan,” which helium and respective dancers performed portion twirling astir prop powerfulness lines. The 13-minute amusement ended with Bad Bunny proclaiming “God bless America” arsenic the stadium’s surface read, “The lone happening much almighty than hatred is love.”

Bad Bunny’s show was arguable earlier helium adjacent took the field.

President Trump called his booking “a unspeakable choice” and said that “all it does is sow hatred.” Right-wing commentators framed Bad Bunny’s enactment arsenic un-American (though Puerto Rico is of people a U.S. territory); Turning Point USA, the blimpish enactment founded by the precocious Charlie Kirk, enactment unneurotic a alleged All-American Halftime Show featuring Kid Rock successful an entreaty to viewers scandalized by … the Spanish language? Dancing? The thought of fun?

For the NFL, the blowback was a calculated hazard arsenic the league makes a propulsion to globalize its instrumentality base. Bad Bunny’s amusement was the latest successful a semipermanent woody betwixt the league and Jay-Z’s sprawling amusement company, Roc Nation, which took implicit producing halftime successful 2020 amid bruising disapproval of the NFL’s handling of contention successful the aftermath of Colin Kaepernick’s protestation against constabulary unit targeting Black people.

Before kickoff Sunday, Charlie Puth performed a slick, yacht-rock-style rendition of the nationalist anthem for which helium accompanied himself connected Rhodes electrical piano, and Brandi Carlile sang “America the Beautiful” with assistance from her predominant collaborators SistaStrings connected violin and cello. The venerable Bay Area punk set Green Day besides enactment successful a characteristically punchy mini-set meant to people the Super Bowl’s 60th anniversary.