Bad Bunny at the Super Bowl: Fighting hate with love – and good music
During Sunday’s much-anticipated Super Bowl halftime show, live, in the center of a stage surrounded by over 70,000 fans and with an estimated 135 million more tuning in from screens and televisions, Puerto Rican musical superstar Bad Bunny turned an annual sporting event into a moment of embrace. As singers and dancers held each other and rejoiced on the football field, they emitted music, cultural pride and the comfort of community, a feeling that proved contagious.
I felt that embrace as I watched the show at the Oakland, California, beer garden Plank, accompanied by a mix of friends who are football fans and others who just like Bad Bunny. Our server wore a shirt that read “Team Benito,” referring to Bad Bunny’s real name, Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio.
What has always set Bad Bunny apart is not just his musical acclaim, but his words. Bad Bunny received a raucous response at the 2026 GRAMMY Awards ceremony last week in the lead up to the halftime show, calling on people to fight hate with love. He started off by declaring, “ICE out,” before saying, “We’re not savages, we’re not animals, we’re not aliens, we are humans, and we are Americans.”
On Sunday, the combination of that important and inspiring message along with music, dancing and showmanship made for a Super Bowl LX halftime show that broke viewership records, narrowly edging out Kendrick Lamar.
While his musical feud with Drake brought much attention to the show last year, Lamar used his halftime show to spotlight social issues facing Black Americans, as AfroFuturist artist, educator, and writer Nettrice Gaskins breaks down in her Medium blog. Lamar used the Super Bowl stage to call for social change. Bad Bunny was in a similar position this year with his nearly all-Spanish revue, coming at a time when pushback against Spanish speakers has flooded American discourse.
While this year may mark the first time a sitting U.S. president publicly complained about the National Football League’s choice of halftime entertainment, Bad Bunny is not the first Latine artist to have the honor, nor was Sunday his first time performing on the NFL’s big night. Bad Bunny made a guest appearance in 2020 when Shakira and Jennifer Lopez were the marquee artists. That year, during Trump’s first term as president, featured child singers in cage-like structures that were seen widely as a criticism of the Trump administration’s immigration policies, including family separation and the detention of migrant children.
This year, Turning Point USA, the political organization founded by the late conservative activist Charlie Kirk, led the criticism of the Super Bowl halftime show for not featuring English-language music. Turning Point offered an alternative halftime show fully in English, but only a fraction of the number of viewers who tuned in for Bad Bunny watched the YouTube Livestream. Bad Bunny, meanwhile, succeeded in bringing Spanish-language music to the forefront of his performance on Sunday, creating a moment of solidarity through Latine music and dance.
Born and raised in Puerto Rico, Bad Bunny is a proudly Latine performer who emphasizes his culture and language. In fact, they are major components of his musical identity. According to Harvard Gazette’s Liz Mineo, Bad Bunny’s most recent album, “DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS,” dives into the history of Puerto Rico, a history largely “invisible to the United States.”
According to Spotify, the musician has set many records as a Latino, with more than 90 million monthly listeners. Bad Bunny is also the first to have multiple all-Spanish records at the top of the Billboard 200, as well as the first to win a Grammy for album of the year for a Spanish-language album this year, according to Biography.
Before earning global acclaim, Bad Bunny was known as the king of the musical genre “Latin Trap,” which led to criticism that his music did not align with Puerto Rican cultural values, according to Mineo. Today, Bad Bunny’s musical style is often described as a fusion of past and present Puerto Rican sounds, mixing “salsa, plena, bolero, as well as today’s Latin pop and musica urbana,” according to Tatiana Lee Rodrigues, a contributor to the online music publication Pitchfork.
On Sunday afternoon at Plank, when the first half ended and the halftime show was announced, the whole venue erupted like fireworks. Some people cheered. Others stood up from their chairs and surrounded the multiple screens on display to clap and dance.
The entirety of Bad Bunny’s stage set was like a walk through Latine culture, starting with a man with a guitar who says, “Qué rico es ser Latino” (“How wonderful it is to be a Latine”). Bad Bunny walked among farmers working in faux fields that symbolized crops like sugarcane. As he moved into a more urban scene, there were street vendors, nail stylists, old people playing table games and a barber shop.
From here, it cut to a segment that can only be described as an ode to the musical genre reggaeton. Bad Bunny sang from the top of a vintage pickup truck with classic reggaeton songs mixed together, and announced, “Están escuchando música de Puerto Rico. De los barrios y los caseríos (You are listening to Puerto Rican Music. From its neighborhoods and hamlets).”
Lady Gaga’s surprise appearance sparked another wave of cheers and awe at Plank. She sang and danced with Bad Bunny to a salsa version of the song she released with Bruno Mars, “Die With a Smile.” Bad Bunny took Lady Gaga’s hand for a dance, signaling to the world that music and dance produce love and togetherness.
While so much can be said about this intimate scene, what resonated with me the most was the quick acknowledgement of the universal Hispanic experience: the kid sleeping on a chair.
Growing up Latine, my family loved singing and dancing late into the night at family parties. As a kid, I wasn’t much of a dancer. My tired eyes left me resting over a white folding chair. The halftime show reminded me of those moments when I declined to join the dance floor. When Bad Bunny woke the child, I imagined it was his way of bridging the distance between the Latine youth and their elders.
In a nod to his Grammy speech, Bad Bunny put a small television screen in front of a little boy and handed his Grammy, saying, “Puerto Rico, esto es para ti (Puerto Rico, this is for you).” Perhaps this symbolic moment mirrors Bad Bunny’s younger self and aims to inspire today’s Latine youth.
Bad Bunny ended the show by holding the Puerto Rican flag while many others held other flags. He then named every country in the America continent, starting with Latin America and going all the way up to Canada. Within that list, I was proud to hear Bad Bunny mention Guatemala, my home country.
– Story by Marvin Juarez
– Copy edited by Kami Waller
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What a wonderful article about the beautiful and super important performance that Bad Bunny put on at the Super Bowl!