It wasn’t Prince in the rain. It wasn’t U2 after 9/11. It wasn’t the Rolling Stones or Tom Petty. It wasn’t Whitney or Michael. It wasn’t one of those pyrotechnic, spine-rattling halftime spectacles that rearrange the molecules in your chest and leave you stunned on the couch. Musically? It wasn’t in that pantheon. But that was never the point.
The point was the message.
When Bad Bunny emerged from a recreation of Puerto Rico’s sugar cane fields at Super Bowl 60, jíbaros in pavas, viejitos slapping dominoes, a piragua stand glowing like a childhood memory, he wasn’t just performing. He was planting a flag. Not the sanitized, corporate version of a flag. The real one. The complicated one. The colonial one. The proud one.
From a small Caribbean island that America often treats like a footnote, Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio walked into the largest televised spectacle in the country and said, in Spanish, I never stopped believing in myself, and neither should you. That wasn’t translation-ready patriotism. That was cultural sovereignty broadcast in prime time.
He ran through “Tití Me Preguntó.” He moved into “Yo Perreo Sola.” He nodded to Daddy Yankee and the architects who paved the reggaetón road before him. He introduced himself in Spanish without apology, because why should he? This country is supposed to be an all-inclusive melting pot, not a gated community with an English-only sign nailed to the door.
And here’s where it matters.
When an artist stands on that stage and centers Puerto Rican culture, not as decoration, not as seasoning, but as the main course, it challenges the narrow narrative of who gets to define “American.” The United States was built by migrants, dreamers, refugees, risk-takers. It thrives when people contribute in their own ways to the common good, not when they are reduced to headlines and handcuffs.
For many communities, immigration enforcement has come to symbolize fear more than safety, raids before dawn, families separated, power exercised without transparency. When people invoke dark chapters of history, they are responding to the emotional reality of those experiences. Democracies erode not in fireworks, but in quiet permissions.
Bad Bunny didn’t scream it. He didn’t need to. The imagery was the speech. The language was the protest. The pride was the declaration.
Was it the greatest halftime show of all time? No.
Was it important?
Absolutely.
Because sometimes the most radical act on the biggest stage in America is simply existing, fully, unapologetically, bilingually, and reminding millions of brown kids watching that they are not guests in this country. They are the country.
And that message rang louder than any guitar solo ever could.
—, Not Just a Drummer: Reflections on Art, Politics, Dogs, and the Human Condition.
No comments:
Post a Comment