What's So Bad About Bad Bunny?

A lot of misunderstandings and culture war issues have come together over the choice for the next Super Bowl halftime show.

“Isn’t Bad Bunny MS13? #BadBunny at the Super Bowl is a disgrace!! I hope President Trump steps in and forces the woke #NFL to have @KidRock handle the half time show!!”

That post on X pretty much covered all the bases including the one MAGA musician that the president’s followers know of, but that didn’t stop the Right on from piling on when the NFL announced that Bad Bunny would play this year’s Super Bowl halftime show.

Another poster wrote, “This is who the #NFL chose to do the #SuperBowlHalftime show this season. Read the room @NFL. You’re braindead,” accompanied by a photo of Bad Bunny in a dress.

“Are ‘We the People’ powerful enough to get the #NFL’s attention? We should start a movement to stop the NFL from using ‘Funny Bunny’ to corrupt our children and weak-minded adults,” another wrote, with that text accompanied by a quick, hard to follow gif of Bad Bunny in the water in chains in what I assume is supposed to be some kind of bondage presentation.

“@NFL proves once again how tone deaf they are. Hyping Bad Bunny for the Super Bowl halftime show? Vulgar lyrics, zero talent, total joke. I’ve boycotted the NFL since 2017 and don’t miss it,” another wrote. I can’t imagine the NFL gets too worried about the opinions of someone who hasn’t watched the Super Bowl in eight years because it’s pretty clear Bad Bunny’s not the problem. This poster also gets credit for knowing the lyrics are vulgar, but that’s most likely a guess or secondhand knowledge since this writer doesn’t come off as multilingual.

Some critics showed their ass in a Civics 101 way. NFL Hall of Fame running back Eric Dickerson got in the game to say, “If Bad Bunny has made negative comments about the U.S., he shouldn’t come here to perform. You know, just stay in your own country.” Of course, Puerto Rico is part of the United States, but that didn’t stop Dickerson. When he was corrected, he insisted, “It’s not the same as the U.S., in my view. That’s how I feel.”

The anger toward the NFL is as misplaced as the grudging congratulations offered NFL owners. The NFL had nothing to do with it—directly, anyway. No committee of owners picks the artist who plays the Super Bowl halftime show. In 2019, the NFL signed a contract with Jay-Z’s Roc Nation to, in short, help it deal with the charges of racism that dogged it, the highest profile complaint being its treatment of Colin Kaepernick. Part of that agreement meant that Roc Nation would choose the halftime talent.

At a simple level, Jay-Z was solving a problem for the NFL. He explained at a press conference that up to that point, the owners’ process had made the selection process a  problem. They would talk to four artists to hear their plans for the show, then chose one and burn three other major acts in the process.

“After three years, three people play and nine people are upset,” Jay-Z said. “There aren’t that many superstars in the world. You’re gonna run out of people.”

Also, after the Classic Rock 2000s when Aerosmith, U2, Paul McCartney, The Rolling Stones, Tom Petty, Prince, and Bruce Springsteen played, the halftime show didn’t carry much of a cool factor. Beyoncé, Lady Gaga, and Coldplay performed, but the corny spectacle rarely put the artists in situations that synched well with their images and made them look cool. Perry’s halftime show is best remembered for choreographed dancing sharks behind her, one badly out of step with the other.

Pink and Cardi B turned down the gig, and the history of racial tension wasn’t going away. Rihanna, who told Vogue in 2019, “I couldn't dare do that. For what? Who gains from that? Not my people. I just couldn't be a sellout. I couldn't be an enabler. There's things within that organization that I do not agree with at all, and I was not about to go and be of service to them in any way."

Jay-Z had a clear vision for how to make the halftime show cooler. “In 1998, rap was the number one genre, and going forward to today,” he told the 2019 press conference. “I’d love for these platforms to be more inclusive of our music.” Since then, the halftime show has featured Jennifer Lopez with Shakira, The Weeknd, The 50th Anniversary of Hip-Hop, Rihanna, Usher, and Kendrick Lamar. This decision didn’t only get the halftime show in sync with the pop marketplace; it also brought the entertainment more in line with actual demographics of the NFL. In 2023, only 24.9 percent of the players were white, while 53.5 percent were Black.

Comedian Josh Johnson nailed the anxiety in a recent concert. “ They have watched the Super Bowl religiously and the last few years have watched it get blacker,” he said. “After Kendrick, they were like, ‘It’s black now. Is it finally black enough? You blacked it.’”   

The Roc Nation halftime shows have focused for the most part on artists who have been hitmakers in the last few decades, and even though the faithful nostalgic for Prince and The Rolling Stones have complained, the deal worked so well that the NFL renewed it in 2024.

Bad Bunny fits because he’ll get eyes on the Super Bowl that otherwise wouldn’t be there. This summer he played a 31-show residency in his native Puerto Rico largely because he didn’t want his fans in the US to be at risk of harassment and potential deportation from ICE. The result was an economic impact on Puerto Rico of at least $200 million with approximately 600,000 people seeing him during that run. In more prosaic terms, he’s enough of a pop star to work matches in the WWE from 2021 to 2023 and host the season opener for Saturday Night Live this year.

Bad Bunny, Taylor Swift and Morgan Wallen are the three artists right now big enough for the Super Bowl halftime show, and if Republicans weren’t so lost up the president’s ass, they’d be calling for Wallen, not Kid Rock.

The Right’s backlash against Bad Bunny is predictable in a lot of ways. There’s no way they can see him as anything other than a DEI choice, regardless of the data that shows his popularity—the residency and three albums that have sold more than a million copies in the U.S. alone (in the streaming era!) and the number of international gold, platinum and diamond records. They don’t know those songs and didn’t buy those records, so he doesn’t belong.

In many ways, there’s a sad level of detachment from reality in the hostility to Bad Bunny’s selection. MAGA types who want Lee Greenwood or Kid Rock. Last week on Facebook, Americana artist James McMurtry posted a photo of a marquee outside a club in Tomball, Texas promising upcoming shows by him, Steve Earle, Marc Broussard, Crystal Gayle and Lee Greenwood, which indicates the size of Greenwood’s appeal.

They call for a halftime show that expresses what they consider American values, but the Super Bowl hasn’t gone down that faceless path since 1988 when Chubby Checker, The Radio City Rockettes, and 88 grand piano players cavorted with marching bands from San Diego State, Northridge, and USC. Or maybe 1989, when the 1950s rock ’n’ roll-themed show “Be Bop Bamboozled in 3-D” featured the Elvis Presto South Florida-area dancers and performers. Lady Gaga wasn’t a patriotic choice, nor were The Rolling Stones, who’ve only been neutered by age.

They’re also so detached that they think that Homeland Security Director Kristi Noem’s promise to send ICE to the Super Bowl constitutes a meaningful threat, as if anyone but the wealthiest people in America can see the Super Bowl. If ICE harasses Latinos there, they’ll likely be all over captains of industry.

The one thing they see correctly is that the halftime show is one more place where the culture war is playing out. Jay-Z correctly perceived the Super Bowl halftime show as a platform that could elevate the biggest stars in hip-hop, Latin pop and R&B by putting them on one of the biggest stages American television has to offer. Many on the Right thought that when they elected Trump, they had won those wars, and the first few months of his presidency and the capitulation of media conglomerates to his interests fed the belief that the war was over and it was time to celebrate. Every sign of resistance, whether it’s Kimmel, Colbert or Bad Bunny irritates them because they’re evidence that the win wasn’t total. And, I’d argue, the culture war is the part that MAGA always cared most about, far more than the economy or health care.

One ugly piece of this story has been the transphobic current—it’s too prominent to be an undercurrent—running through their outrage. Former Atlanta Braves pitcher John Rocker posted on X, “There’s no reason that such a patriotic event needs to be stained by a crossdressing singer who hardly speaks English.” The obsessive concern about the trans community and gender fluidity makes me think the issue isn’t just one of tradition or fairness or faith and has more to do with anxiety of Republican dudes that they’ll think some chick is hot and discover she’s trans.

That aside, I can sympathize up to a point with people who don’t get Bad Bunny’s selection. The monoculture has splintered to a point where it’s easy to miss the biggest artists in the country. There’s no radio station or MTV that features the music that matters. If you don’t know Spanish, his musical roots, or hip-hop, it’s also not immediately obvious how to process Bad Bunny’s music.

But that lack of knowledge becomes an issue when the answer is to deny the validity of the music—or movie, or book, or cultural movement—instead of doing some reading to get up to speed. MAGA asks the world to conform to things people already know and dismisses anything they don’t as not worth knowing.

Speaker of the House Mike Johnson inadvertently gave the game away when he criticized Bad Bunny’s selection. Like many Trump administration survivors, Johnson never knows more than the president knows and argued that America would be happier with one of the musicians Trump can think of, Lee Greenwood. He also argued that the halftime show should be played by someone with a “broader audience.” While Bad Bunny has an audience large enough and broad enough to sell the way he has, Johnson thinks his music isn’t for white folks and that won’t do.

I could argue that this is yet another place where adults have no idea what young people listen to, and particularly how many young white people listen to Bad Bunny too, but that’s beside the point. The bigger thought at the heart of the Super Bowl halftime conversation is one that threads through many MAGA projects. Who is American? Who counts? Whose interests need to be accommodated, and whose can be marginalized? Mike Johnson makes the answer very clear.