Thoughts on Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl Halftime Show

Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl half-time show was one big love letter to his native Puerto Rico, culminating in a message of pride in his home and the Americas, and an appeal for unity with the U.S.

. . . The 31-year-old, who was the world’s most-played artist in 2025 according to Spotify, made history by becoming the first musician to perform entirely in Spanish at a Super Bowl, which is normally the most-watched event on U.S. TV. He did choose to say one line in English, “God bless America,” before listing nations of Central, South and North America as dancers carried their flags. Behind them, a billboard message read "The only thing more powerful than hate is love," and he held a football at the end of the segment bearing the slogan in English: “Together, We Are America.”

. . . Bad Bunny’s performance in Santa Clara, California, marked the first time the singer and rapper had performed in the United States - except for shows in Puerto Rico - since releasing last year’s Grammy Award-winning album Debí Tirar Más Fotos (I Should Have Taken More Photos).

Puerto Rico, which is a self-governing territory of the U.S.A., was at the heart of everything in this performance, from his early emergence from a sugarcane field to a set that was meant to represent the sounds and sights of the place he calls home.

Transporting himself through a Latin landscape, with set pieces that included everything from a nail salon to a bar, the Grammy award winner reeled off a medley of his biggest hits, including “Tití Me Preguntó,” “MONACO” and “BAILE INoLVIDABLE.”

Bad Bunny ended his performance by shouting “God Bless America” and naming multiple countries and territories, including Puerto Rico and the U.S., with those two flags carried behind him side-by-side.

Sunday’s show represented the best of Latin culture on the sporting world’s biggest stage.

– Annabel Rackham
Excerpted from “Bad Bunny Makes History
as Trump Criticises 'Terrible' Super Bowl Show”
BBC News
February 8, 2026

Bad Bunny didn’t just break the Internet and viewership records; he broke MAGA in a way that is deeply personal, and they hate him for it.

But they don’t hate him because he doesn’t sing in English, or because he’s been critical of the masked thugs they beat immigrants vicariously through, or because his pigmentation is problematic – at least those aren’t the primary reasons.

MAGAers hate Bad Bunny because he is a symbol of their greatest fears coming to life: a nation that is outgrowing them, a culture that is evolving past them, a war against progress that they know they’re losing.

They despise him because, over the course of a thirteen-minute halftime show that they swore they wouldn’t watch but couldn’t look away from, they were forced to see what’s happening outside of the insular, white nationalist echo chamber they spend their lives in, and it terrified them.

– John Pavlovitz
Excerpted from “MAGA Americans Have a Bunny
Living Rent-Free in Their Heads”
The Beautiful Mess
February 11, 2026

Bad Bunny’s official half-time show . . . was joyous and complex, intimate and historical, and it managed to do all of that all at once. It felt like a celebration of life, and you didn’t need to follow the words, because you just needed to feel the beat. (Asked if people must know Spanish to appreciate this show, Bad Bunny said: “It’s better they learn to dance. There’s no better dance than the one that comes from the heart.”) The performance concluded with a big banner that read “The only thing more powerful than hate is love” and with Bad Bunny holding a football (the U.S.A. kind) with text that read: “Together, we are America.”

That American conservatives saw that last line as “subversive” shows you the depths of the problem we face in this country. While some of us realize that we have and even like our neighbors, others seem to think we live, or should live, in a hermetically sealed-off land.

– Moustafa Bayoumi
Excerpted from “Why Has MAGA
Lost Its Mind Over Bad Bunny?”
The Guardian
February 11, 2026

This is the choice in front of us. You can accept Trump’s America, the America that governs through sieges, blockades, sanctions, and humiliation, deciding from afar who may rule, who may eat, and who must be punished into submission. Or you can stand with Nuestra América, the America José Martí and Simón Bolívar imagined, and that Bad Bunny echoed when he held up a football, reading “Together we are America.” This is an America that refuses domination, that believes no nation is a backyard, and that insists the future of this hemisphere belongs to its peoples, not to an empire. There is no neutral ground between those two Americas.

This is why the moment demands more than applause. It demands that we look past the spectacle and confront the systems that decide who gets to thrive and who is forced to flee. A real Good Neighbor Policy would respect sovereignty, stop weaponizing hunger and instability, and recognize that dignity does not end at the U.S. border. Bad Bunny reminded millions of people of connection, of shared humanity, of a hemisphere bound together by history and responsibility. What comes next is on us. If those 13 minutes meant anything, they must move us toward demanding a foreign policy that treats our neighbors as equals. Because in the end, the message is simple and uncompromising: The only thing more powerful than hate is love.

– Michelle Ellner
Excerpted from “Bad Bunny, Good Neighbor”
Common Dreams
February 11, 2026

Related Off-site Links:
Bad Bunny Super Bowl Halftime Show Symbolism Decoded – Teflon Tv (February 10, 2026).
Bad Bunny’s Nuestra América – Diego von Vacano (Buenos Aires Herald, February 9, 2026).
Bad Bunny’s Superbowl Halftime Show Explained – MattyBallz (February 9, 2026).
In Times of Turmoil, Bad Bunny Chose Love with the Halftime Show – Olivia Flanz (Berkeley Beacon, February 11, 2026).
Bad Bunny Sets Super Bowl Record While MAGA’s Halftime Implodes – David Doel (The Rational National, February 9, 2026).


See also the previous Wild Reed posts:
• John Pavlovitz: Quote of the Day – February 3, 2026
• Michael Jochum on Bad Bunny and the “Great American Meltdown”
• John Pavlovitz: Quote of the Day – September 30, 2025