By Jesus Mesa
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Days after being announced as the headliner of the 2026 Super Bowl Halftime Show, Puerto Rican superstar Bad Bunny appeared on stage at Saturday Night Live’s hallowed Studio 8H to share the news—in his native Spanish. It was a moment many Latinos in the United States embraced as a cultural win.
“If you didn’t understand what I just said,” he told the audience, “you have four months to learn.” Delivered with a smile, the line ricocheted across cable news, social media and political commentary, becoming shorthand for a backlash that had little to do with the music itself.
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Conservative lawmakers and pundits framed the booking as a provocation. Some, like Georgia Republican Marjorie Taylor Greene and Fox News pundit Tomi Lahren, questioned why the Super Bowl—still seen by many as the apex of American cultural might—would hand its biggest stage to an artist who performs exclusively in Spanish. President Donald Trump called the decision “absolutely ridiculous,” before admitting he didn’t know who Bad Bunny was.
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Weeks later, Trump said he would skip the Super Bowl altogether, dismissing the halftime lineup as a “terrible choice” and declaring himself “anti-them.” A video trailer of the show posted to Bad Bunny’s Instagram account on January 16—in which he states “the world will dance”—has been liked more than 5.8 million times and viewed nearly 80 million times.
Outside the political ecosystem, the decision was received very differently. Within the music and sports industries, Bad Bunny’s selection was widely seen as a reflection of scale, timing and reach—a calculation overseen by Roc Nation, the Jay-Z–founded music empire that has served as the NFL’s halftime booking partner since 2019.
“Bad Bunny has had a stellar career and a stellar year,” Desiree Perez, Roc Nation’s CEO, told Newsweek. “Roc Nation is committed to bringing nothing less than the best of the best to the world’s biggest stage, working with artists who are at the highest level of excellence. Bad Bunny is the best of the best.”
Born Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio, the Puerto Rican rapper is one of the most commercially dominant artists of the streaming era. He has been Spotify’s most-streamed artist globally four times—from 2020 to 2022 and again in 2025—according to the platform, and has amassed tens of billions of streams across services. By 2025, the 31-year-old had topped the Billboard 200 four times with Spanish-language albums and won six Grammy Awards from 16 nominations. His sustained success places him among the biggest global pop stars of his generation, alongside names like Taylor Swift, Beyoncé and The Weeknd.
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Yet the decision to give Bad Bunny the Super Bowl stage was quickly pulled into America’s roiling culture wars—even as the musician himself has largely stayed clear of it. Unlike many artists who have found themselves at the center of political controversy, Bad Bunny has not cultivated a confrontational public persona. He did, however, choose not to bring his sold-out world tour to the continental U.S. after his latest album, DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS, shattered records, citing concerns for his fans’ safety amid intensified U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement crackdowns. In the run-up to the match, a government official confirmed ICE would be conducting immigration enforcement at the game.
With DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS, Bad Bunny became the first artist in Grammy Awards history to win album of the year with a record sung entirely in Spanish. It also won best música urbana album. When collecting his award for the latter at the ceremony in Los Angeles on February 1, Bad Bunny said, to rapturous applause from the audience: “ICE out. We’re not savages, we’re not animals, we’re not aliens. We are humans and we are Americans.”
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In a recent Billboard column, Chief Content Officer Leila Cobo argued that much of the outrage surrounding Bad Bunny’s selection to perform at the Super Bowl has been misplaced. The backlash, she wrote, has less to do with his politics—or even his comments about Trump’s immigration crackdown—than with the language he performs in.
“Spanish is what’s got people all worked up,” Cobo wrote.
That reading was shared by Amílcar Antonio Barreto, a native of Puerto Rico and professor of cultures, societies and global studies at Northeastern University, who sees the reaction as part of a longer-running tension over language and belonging in the United States. “In this country, there has always been a push and pull between two ideas of American identity,” Barreto told Newsweek.
“One is civic and inclusive. The other is cultural, tied to race and language. Spanish has long been a trigger in that divide.”
From Spectacle to Flashpoint
For much of its early history, the Super Bowl Halftime Show was designed to avoid precisely this kind of attention. Marching bands and broadly appealing, if anodyne, performances served as palate cleansers between halves. A built-in bathroom break for the real show taking place on the gridiron. That changed in 1993, when Michael Jackson transformed halftime into a global pop event and permanently raised expectations for those who would follow in his moonwalking footsteps.
As the audience expanded, so did the stakes. The league’s sensitivity to controversy hardened after 2004 when Janet Jackson’s “wardrobe malfunction” briefly exposed her breast during a halftime performance with Justin Timberlake. Nipplegate, as it was termed, triggered congressional outrage, FCC fines and a broader moral panic (as well as sparking the idea for a new website that would come to be known as YouTube). The following year, the NFL responded by playing it safe, booking Paul McCartney—a choice widely understood by critics as a corrective.
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“After Nipplegate they went to more conservative, safe fare,” music industry veteran Bob Lefsetz told Newsweek. “The NFL learned very quickly how blowback works.”
By the mid-2010s, the NFL’s biggest game was no longer insulated from the country’s political fights, particularly after Colin Kaepernick’s protests, in which the San Francisco 49ers quarterback would take a knee to protest police violence rather than stand during the national anthem at the start of games. Kaepernick sparked a movement that pushed the league into debates over race and patriotism. What began as a player-led protest against police brutality and racial inequality quickly became a national flashpoint, drawing criticism from across the political spectrum—from Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg to then-presidential candidate Donald Trump.
Trump, who won his first election in the middle of those protests, repeatedly targeted Kaepernick and urged team owners to discipline players who protested. The league tried to thread the needle—defending players’ rights and making token changes like the much-ridiculed END RACISM slogans added to the end zones, while distancing itself from the protest. But after Kaepernick became a free agent in 2017, he never returned to the NFL. Kaepernick filed a grievance against the NFL, accusing owners of colluding to keep him out of the league. The grievance was eventually withdrawn after Kaepernick made a confidential settlement with the NFL front office.
From that point on, the Super Bowl Halftime Show was pulled back into the same ecosystem of scrutiny. Rihanna and Cardi B publicly declined to perform in solidarity with Kaepernick in 2019, while artists who accepted the invitation—such as Maroon 5 and Justin Timberlake, making his post-Nipplegate return to the big stage—found their decisions to perform questioned as much as the performances themselves. Headlines openly described the 2020 Super Bowl as “the most political halftime show yet,” as Jennifer Lopez and Shakira’s appearances were widely read as a response to Trump-era immigration policies, including children shown inside illuminated cages. Rihanna would later headline the show in 2023, a performance that Trump labeled the “worst” in Super Bowl history.
Lefsetz sees that shift as structural rather than personal. “The Super Bowl is one thing that everybody knows about in a Tower of Babel society,” he said. “Everybody looks forward to the choice of halftime performer every year and there are always complainers. If this were another event, it would not be as huge of a story.”
The rise of social media accelerated that transformation, collapsing the distance between players, politicians and audiences and turning what might once have been contained controversies into instant, nationwide flash points. What has changed, Lefsetz argues, is not that artists have become more political, but that culture is now politics, while backlash itself has become louder, faster and more performative.
“This is what the right does—work the refs,” Lefsetz said. “It’s only a vocal few. But one cannot be afraid of a vocal few.”
The dynamic became clear in the years following Kaepernick’s protests. Maroon 5 and rappers Travis Scott and Big Boi faced petitions and public pressure for agreeing to perform in 2019, while artists who declined were framed as taking a stand. Press conferences were canceled and the focus shifted from music to motive.
Alejandro Marín, a Colombian radio executive, writer and former Universal Music Group head of international markets for Colombia, Peru, Ecuador and Venezuela, frames the shift even more bluntly. “What has happened is not that entertainment became political,” he said. “It’s that politics became entertainment.”
In that environment, Marín argues, even a straightforward booking decision—like the NFL’s choice of Bad Bunny as its halftime performer—can be transformed into a symbolic confrontation.
“The decision is already a message,” Marín added.
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The Numbers Behind the Noise
Still, in the post-Kaepernick era, even decisions grounded in audience data rarely stay confined to business logic. As the league has learned over the past decade, nearly everything orbiting the Super Bowl—from who performs to how those choices are discussed to the commercials—is now filtered through the broader culture wars shaping American life. Even before rehearsals began, online speculation about Bad Bunny’s potential halftime wardrobe had triggered backlash.
But while the league may have gambled on controversy, it didn’t gamble on popularity. Bad Bunny’s audience is young, Latino and global—the exact demographic the league needs as its core viewership ages. The median age of NFL viewers in 2023 was 50 years old. The annual halftime show is one of its few tools left to reach the next generation.
Bad Bunny arrived on the stage within that reality. He sells out stadiums across the United States without recording in English, commands one of the largest digital audiences in the world and reaches listeners who do not always overlap with the NFL’s traditional base. Within the industry, his selection has been framed less as a risky gamble than as an alignment with where audiences are already moving.
“This is the perfect year for Bad Bunny, an award-winning artist with a massive global audience, to be the Super Bowl halftime performer,” Roc Nation’s Perez told Newsweek, acknowledging that strong opinions accompany every headline act. “We believe the experience of the show will be a powerful and unifying moment,” she added.
The league expects the booking to help the 2026 Super Bowl reach a record 150 million global viewers. As of the 2025 season, the NFL counts more than 39 million Latino fans in the United States—a group that is, on average, about 10 years younger than the league’s median viewer. That business logic has also played out publicly, often clashing with the culture-war framing pushed by political commentators.
“I don’t think our game is about politics. I don’t think people tune in to look at politics. We do everything we can to avoid politics,” said Charlotte Jones, the Dallas Cowboys’ chief brand officer and co-owner and daughter of team owner Jerry Jones, after being pressed by conservative podcaster Katie Miller about Bad Bunny’s past comments and the fact that he does not sing in English. “We’re on a global stage. Our game goes out to everybody around the world,” she added.
For Lefsetz, the gap between the business case and the public reaction has become familiar. The league, he said, no longer expects consensus.
“You can’t make a choice that satisfies everybody anymore,” Lefsetz told Newsweek. “In the time until the next Super Bowl halftime act is picked, a lot will transpire.”
Marín extends that argument beyond the league itself. The former Universal Music executive and now director of La X radio station in Bogotá said visibility alone now does the work.
“When something reaches that level of exposure, it automatically takes on political meaning,” he said. “Not because the artist intends it, but because the audience projects it.”
Recent halftime shows illustrate the shift. Coverage across the political spectrum increasingly treats performances as coded statements, parsing choreography, song choices, staging and even wardrobe for meaning. In 2022, the West Coast–themed halftime show at SoFi Stadium headlined by Dr. Dre alongside Snoop Dogg, Kendrick Lamar, Eminem and Mary J. Blige, was framed by the league as a postcard to L.A. and its hip-hop culture. Within hours, it was recast in headlines as a statement on race and protest, particularly after Eminem knelt during his performance.
Three years later, Lamar’s repeat halftime appearance followed a similar arc. When Lamar declared that “the revolution ’bout to be televised,” flipping Gil Scott-Heron’s famous line, the moment was widely read as a meditation on race, power and who controls the national narrative. What began as a tightly choreographed performance quickly became a canvas for interpretation, with essays, opinion columns and televised debates parsing its imagery and symbolism, often eclipsing the music itself.
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“People have a short memory,” Lefsetz said. “It’s the nature of online blowback, and the NFL believes it’s for all, both right and left.”
In an effort to calm the backlash that followed recent Super Bowl booking decisions, industry analysts pointed to Netflix’s Christmas Day halftime show as a telling case. Headlined by Snoop Dogg, the performance jumped rapidly across genres, pairing country singer Lainey Wilson with opera stars Andrea and Matteo Bocelli and folding in characters from Netflix’s K-Pop Demon Hunters. Critics, however, largely found the result disjointed.
That tension now defines the modern halftime show: a decision driven by audience growth and global reach, and one destined to be interpreted through the political moment in which it lands. By the time Bad Bunny steps onto the field during the halftime break in the clash between the New England Patriots and Seattle Seahawks at Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara, California—Kaepernick’s former home—the performance will already be part of a broader argument about culture, identity and who the Super Bowl is really for.
Game-Changing Halftime Highlights
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Photo-Illustration by Justin Metz for Newsweek
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