‘It’s gonna be a huge party’: Bad Bunny set for Super Bowl stage as Trump skips event | Music
Just one week after receiving the Grammy Award for Album of the Year, Puerto Rican rapper Bad Bunny will perform at the most-watched concert of the year in the United States during the Super Bowl this Sunday.
The artist born Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio won the music academy’s highest honor for 2025’s Debí Tirar Más Fotos, a politically minded record infused with Puerto Rican music and culture. The album became the first Spanish-language work to win the award, beating out competition from Kendrick Lamar, Lady Gaga and Justin Bieber.
During his acceptance speech for Best Urban Music Performance, Bad Bunny echoed the anti-ICE sentiment that animated many speeches at the Grammys. “ICE out,” he said. “We are not savages, we are not animals, we are not aliens. We are humans and we are Americans.” He added, more broadly: “The only thing more powerful than hatred is love. »
Eyes on both sides of the aisle will be watched to see if his performance on Sunday contains a sharper statement.
At a press conference Thursday before the show, Bad Bunny said: “I really want people to have fun. It’s going to be a big party. I want to bring what people can always expect from me, and a lot of my culture…”
The announcement of his spot on the front page was met with both jubilation and hostility. While many artists and activists welcomed his booking, Corey Lewandowski, an advisor to the Department of Homeland Security, said, “It’s so shameful that they decided to choose someone who seems to hate America so much to represent them at halftime.” »
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said ICE would be “everywhere” during the Super Bowl.
Bad Bunny broke records last year with a historic 30-night concert in San Juan, but decided not to bring the show to the United States out of fear for the safety of his fans. “There was the problem of whether fucking ICE could be on the outside. [my concert]”, he told iD. “It’s something that we’ve been talking about and that we’re very concerned about.”
He responded to criticism while hosting Saturday Night Live in October, after a monologue segment in Spanish with a wink in English: “If you didn’t understand what I just said, you have four months to learn.” »
Since then, social media posts about learning Spanish and Puerto Rican slang have increased, with Duolingo last month launching a “Bad Bunny 101” course to give newcomers a taste of the language.
Donald Trump will not attend this year’s Super Bowl after saying in an interview that the Santa Clara, California, venue was “too far away.”
Regarding Bad Bunny and Green Day, who will perform before kickoff, the US president said: “I’m anti-them. I think it’s a terrible choice. It just sows hatred.”
The NFL maintains the reservation. Asked about Bad Bunny’s anti-ICE comments at the Grammys, commissioner Roger Goodell called him “one of the greatest artists in the world. That’s one of the reasons we cast him…He understood the platform he was on.”
Sunday’s NFL game will mark the second time Bad Bunny has appeared on the Super Bowl stage, following an appearance in 2020 during Shakira and Jennifer Lopez’s co-headline slot in 2020.
“I really don’t want to spoil it,” Bad Bunny said during the press conference. “It’s going to be fun and easy, and people will just have to worry about dancing.”
As the most-watched U.S. television event of the year, Super Bowl ad rates have soared as high as $10 million for a 30-second spot, with many brands featuring their biggest campaigns of the year.
Stars expected to appear in ads this year include Sabrina Carpenter, Ben Affleck, Bradley Cooper, Melissa McCarthy, Lady Gaga and Emma Stone, while some brands are targeting Gen Z with ads featuring MrBeast, Addison Rae and Chicken Shop Date’s Amelia Dimoldenberg.
This year will also mark the first Super Bowl commercial generated primarily by AI, courtesy of vodka brand Svedka, with a spot featuring a robot couple dancing with human partygoers. Meanwhile, Anthropic and its AI assistant Claude are taking aim at Open AI’s ChatGPT with an ad promising that “Ads are coming to AI. But not for Claude.” On Twitter/X, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman called the ads a “clearly dishonest representation.”
