Most Super Bowl halftimes are bonkers. Bad Bunny’s was art.
Let me be honest and say that I just finished watching Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl halftime show and am supposed to write down some thoughts, long story short: Holy smokes. How could you not pass out from that? I even felt a chill or two.
It was catchy, funny, surprisingly touching. Understand, I love Super Bowl halftime shows, but usually because they’re crazy. For decades, they’ve gone beyond nuts. Until a few (Prince in 2007; Madonna in 2012; Beyoncé in 2013) transcended nuts. Bad Bunny’s was closer to a cultural moment, a paradigm shift, a reimagining of how a halftime show can look like art. It was a love letter home and a hand extended outward, inviting you to dance with him. No doubt, it was one of the most understandable halves.
In fact, while Kid Rock and his awesome friends were on social media and Turning Point USA’s YouTube channels performing an alternative halftime show to protest the fact that the NFL was entrusting its official halftime show to a Spanish-speaking artist, Bad Bunny was professing, in Spanish and English, the power of community, the meaning of unity.
But then again, I love all the halftime shows.
I cannot be trusted with such important opinions. Probably neither do you, and if you refused to watch because Bad Bunny sang in Spanish and thought you couldn’t understand what he was saying, let me remind you of a 1970 Super Bowl halftime show with Lionel Hampton on the vibraphone, a re-enactment of the Battle of New Orleans (complete with a field of dead and dying soldiers), and Carol Channing singing. Indeed, one of the strangest Super Bowl halftime shows of all time, exactly 40 years ago, the year the Chicago Bears destroyed my beloved Patriots by 36 points, was so creatively confusing that the folks at Up With People – pure uncut Super Bowl halftime kitsch – cooked “Born in the USA” into a vanilla mash of Huey Lewis and Kenny Loggins, then, again times, added a note that the real star of the evening was Martin Luther King, Jr.
When it comes to Super Bowl halftime shows, you can’t make this stuff up.
Especially because it feels like they make this thing up about 20 minutes before halftime.
See, Super Bowl halftime shows are like those old Stefon skits with Bill Hader on “Saturday Night Live,” throwing non-sequiturs together and calling it a party. In 2011: The Black Eyed Peas, Slash and Usher. In 1995: Tony Bennett, the Miami Sound Machine and Indiana Jones. In 1988: Chubby Checker, the Rockettes and 88 grand pianos. Hell, the first half of the Super Bowl in 1967 featured men flying in jetpacks, marching bands, and 300 pigeons.
Bad Bunny’s performance, by comparison, did what smarter halftime shows do: besides its moon spectacle, besides its veritable recreation of the entire island of Puerto Rico, besides the inevitable, literal fireworks display, it was performed in a singular voice – much like what Prince did, or what Tom Petty pulled off in 2008 without dancers or conceptual flash.
Bad Bunny – and if you listened to his later albums, you’d expect it – was mostly about music, connections, and a familiar love gleaned from lore. There really was no scene. Rather, there was a group of hundreds of people, dancing together and sprawling apart, among the tall grass, old men playing dominoes, street vendors, a nail salon, utility workers dancing from their telephone poles, rows of brass players and a full string section – the last led by Giancarlo Guerrero, the new conductor of Chicago’s Grant Park Music Festival, originally from Costa Rica.
Think dizzyingly, but in the best possible way.
For those new to Bad Bunny, a little context: his name stuck because of an old family photo, a photo of a young Benito Antonio Martinez Ocasio wearing a bunny costume, glaring. His music, with one foot in the future and the past, is a tribute to Puerto Rican traditions, rich in salsa, with hints of hip hop, big band, indie rock and reggaeton. It may not be your world, but it feels like the world. And often it breaks out like a street party – despite his solemn voice coating everything with bittersweet, his phrasing alternating with dramatic gasps, as if he is so helpless he doesn’t notice the party behind him.
Some claim he’s the most popular recording artist in the world, and if that’s the case, I’d wager his secret lies in how laid back and unpretentious his disparate mix is, how close to the ground it is. As the New Yorker says: “The bigger it gets, the more local it seems.” » Its concert series celebrating Puerto Rico last year became such an international event that Moody’s slightly upgraded its financial outlook for the island.
His halftime show was a kaleidoscopic extension of that triumph, a sunny snapshot of the island brought to the 50-yard line, largely doing away with anything resembling a traditional stage, spreading the dancing and musicians outward and evenly, placing Bad Bunny at the center of a constant whirlwind of action.
What struck me was how wholesome a Bad Bunny halftime show could be. How could a vocal section of the audience have seemed threatened by this?
But then, to gauge how slow we may be to embrace social change, we could do worse than look at the last 59 years of Super Bowl halftime shows. For decades, it was a national bathroom break. In the 1970s, during the heyday of Led Zeppelin and Earth, Wind & Fire, halftime was a bouillabaisse of marching bands and artists a decade or more old. There were salutes to Duke Ellington and Old Hollywood.
The model of the halftime years was cemented by an events director named Tommy Walker, the man behind Disneyland’s Main Street Parade. Unwittingly, even as the Vietnam War dragged on and the national mood was grim, the halftime show became a classic of Americana, a telling mix of self-parody and pride.
Nothing changed until the 1991 halftime show, hosted by New Kids on the Block. Surprisingly, this was the first half featuring a contemporary hitmaker, albeit inserted into Disney’s “It’s a Small World” theme.
The following year, Gloria Estefan was the star of the halftime show.
The following year, Michael Jackson.
And so on. The Super Bowl halftime show is now watched by an estimated 100 million people, making it by far the most viewed musical spectacle of the year, if not always the most memorable.
Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl Halftime Show in Photos
Of course, since the 1990s, the road hasn’t always been easy. (Who told the Rolling Stones to play a new song? In 2006?) As Bad Bunny’s pageantry reminded us, perhaps the best way to approach a Super Bowl halftime show is to mix old school with lots of new. Dr. Dre, Eminem and Kendrick Lamar (2022) reworked the Calcified Revue halftime show into a thrilling survey of 2000s rap. Prince looked even further afield for inspiration, finding room to include the Florida A&M University marching band.
Bad Bunny brought in Lady Gaga and Ricky Martin, seamlessly, without stopping to genuflect, the mood shifting from sweaty to open-hearted, then finally, with Bad Bunny dancing off the field, singing into the camera, a furious insistence on decency itself. You don’t need to speak Spanish to know when someone is holding on.
Bad Bunny’s powdery name suggests a flash-in-the-pan, artist-of-the-week; If you’ve never heard of this guy before learning he was playing at halftime, perhaps the announcement sounded like a disrespect to the still, uh, worthy halftime tradition. But here was a spectacle of such joy, such class, and such self-determination that it struck a louder note: This political moment will one day pass; Benito Antonio Martinez Ocasio won’t do it.
cborrelli@chicagotribune.com
