When it was announced that Bad Bunny would be the halftime performer at the Super Bowl, controversy broke out along political divisions of the United States, with anti-ICE movements rallying for a Latino voice and pro-Trump perspectives frustrated by the Spanish speaking artist.
While language likely had little to do with the put down of Bad Bunny and more to do with current immigration crackdowns, the public criticism of a non-English singer on the largest stage in U.S. live performances focused largely on the “language barrier.”
However, if the controversy were truly about the musical performance itself, language would not matter. American writer Henry Wadsworth Longfellow once wrote, “Music is the universal language of mankind.”
“I didn’t understand the lyrics, but the rhythm and confidence grabbed me immediately, it felt effortless and universal,” said Antoine Bardet, a 28-year-old French listener from Miami who was first introduced Bad Bunny through his Latina girlfriend “You feel the mood through his delivery, energy, and the way the music moves before you ever think about lyrics.”
Bad Bunny doesn’t expect his listeners to understand every lyric. It is through the music that he draws his audience in, adding the cultural history and politically charged messages for native listeners and curious non-spanish speakers willing to engage and translate.
“People miss a lot. Actually, there’s even a lot of Latinos who speak Spanish who are missing a lot because I’m singing in Puerto Rican slang,” Bad Bunny said to the New York Times.
And yet, his voice still echoes throughout the music industry, using innovative and creative methods of displaying traditional Puerto Rican sounds like Salsa and Plena that most people are familiar with.
“This is not like a new rhythm, it’s a very old rhythm, it just sounds new and different because I’m doing it — I’m making this sound with my voice, my style, my flow,” Bad Bunny said. “You can make it like your own style. You don’t have to do the same thing that the old artists did in the past. You can do it with a new feeling, with a new slang, with a new everything.”
Through his revival of old sounds anew, Bad Bunny uses themes of home, unity and struggle to connect with listeners around the world, Spanish speaking or not. The Puerto Rican artist has been named Spotify’s artist of the year globally four times since 2020, Billboard Top Artist of the Year 2022 and has over one billion views — more than any other artist on YouTube — and 51.7 million subscribers for just 19 music videos.
Bad Bunny’s invitation to headline the Super Bowl comes at a high point in his career, with his acceptance of the offer adding icing to the cake on Feb. 1 when “Debí Tirar Más Fotos” became the first Spanish-language album to win the Grammy for album of the year.
“It’s going to be easy, people only have to worry about dancing. They don’t even have to learn Spanish. Better they learn to dance. There is no better dance than the one that comes from the heart,” Bad Bunny said to USA TODAY.
In spite of the Turning Point USA alternate Super Bowl performance featuring Kid Rock, which attracted around 6 million viewers on YouTube, Bad Bunny’s performance averaged 128.2 million viewers. That makes it the fourth-most watched half-time show in history behind Kendrick Lamar, Michael Jackson and Usher.
At a time when the country is divided by political violence and racism, a voice like Bad Bunny’s reminds Americans that we are a diverse country, all with citizens deserving of equal rights. Bad Bunny’s message at the end of his superbowl performance was clear for the 23 countries he named: it is only through uniting behind the emotions and passions of the human experience that we can destroy the hate dividing our peoples.
Emphasizing the message displayed on the jumbo trons, “The only thing more powerful than hate is love.”
