Bad Bunny’s Spanish-Language Super Bowl Halftime Show Sparks Cheers, Backlash and a Debate Over Identity

SANTA CLARA, Calif. — Under a wash of stadium lights and Spanish lyrics, Bad Bunny stepped onto the 50-yard line at Levi’s Stadium on Sunday night wearing a cream football-style jersey stitched with his family name, “Ocasio,” across the back.

For roughly 14 minutes during halftime of Super Bowl LX, the Puerto Rican superstar delivered a show built on reggaeton, Latin trap and salsa, performed almost entirely in Spanish. The Apple Music-sponsored performance marked the first time a Latino solo artist has headlined the Super Bowl halftime show — and the first time the event’s main act chose to sing almost exclusively in another language.

By the time confetti fell on the Seattle Seahawks’ victory over the New England Patriots, the set had become a flashpoint far beyond football, praised by many critics as a landmark in representation and condemned by former President Donald Trump as “a slap in the face to our Country.”

A historic booking — and a strategic bet

The NFL and Apple Music, which jointly announced Bad Bunny as the Super Bowl LX headliner in September, framed the booking as both historic and strategic. League executives have said its future audience growth is “mathematically impossible without Latinos,” pointing to an estimated tens of millions of Latino NFL fans in the United States. Apple Music used the weeks leading up to the game to build a “Road to Halftime” campaign around his catalog, including exclusive interviews, playlists and lyric translation tools.

“What I’m feeling goes beyond myself,” Bad Bunny, whose real name is Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio, said in a league news release when his selection was announced. “It’s for those who came before me and ran countless yards so I could come in and score a touchdown … this is for my people, my culture, and our history.”

On Sunday, that history was on full display.

From sugar cane fields to city blocks

The show opened on a stage dressed as a Puerto Rican sugar cane field, with Bad Bunny launching into “Tití Me Preguntó,” his hit from the album Un Verano Sin Ti. Dancers in earth tones moved amid stalks of cane as cameras swooped down from the upper decks. The medley pivoted quickly to songs such as “Yo Perreo Sola” and “Safaera,” staples of the reggaeton-led sound that helped make him one of the world’s most-streamed artists.

The imagery shifted from rural to urban as a pastel-colored “casita” — a small house motif that has recurred in his tours — rolled to midfield, turning the Super Bowl into a crowded block party. Later, the backdrop morphed into a New York streetscape marked “NUEVAYoL,” a nod to Puerto Ricans and other Latinos in the city’s outer boroughs.

Midway through the set, the show cut to a town square-style plaza where a bride and groom finished an actual wedding ceremony in front of a live global audience. The couple kissed, cut a cake and walked through a crowd of dancers. Bad Bunny later signed their marriage certificate as a witness, according to event organizers.

Surprise guests and pointed references

The celebration segued into the first major guest appearance. Lady Gaga joined Bad Bunny for a salsa-leaning version of her ballad “Die With a Smile,” recast with Caribbean percussion and a brass section. Puerto Rican plena group Los Pleneros de la Cresta appeared for “Café Con Ron,” bringing traditional drums and call-and-response vocals to the field.

Ricky Martin, one of the first Latin pop stars to cross into the U.S. mainstream in the late 1990s, arrived for “Lo Que Le Pasó a Hawaii,” a song whose lyrics have been interpreted as a critique of U.S. imperialism and colonial history. Later, “El Apagón,” which references rolling blackouts, gentrification and displacement on the island, played over visuals that suggested Puerto Rico’s strained power grid.

The closing segment turned the football field into a sea of flags from across North, Central and South America. As dancers carrying national banners from Canada to Chile filled the frame, Bad Bunny performed “DeBÍ TiRAR Más FoTos,” the title track of his Grammy-winning 2025 album. Near the end of the song, he switched briefly to English.

“Together, we are America,” he told the crowd and viewers at home. In some broadcasts, he was also heard saying, “Lo único más poderoso que el odio es el amor — the only thing more powerful than hate is love.”

Applause, complaints and political backlash

The performance drew swift and sharply divided reaction.

Music critics at several national outlets called the show a milestone. One entertainment magazine described it as “a victory lap” for an artist who, just a week earlier, had won album of the year at the 68th Grammy Awards for Debí Tirar Más Fotos, the first all-Spanish-language album to take that prize. Another outlet called the halftime show “a thrilling ode to Boricua joy,” highlighting the staging’s references to rural Puerto Rico, diaspora neighborhoods and post-hurricane life.

Inside Levi’s Stadium, social media posts from attendees described the crowd as loud and engaged. One popular streamer who attended the game posted that Bad Bunny’s set was “the loudest the stadium has been all game.”

Online, some viewers complained they did not understand the lyrics and questioned the choice of a Spanish-language performance for what is typically the most-watched U.S. television event of the year. Others praised the show as overdue recognition of a language spoken at home by millions of American residents.

Trump, who has frequently criticized the NFL over cultural and political issues, attacked the performance in a series of posts on his social media platform. He called the show “absolutely terrible, one of the worst, EVER” and “an affront to the Greatness of America.” He added that “nobody understands a word this guy is saying” and called some of the dancing “disgusting, especially for young children.”

Before the game, some conservative commentators had criticized the league’s decision to feature Bad Bunny, citing his past comments about U.S. immigration enforcement and the predominance of Spanish in his catalog. At the Grammy Awards on Feb. 1 in Los Angeles, the artist used his acceptance speech to dedicate his album to people who “had to leave their homeland, their country, to follow their dreams” and made a pointed reference to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, saying “ICE out” onstage.

A rival “All-American” livestream

Those political overtones, along with his prominence in Spanish-language music, helped spark an alternative show timed to the Super Bowl. Conservative advocacy group Turning Point USA taped and streamed what it billed as an “All-American Halftime Show,” headlined by rocker Kid Rock and featuring country artists including Brantley Gilbert, Lee Brice and Gabby Barrett.

Organizers promoted the event as a patriotic, English-language alternative to the official halftime show, with themes of faith and traditional values. Turning Point USA claimed the stream reached between 5 million and 6 million concurrent viewers on YouTube and around 16 million total views across platforms by midnight. Those figures could not be independently verified and would still fall far below a typical Super Bowl audience, which has exceeded 120 million in recent years.

Ratings data for Super Bowl LX and its halftime show had not yet been released by Nielsen as of Monday afternoon. The game aired on NBC and its Peacock streaming service, with a Spanish-language broadcast on Telemundo and additional coverage on NFL+.

Immediate streaming gains and a shifting market

Whatever the final audience count, early metrics indicate the halftime spotlight translated into immediate gains for Bad Bunny and Apple Music. The streaming service reported that plays of his songs rose roughly sevenfold in the minutes after the performance compared with pregame levels. Tracks featured in the show, including “Tití Me Preguntó,” “BAILE INoLVIDABLE” and “DeBÍ TiRAR Más FoTos,” surged into its charts, with “BAILE INoLVIDABLE” reaching the top of the service’s U.S. Latin ranking.

The halftime booking came at a moment when Latin music is gaining a larger share of the U.S. market. Industry figures show Latin recorded-music revenues in the United States grew to more than $1.4 billion in 2024, representing just over 8% of the total market and extending a yearslong run of faster growth than the broader industry. Nearly all of that revenue comes from streaming, the sector where Bad Bunny has repeatedly broken records as the world’s most-streamed artist.

Within the NFL, the halftime show is both a cultural tentpole and an advertising engine, linking brands, artists and audiences on a single stage. For the league and its partners, handing that platform to a Spanish-speaking Puerto Rican artist aligned with their efforts to expand among Latino fans — a demographic whose economic and cultural influence is rising nationwide.

For critics on the right, the choice underscored tensions over immigration, identity and national symbols in an election year. Trump’s supporters have often framed English as central to American culture and have criticized bilingual or Spanish-first public messaging by corporations and institutions.

The NFL has navigated politically charged halftime performances before, including Beyoncé’s 2016 show that referenced Black Lives Matter imagery and the 2020 co-headlining set by Shakira and Jennifer Lopez, which incorporated Latin and bilingual songs. Bad Bunny’s turn differed in its near-total reliance on Spanish lyrics and its explicit focus on Puerto Rico and the broader Americas.

As Bad Bunny stood in the center of Levi’s Stadium on Sunday night, flanked by flags from across the hemisphere, his final English words — “Together, we are America” — offered a definition that stretched beyond the borders of the United States and beyond a single language. How widely that message resonated, and how firmly it will shape future Super Bowl stages, will become clearer as audiences and advertisers absorb what they saw.