Bad Bunny’s historic booking sparked backlash, rival streams, and celebration, turning the Super Bowl halftime show into a frontline of America’s culture war.
When the NFL announced that Bad Bunny would headline the Super Bowl LX halftime show, the news landed with the inevitability of gravity. Of course it was going to be Bad Bunny.
He is one of the most streamed artists on Earth, a stadium-filling global pop monolith whose music plays everywhere from Miami clubs to European fashion runways to TikTok edits of Formula 1 crashes. From a business standpoint, it made perfect sense.
From a cultural standpoint, it was historic, making him the first solo Latin male artist to headline the halftime show.
And yet, within about forty-five seconds of the announcement, it stopped being about music entirely and became another front in America’s permanent, low-grade culture war, where every piece of mass entertainment must now be processed through the question of who it is for and who it is leaving behind.
The NFL’s Official Pick
From the league’s perspective, this was a pure market play. The Super Bowl halftime show is not designed to soothe the cultural anxieties of cable news panelists. It is designed to capture the largest possible global audience, and Bad Bunny is, statistically speaking, one of the safest bets alive.
His streaming numbers are cartoonish, his tours sell out instantly, and his crossover appeal cuts across language barriers in a way legacy American acts increasingly cannot.
His performance is expected to foreground Puerto Rican culture and Spanish-language music, which is less a political statement than a reflection of where popular music actually lives now.
The NFL did not select him to make a cultural argument. They selected him because he is one of the biggest entertainers on the planet, which is, theoretically, the point of the halftime show.
The Backlash Begins
Naturally, this did not prevent the backlash from arriving on schedule. Former quarterback Brett Favre weighed in to say he would have preferred Jason Aldean, framing the issue less in terms of entertainment value and more in terms of patriotic vibes.
Around the same time, House Speaker Mike Johnson joked that Lee Greenwood would have been a better pick, which is the kind of suggestion that functions less as a programming idea and more as a cultural signal flare. The subtext was not subtle.
Spanish-language reggaeton was being contrasted with English-language flag-waving country, as though the halftime show were a referendum on national loyalty rather than a concert watched by people eating seven-layer dip.
Counter-Programming Becomes Reality
What elevated the situation from routine backlash to something genuinely surreal was the decision to make the protest infrastructural.
Conservative youth organization Turning Point USA announced it would stage a rival livestream event, the “All-American Halftime Show,” airing simultaneously with the official broadcast.
The event is headlined by Kid Rock, which feels less like a booking and more like performance art about the concept of counter-programming itself.
Additional country and Southern rock acts round out the lineup, creating what is effectively a parallel halftime universe for viewers who feel alienated by the existence of Spanish lyrics on network television.
It is difficult to overstate how funny it is that the culture war has now progressed to the point of dueling halftime shows, like ideological Super Smash Bros.
Representation, and Cultural Milestones
Lost slightly in the noise of the backlash is the fact that many people are simply excited. For Latino audiences, Bad Bunny’s headlining slot is being treated as a genuine cultural milestone, a recognition of how central Spanish-language music has become to global pop.
Artists across the industry have voiced support, including Ricky Martin, who framed the moment as a victory for performers who achieved worldwide success without sanding down their cultural identity.
Fans are organizing themed Super Bowl parties, Spanish-language campaigns are ramping up, and the general mood in those spaces is celebratory rather than defensive.
To them, the halftime show is not a controversy. It is a coronation.
Halftime as Culture War Battleground
What this entire episode illustrates is how the Super Bowl halftime show now functions as a kind of symbolic terrain where larger demographic and cultural anxieties get staged.
The argument is nominally about music, but it is actually about language, immigration, globalization, and the uneasy realization that American mass culture no longer revolves exclusively around English-speaking audiences.
As Latino viewership and market power grow, their presence on major cultural platforms becomes unavoidable, and for some observers, unsettling.
The halftime show becomes a condensed site where those tensions play out in brightly lit, sponsor-approved form.
Spectacle, Satire, and the Absurdity Factor
There is also an unmistakable layer of absurdist comedy to the entire situation. The fact that a Super Bowl halftime performance has generated a rival ideological broadcast would have sounded like a bit from a satirical TV show ten years ago.
Now it exists as a real media product, complete with branding, livestream infrastructure, and audience targeting.
The spectacle surrounding the spectacle reveals the degree to which shared cultural experiences have fractured.
Even the nation’s most watched entertainment event can no longer function as neutral ground. It must be mirrored, opposed, and ideologically sorted.
More Than a Performance
When Bad Bunny finally takes the stage, the performance will operate on multiple levels at once.
For the NFL, it is a straightforward ratings play built around one of the world’s biggest stars. For supporters, it is a milestone in representation and cultural visibility.
For critics, it symbolizes an ongoing shift in national identity that they find disorienting or unwelcome. And hovering over all of it is the existence of a rival halftime show, a counter-spectacle that perfectly encapsulates the moment.
The Super Bowl halftime show used to be a shared pop ritual.
Now it is a bifurcated media event, reflecting a country that increasingly experiences even its most universal spectacles through parallel, incompatible lenses.