America’s biggest sporting event shouldn’t turn into a political debate over a Puerto-Rican popstar and a pre-recorded Kid Rock concert.
Turning Point USA held its own alternate Super Bowl halftime show, featuring multiple country artists and Kid Rock, to supposedly rival the official Bad Bunny performance.
Both halftime shows missed the mark. Most Americans can’t understand Bad Bunny, and Kid Rock hasn’t been relevant for two decades. It’s about audience, not identity.
The problem with this year’s halftime controversy isn’t cultural representation. It’s that both sides forgot a basic concept of mass entertainment. If you’re performing for over 100 million people, most of them should be able to connect to it.
Neither show felt like a unifying cultural moment. Instead, they felt like niche programming forced onto a national stage.
No one wants to go through the effort of changing the channel just to watch a washed-up Kid Rock perform. He was part of the halftime show in 2004, which is remembered for Justin Timberlake exposing Janet Jackson’s breast to the world, as well as a Diddy performance. So, he sounds like the perfect guy to headline a Christian, conservative show.
It’s also ironic that one of his biggest songs is called “Bawitdaba.” The chorus is literally gibberish. The whole point was supposed to be that people can’t understand what Bad Bunny is saying. The lack of self-awareness by Turning Point USA since Charlie Kirk’s assassination is baffling.
Pointing out that most viewers don’t understand Spanish while rallying around a man whose greatest hit is anchored by the lyric “bawitdaba da bang da dang diggy diggy” isn’t exactly the most logical hill to die on. While the chorus is an interpolation of early hip-hop lyrics, they were never used as the focal point of a song.
President Donald Trump has taken issue with Bad Bunny’s performance. Right or wrong, he should be more focused on ending overseas conflicts, fixing the economy and securing the border without American citizens being killed by federal agents. Trump’s typical trash-talking should no longer be taken seriously. At this point, all it does is distract people from his administration’s handling of the Epstein files.
Neither of these halftime shows represent America like Kendrick Lamar’s did last year. The only people upset with Lamar’s halftime show were Drake and Lil Wayne, and Drake is Canadian anyway.
Lamar’s was the most viewed halftime show ever, surpassing the king of pop, Michael Jackson. He had over 5 million more viewers than Bad Bunny, while the amount of people who watched Turning Point’s boomer slop halftime show was about 6 million. The NFL is a private company with the right to do as they wish, but they just lost 5 to 6 million viewers due to the unforced error of holding a halftime show that less than 15% of the country can understand. It’s not that people don’t want to celebrate culture, it’s that over 85% of the country doesn’t understand the language.
Bad Bunny has actually already performed in the Super Bowl halftime show back in 2020. It was an all-Hispanic halftime show featuring Shakira, Jennifer Lopez, J Balvin and Bad Bunny. There were parts performed in Spanish, but the show as a whole was predominately performed in English.
It felt more celebratory and unifying than this year’s show. There was more controversy about the sexual nature of Shakira’s and Lopez’s performances than the language they were speaking.
This year, the show was predominately performed in Spanish. The problem isn’t Bad Bunny’s race or culture. The problem is that when music has lyrics, most people want to understand them, or better yet relate to them.
Unfortunately, the alternative to “BAILE INoLVIDABLE” was “Bawitdaba.”
The NFL needs to use common sense when honoring artists with the halftime show, and Turning Point needs to check what year it is.
