Super Bowl Halftime Show Was A Complete Humiliation Ritual
A little over ten minutes of un-American garbage.
Bad Bunny, born Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio, delivered a nearly English-free performance at the Super Bowl Halftime Show this Sunday.
Ocasio’s songs are vulgar, in lyrics and melody. Most feature a variation of the same bass-boosted trance beat: Eyy, yo, yo, yo, yo, yo, eyyy, yo, yo, yo, yo, yo.
Ocasio performed “Tití Me Preguntó,” perhaps his most popular song. A TikToker kindly provided an English-language translation (and performance) of the song, which you can watch here, to get a sense for the song’s deep stupidity.
“Safaera,” meaning “promiscuity, debauchery or substance abuse,” also featured in Ocasio’s set list. He performed a censored version. Can you imagine why?
(In some respects, we’re lucky Ocasio rapped in a Spanish so sloppy, it was unintelligible even to other Latin Americans.)
But degeneracy is par for the course in pop culture. As are insipid chord progressions and melodies, as are terrible live performances.
Ocasio’s performance was notable for its hostility to American culture, and its distance from American culture.
Some aggrieved Latino will inevitably object: “Uhm, ackshually, anyone born in the Americas is an American.”
Ocasio made reference to such pedantic arguments, shouting “God bless America” before rattling off the countries from Chile to Canada (along with Puerto Rico, despite its status as a U.S. territory.) Dancers holding the flags of the North and South American nations marched behind Ocasio, who concluded the segment by holding a football to the camera. Inscribed on it: “Together, We Are America.” (Mexican band Los Tigres del Norte made the same point in 1986 with “América,” so there’s zero novelty left to squeeze from such wordplay.)
Well, fine. If Mexicans and Venezuelans and Argentines want to spend their days arguing a petty semantic point, let them have at it. The desire to claim the “American” label for themselves betrays a certain insecurity at being Mexican or Venezuelan or Argentine. Or perhaps a bitterness towards (actual) Americans: “You like calling yourselves Americans, so we’re going to take it away from you.”
Ocasio threw plenty of digs at “the colonizers.” His performance began in the sugar cane fields, Puerto Rican laborers chopping at tall stalks (perhaps an allusion to sugarcane plantations which once employed slave labor.)
Ocasio performed “LO QUE LE PASÓ A HAWAii,” a song lamenting the colonization of Hawaii and a parallel change coming to Puerto Rico: “Thеy want to take my river and my beach too / They want my neighborhood and grandma to leave / No, don’t let go of the flag nor forget the lelolai / ‘Cause I don’t want them to do to you what happened to Hawaii.”
What’s wrong, Bad Bunny? Afraid of a little cultural enrichment?