Bad Bunny Joyfully Forces Football Fans To Acknowledge Existence Of Puerto Rico For 13 Whole Minutes

Will MAGA ever recover?

screengrab, Bad Bunny Super Bowl performance, obviously

Holy fuck, that Super Bowl! Two blue-state teams playing against the backdrop of the gayest city in the land, and a logo that looked like the rainbow flag and the trans flag took some poppers and squeegeed a neon Lichtenstein landscape together. AND the New England Patriots lost, fuck them ball-deflators and their rub-n-tug owner.

But the big story was that Bad Bunny/Lady Gaga/Ricky Martin/an entire REAL WEDDING cameo-studded halftime show! Watch it!

Art will save us, and this was Bad Bunny’s plea for the humanity of Puerto Ricans and people of the other Americas besides MAGA USA. Donald Trump et al. have been making the case for assimilation and the continued dominance of white culture, and here was the counterpoint.

¡NO!

Which way, America? Bad Bunny, or Kid Rock’s Dr. Phil-looking ass in jorts and a fur? Puerto Rican musical theater of whitewashed West Side Story with Natalie Wood, or with Puerto Ricans telling their own story? The joy of dance and song, or the hunched over MAGA regime of rhythmless haters contributing nothing but snarling complaints and shooting people in the head? The only thing more powerful than hate is love, but hate’s still got control of all branches of government and an approval rating of 41 percent.

Here is Bad Bunny to remind the USA that you love Latinos! Always have. Fought entire wars with Spain and moved the whole Mexican border right on over them in the 1840s and ‘50s, and fought a whole other war in 1898 to get Puerto Rico and Spain’s other Caribbean real estate too. And now Trump is Viceroy of Venezuela and even putting moves on Cuba.

You bought the ticket, USA, so why not take a tour of Puerto Rican joy in the face of colonialist oppression!

Bad Bunny, real name Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio, worked with historian Jorell Meléndez-Badillo, University of Wisconsin–Madison assistant professor of Latin American and Caribbean history and author of the book Puerto Rico: A National History, to write historical narratives to accompany videos for 17 of his songs, all in Spanish.

The book sounds like an engrossing read. Meléndez-Badillo describes it as:

“a history of Puerto Rico from pre-Columbian societies all the way to Bad Bunny, shedding light on communities that have been marginalized throughout history: working-class movements, feminist movements, queer movements. It’s interested in how history can help us to understand the present and also to envision potential futures.”

Which explains the Lady Gaga salsa and the Ricky Martin and the cane field tour, moving through the working-class streets, the wholesome Christian wedding, the utility-pole dancers, literally crashing into a family’s house (merging past and present), then giving the Grammy to the Liam-looking little boy and returning him to his parents. Jesus fucking Christ! A cornucopia of symbolism. It was part history in the book sense, part jerk-out-your-tears-with-a-winch history, like the scene in Coco when Miguel tries to make his grandma remember she was married to Hector.

Down somewhere in your crusty, icy, murderous heart, USA, you loved Latinos. Somewhere you still do! Remember? Latinos are your neighbors and always have been, even since before there was a USA. And do you really think Latinos are scary, America? Come TF on.

Monolingual USA, maybe if you want some help and insight on fighting shitass colonizers, learn some Spanish, crack a book. The fight may be new and shocking to us, but the rest of the world has been fighting Trump’s style of boot-stomping imperialism for a long, long time.

Anyway, Trump and shitasses like Laura Loomer and Fox News had nasty things to say, as they do every single day of their miserable lives. Yet they watched, even on giant screens at Mar-a-Lago.

Oh, so many tens of millions of MAGAs watched, hate-watched between their fingers, grinding their teeth against their packets of menthol Copenhagen, wishing away their problematic boners. And Trump (or Dan Scavino, or the mystery “staffer”) pounded out his dumb little daydreams.

You sure you want to be all think of the children right now, ese? We’d almost forgotten the Epstein Files for three entire hours. (Internet: “Kid Rock, is that a nickname for Epstein’s island?”) Did Trump forget Puerto Rico is part of the country he is president of? Back to bed, gramps.

Finally, we guess we got primary custody of the NFL in the national divorce? Unexpected, but if it’s going to be that much fun and they keep working on that traumatic brain injury thing, maybe we will consider letting them into the living room. Arts, sports, they bring people together, and connection and love are beautiful things.

[Hollywood Reporter / Rolling Stone archive link]

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