The New Yorker:

You could think of the set as a tribute to the power and capaciousness of American popular music—or as a pointed critique of it.

By Kelefa Sanneh

Bad Bunny arrived on the Super Bowl stage wearing a silver trenchcoat and a matching do-rag. He delivered a perfectly incendiary verse in which he declared, “Viva la raza!”, and then he disappeared—and no one really seemed to mind. The year was 2020, and Bad Bunny was appearing as a special guest of Shakira, who was one of the halftime show’s two headliners. (The other was Jennifer Lopez.) Back then, he was neither a national obsession nor the subject of fierce political debate; when he declared, “Viva la raza!”, he was saluting the Texas-born professional wrestler Eddie Guerrero, who had adopted that phrase as his rallying cry. This year, Bad Bunny returned to the Super Bowl as both the halftime headliner and the event’s main newsmaker, often overshadowing the players who were ostensibly the top attraction. (He has more than fifty million followers on Instagram, which is about a hundred times as many as Sam Darnold, the Seattle Seahawks’ quarterback.) Bad Bunny is a Puerto Rican star who performs almost entirely in Spanish, who endorsed Kamala Harris in 2024, and who has been critical of Immigration and Customs Enforcement. And yet the news that he would be this year’s Super Bowl headliner transformed him into something he had never really been before: a divisive figure. In early October, not long after the halftime-show announcement, President Donald Trump described the N.F.L.’s decision to host Bad Bunny as “absolutely ridiculous,” though he also claimed that he’d “never heard of him.” Shortly afterward, Turning Point USA, the conservative student network, said that it would produce a competing concert, the All-American Halftime Show—an attempt, perhaps, to upstage the upstager.

That is probably not possible, at least not right now. Bad Bunny has spent the past decade creating one of the most irresistible bodies of work in all of popular music, and turning himself into an equivalently transfixing performer, singing and rapping in a cool and deceptively casual voice that can make almost any rhythm sound as if it were created just for him. And on Sunday he put on what might have been the best halftime performance in Super Bowl history: a riot of machine-tooled beats and swaying melodies, accompanied by so much dancing and so many different scenes—from a sugarcane plantation to a miniature nail salon to a handful of malfunctioning electric poles, to evoke and protest the island’s rolling blackouts—that when it was over, scarcely thirteen minutes after it began, viewers might almost have forgotten the appearances by Lady Gaga and Ricky Martin.

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