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Kid Rock Lip-Synced to an Empty Room While Bad Bunny Taught 130 Million People About Colonialism

One of the most politically charged halftime shows in Super Bowl history was so masterfully crafted that millions of Americans thanked Bad Bunny for keeping politics out of it.

Kahlil Greene
Feb 11, 2026

On Sunday, Bad Bunny delivered the first entirely Spanish-language Super Bowl halftime show in history, and predictably, the far-right lost its collective mind. Conservative pundits called the performance "too woke" before a single note played. Some commentators questioned whether a Puerto Rican artist was even "American enough" to headline the biggest stage in the country.

They're losing the culture war, and the reaction proved it. Bad Bunny's Spotify streams spiked 470 percent in the U.S. after the performance.

Turning Point USA's alternative halftime show featured Kid Rock delivering what Rolling Stone described as a “half-assed lip-synch” to a crowd that seemed more interested in owning the libs than enjoying live music. Meanwhile, Bad Bunny packed a 13-minute set with world-class choreography, Lady Gaga, Ricky Martin, a real wedding ceremony, and a visual narrative spanning centuries of Caribbean history.

But the far-right's meltdown isn't the real story here. What's far more revealing is what happened with everyone else. Specifically, I want to discuss the high number of moderates and center-right viewers who came away praising Bad Bunny because he supposedly “kept politics out of it.” They just saw a guy who loves Puerto Rico putting on a hell of a performance. Nothing controversial.

Bad Bunny smuggled radical critique into the center of the most corporate, flag-waving American event of the year. He delivered a 13-minute history lesson on colonialism, gentrification, and resistance to 130 million people, and most of them thought they were just watching a good show. A huge chunk of the audience literally thanked him for being neutral.

Here’s the context they missed, and the six most political things Bad Bunny did on Sunday night.

1. He Opened in the Sugar Cane Fields

The very first image of the halftime show was labor. Dancers swung machetes through sugar cane while wearing all-white clothing and traditional pava hats, the woven straw headwear associated with Puerto Rico’s rural working class. As Rolling Stone’s Vanessa Diaz and Petra Rivera-Rideau note, “sugar cane was the economic engine for many Caribbean countries in the 19th and early-20th centuries, including Puerto Rico,” and “sugar plantations have also long been symbols of the legacy of colonialism and slavery in the region.”

Enslaved Africans worked Puerto Rico’s sugar fields until abolition in 1873 under Spanish colonial rule. Then, after the U.S. took control in 1898, American sugar corporations consumed Puerto Rican land and extracted enormous profits while the laborers who made it possible stayed behind, broken and underpaid.

BET’s Yesha Callahan describes this system as “industrial slavery,” noting that it “functioned like a factory powered by bodies.” Workers lost fingers and lives to mills that ran nonstop during harvest season. Even after abolition, the brutal conditions persisted well into the 1940s. Bad Bunny placed that history at the front of the biggest American broadcast of the year. On a night designed to celebrate American excess, he made sure 130 million viewers saw who built the foundation of American prosperity.

2. He Invited Toñita, a One-Woman Stand Against Gentrification

Midway through the set, Bad Bunny stopped at a bar and took a shot from a grinning older woman in a bright blue jacket. That was Maria Antonia "Toñita" Cay, who has run the Caribbean Social Club in Brooklyn’s Williamsburg neighborhood for over 50 years. As CBC News reports, the club started in the 1970s as “a members-only hangout for the community baseball team” and has since become a cultural anchor for the Puerto Rican diaspora in New York.

What makes her appearance significant is what she represents. Williamsburg has become one of the most aggressively gentrified neighborhoods in the country, and Toñita has famously refused to sell her property. On an album built around the dangers of gentrification in Puerto Rico, Bad Bunny brought its living embodiment onto the Super Bowl stage.

3. He Put Two Men Dancing Together on the Biggest Stage in Sports

During the performance, two male dancers shared a moment of clear romantic intimacy on stage. No disclaimer. Just two men dancing together during a halftime show watched by over a hundred million people. Bad Bunny normalized queer intimacy on a stage historically dominated by hypermasculine spectacle. In the context of a reggaeton performance, a genre built on machismo, that quiet moment was one of the loudest statements of the night.

On top of this, his two musical guests, Lady Gaga and Ricky Martin are both globally recognized as being a part of the LGBTQ+ community and creating art meant to empower queer people worldwide.

4. He Had Ricky Martin Sing “Lo Que Le Pasó a Hawaii”

In the late 1990s, Ricky Martin crossed over into English-language pop with songs that leaned into the Latin-lover archetype. As Diaz and Rivera-Rideau observe in Rolling Stone, at the Super Bowl “we saw a different Ricky.” He didn’t perform “Livin’ la Vida Loca.” He performed “Lo Que Le Pasó a Hawaii,” arguably the most politically charged track on Bad Bunny’s album “DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS.”

The song is a direct plea for Puerto Rico not to end up like Hawai’i, which became a U.S. state in 1959 after the U.S.-backed overthrow of the Hawaiian Kingdom. Hawai’i Public Radio’s Cassie Ordonio reports that the song has drawn significant reactions from both Native Hawaiians and Puerto Ricans, with listeners noting “stark similarities between the islands, such as issues of displacement, overmilitarism and overtourism.”

5. He Climbed the Electric Poles and Waved the Flag They Used to Kill People For

For his performance of “El Apagón,” which translates to “The Blackout,” Bad Bunny and his dancers climbed sparking electric poles while stadium lights flickered.

According to Rolling Stone, the song addresses “the frequent blackouts that plague” Puerto Rico, and the performance referenced citizens who, after Hurricane María, “taught themselves basic electrical skills and began risking their lives climbing electrical poles in order to begin reconnecting loose or damaged power lines.”

This was the longest blackout in American history, lasting nearly a year, the result of a decayed power grid, a catastrophic storm, and what the Rolling Stone authors describe as a “massively inadequate and inhumane response by the U.S. government.” That government response, of course, included then-President Trump tossing paper towels at Puerto Rican hurricane survivors like he was shooting free throws at a charity basketball game. Nearly 3,000 people died.

Then, as “El Apagón” played, Bad Bunny emerged carrying a massive Puerto Rican flag. But it wasn’t the standard version. The triangle was light blue, not the dark blue that the U.S. imposed to match its own flag after taking control of the island. According to Diaz and Rivera-Rideau, “the azul clarito has become associated with movements advocating for Puerto Rican independence.” Bad Bunny himself raps on “La Mudanza”: "They killed people here for having the flag. That’s why now I take it with me everywhere.” This references the Ley de la Mordaza, or Gag Law, which from 1948 to 1957 banned Puerto Ricans from even displaying their own flag.

6. He Redefined What “America” Means

Bad Bunny closed the show by doing something deceptively simple. He said “God bless America,” and then listed countries. Not states, countries.

Argentina. Uruguay. Paraguay. Colombia. Venezuela. Cuba. Mexico. Canada. The United States. Nearly every nation in the Western Hemisphere. As he spoke, hundreds of people carrying flags from across the Americas surrounded him on the field. Then he held the football he’d been carrying throughout the performance up to the camera. Written on it in white: “Together, we are America.”

As Rolling Stone’s Diaz and Rivera-Rideau note, this moment “follows a long line of Latin musicians” who “have written songs uniting the Americas against U.S. imperial interests,” from Rubén Blades to Residente to Los Tigres del Norte. The phrase “God Bless America” has been invoked at countless Super Bowls, always understood to mean one country. Bad Bunny took those three words and forced them to mean what they literally say. America is a continent, not a country. And by listing nations from Chile to Canada, he reframed every Latino immigrant not as a foreigner arriving in America but as someone who was already in it.

On a night when conservative critics questioned whether a Puerto Rican artist was “American enough” to perform at the Super Bowl, Bad Bunny didn’t argue for his inclusion. He expanded the definition until the question made no sense. Then he said two words in Spanish: “Seguimos aquí.” We’re still here.

Funny how the most political halftime show in Super Bowl history looked, to millions of people, like it had no politics at all. That’s not a failure of messaging. That’s mastery of it.

Sources

1. Diaz, Vanessa, and Petra Rivera-Rideau. "All of the Hidden Symbols and Meanings You May Have Missed in Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl Set." Rolling Stone, February 9, 2026.
2. Callahan, Yesha. "The History Behind Bad Bunny’s Sugar Cane Opening at the Super Bowl." BET, February 9, 2026.
3. Hughes, Abby. "Decoding the Nods to Latino Culture in Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl Performance." CBC News, February 9, 2026.
4. Ordonio, Cassie. "A Tale of 2 Islands: Bad Bunny Song about Hawaiʻi Sends a Message to Puerto Rico." Hawaiʻi Public Radio, January 30, 2025.