metropolis m

It’s no wonder Donald Trump was enraged by Bad Bunny’s halftime show at the Super Bowl. The Puerto Rican trap star has grown into the role of political artist, and the creativity of his music is an indictment of MAGA’s schlock-filled cultural wasteland.

Bad Bunny is the stage name of Benito Martínez Ocasio, who won the Grammy for best album the previous week. He delivered a show that lived up to the hype, speaking exclusively in Spanish and went through the major hits of his 2025 album, DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS (“I Should Have Taken More Photos”), with an aesthetic evoking Puerto Rico and the island’s working-class New York diaspora.

Through the lyrics of his song “Lo Qué Le Pasó a Hawaii,” he used the platform to openly criticize US colonialism in Puerto Rico and he offered an ode to Puerto Rican working-class migrants with “NUEVAYoL.” Bad Bunny, surrounded by flags from throughout the continent, ended by saying “God Bless America” and then shouted out the names of every country in the Americas in true Bolivarian fashion.

The most political act was the performance in itself, a gesture of defiance toward the xenophobia of Donald Trump’s base and a US government that dehumanizes Latin Americans every chance it gets. Martínez Ocasio used the quintessential US sporting event to openly criticize an administration that has further militarized the US colony of Puerto Rico in order to attack other Latin American nations while continuing to deny Puerto Ricans the right to decide their future.