Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl halftime performance was a celebration of Latin American culture and a rebuke of US imperial power. Yet, argue Agnese Pacciardi and Priscyll Anctil Avoine, the excitement it sparked risks obscuring the corporate, extractive structures that made the show possible, and profitable
Bad Bunny captivated audiences during the 2026 Super Bowl halftime show with a tribute to his homeland, Puerto Rico, and to Latin American culture. The entire performance was in Spanish, granting dignity and centrality to a language that, despite being spoken by roughly one in five people in the United States, has long been marginalised in the US public sphere.
The stage design was deeply symbolic. Sugar cane fields referenced Puerto Rico’s history of colonial exploitation, alongside the labour and resilience of its people, and their attachment to the land. The set recreated street life, with elderly men playing dominoes, young women doing their nails, and food vendors. A casita evoked Puerto Rico’s traditional rural homesteads. Power lines alluded to the island’s chronic blackouts (Puerto Rico's under-maintained and fossil-fuel-dependent electrical grid has been subject to controversial privatisation processes). And an image of El Morro, the fortress in San Juan built during Spanish colonisation, recalled centuries of imperial domination.
Altogether, the performance echoed Bad Bunny’s goal of representing 'my people, my culture, and our history'; words he had posted on X months before the event. In that same post he also announced he would not include the US in his world tour, citing concerns that immigration enforcement raids could target his concerts.
Bad Bunny’s rise to global fame has been meteoric. Beginning as a teenager uploading music online, he is now one of the world's most-streamed, and Spotify’s most-played in 2025. His latest album, Debí Tirar Más Fotos (I Should Have Taken More Photos), was named Album of the Year at the 2026 Grammys.
Many expected Bad Bunny's Super Bowl performance to be political. Online rumours even claimed the NFL had cancelled it, amid speculation he would provoke conservative outrage. Yet the power of his performance lay in its subtlety. There were no direct attacks on the Trump administration, no anti-imperialist slogans. Instead, it staged a joyful, unapologetic anti-colonial show within one of the most powerful symbols of US cultural and political power. At a moment when far-right discourse in the US and beyond is marked by escalating violent rhetoric, the show’s tone of celebration and love felt intentional.
Bad Bunny's Super Bowl performance was expected to be political, yet there were no direct attacks on the Trump administration. Instead, the artist staged a joyful, unapologetic anti-colonial show
The performance reached hundreds of millions of viewers in the US and globally. Donald Trump derided it as 'absolutely terrible', suggesting that the message hit precisely where Bad Bunny meant it to.
The Super Bowl halftime show exists within, and is financed by, the very structures and powers that Bad Bunny exposed. This uncomfortable truth reminds us how easily dissent can be absorbed, repackaged, and sold back to us as entertainment.
We have seen this pattern before. Climate justice language becomes a marketing strategy for corporations driving extractivism in the Global South under a 'green transition' banner. LGBTQ+ rights are invoked to polish state violence, as in the pinkwashing of the Israeli occupation of Palestine. Time and again, systems of power have shown a remarkable ability to take criticism, soften its edges, push it into the mainstream, and strip it of its disruptive force. What begins as resistance risks ending as mere branding.
Massive corporate sponsorships finance the Super Bowl halftime show. In recent years, including this one, Apple Music was the main sponsor, holding deals worth tens of millions of dollars annually. Apple is a flagship of contemporary tech capitalism, yet faces serious labour and environmental criticisms. It also maintains close ties to US political power. Apple CEO, Tim Cook, has effectively lobbied the Trump administration to preserve favourable taxation and corporate advantages.
The main halftime sponsor, Apple, is a flagship of contemporary tech capitalism, yet faces serious labour and environmental criticisms and maintains close ties to US political power
Similar dynamics shape Spotify and the music industry that carried Bad Bunny from reggaeton underground to global stardom. The industry’s model is extractive: a small minority of artists accumulate major wealth while corporations, largely in the Global North, capture disproportionate profits from Latin American cultural production. It is also deeply gendered. Women face systemic barriers, harassment, and unequal pay. Reggaeton reproduces many of these dynamics, and Bad Bunny’s lyrics sometimes echo the genre’s misogyny — including in Tití Me Preguntó (Auntie Asked Me), which opened the Super Bowl halftime show — even as he has challenged heteropatriarchal norms in songs such as Yo Perreo Sola (I Twerk Alone), Caro and Solo de Mí.
Bad Bunny was invited onto that stage because he operates within a capitalist, extractive, sexist and structurally unequal global music industry. His anti-colonial message does not stand outside that system; it travels through it.
The visibility that gave Bad Bunny's message power also generated new profits from the very structures he challenges
The same machinery that amplifies his critique also monetises it. In the days following the performance, his US Spotify streams reportedly surged by 470%. The visibility that gave Bad Bunny's message power also generated new profits from the very structures he challenges. However powerful, his intervention remains inevitably entangled in the system it confronts, and we need to face this.
Absolutely not.
In many ways, Bad Bunny remains a colonial subject. He is a working-class Puerto Rican who rose from bagging groceries to global stardom through independent creativity and strategic engagement with the mainstream. His critiques of imperial power reached millions precisely because he stepped onto that stage.
The question is not how to resolve this contradiction, but how to live with it.
Artists can profit from exploitative systems while still producing work that unsettles them. Framing the debate as a choice between anti-colonial hero and capitalist sellout misses the point. Rather than judging Bad Bunny's 'authenticity', it may be more useful to sit with the tension: to recognise the force of his message while scrutinising the structures that sustain it. Political expression under global capitalism is rarely pure; power, profit and resistance often share the same spotlight.
