Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl Performance: A Celebration of Latin American Identity
There is perhaps nothing more absurd than disliking Bad Bunny, and even more so, defending him, because defending Bad Bunny implies believing he needs defending. Days before his Super Bowl performance, when he received the Grammy Award for Album of the Year, I told a friend, half-jokingly, that someone from Latin America was crying theatrically like that. Following the announcement of his win, and amidst the commotion, Bad Bunny had closed his eyes, pressing his fingers against the bridge of his nose, as if controlling the point of tear release, simply letting time pass.
It’s a method of containment, a gesture of a homemaker, a weary worker, a neighbor two doors down, serving the same purpose for euphoria as for misfortune. Its ambivalence, the happy indeterminacy of emotions, is what makes it profoundly Latin American. Whoever watches doesn’t know what to expect: whether the person pausing has just won the lottery, is coming from burying their mother, or, even more exquisitely, is faking everything that happens to them.
Then, during the Super Bowl, Bad Bunny performed with a permanent expression of astonishment, with a certain nervous quality that didn’t negate the insolent air of a rural upbringing. He seemed like a primary school boy, climbing onto the town stage for the first time, ready to sing the celebrated anthems of the region and earn the resounding applause of the adults. He has been able to awaken the most impenetrable collective joy with all those patches that are useless in conservatories and auditions, while producing a kind of sorrow in the conservative desperation surrounding him, the attack on popular virtue with a technical checklist: “he doesn’t sing,” “he doesn’t perform,” “I don’t know what.” The truth is, he does, but at this point, who cares? After all, it’s difficult, and unnecessary, to explain a ritual to someone who doesn’t yearn to practice it before any pedagogy.
Over the years, and with the evolution of his music, I’ve begun to listen to Bad Bunny as the person I was when Bad Bunny didn’t exist. There’s been a transfer, a lending of senses to a ghost. Just as Bad Bunny hands the Grammy statuette to the child he once was, so too do we listen to his music for the ear of the one who still awaits us in the past.
The obsession with deconstructing him, with deciphering every wink sown into his spectacle, stems from the fact that he is an artist in whose crime we find evidence of our own fault, as if we were a detective following the clues of the culprit in the crime scene of American pop culture, only to discover that the murderer was ourselves. When we catch, in the bustle of the show, the image of a child sleeping on three plastic chairs, awakened by an adult hand, we unlock an ambiguous emotion, threatening to drift into longing, while outlining a territory or a constellation. Private memory expands, and nostalgia comes undone. People are happy to learn that life was full of subtle passages, almost imperceptible behaviors, minor family habits, whose only importance was reserved for many years later, when, in the middle of an American football game, they confirm that what brings two people from the same town together is not nationality, but recognizing the same insignificance.
After the show, Donald Trump said that nothing Bad Bunny said could be understood. That is precisely what is needed. That he not be understood, because right now I can’t think of a more legible statement. He is not, and never has been, a translator, but the language in action, and his culture, which is ours, never suffered a mutilation when it had to climb the hill of success and face the trafficking of symbols undertaken by all the Latin stars who have triumphed in the American market. That is often a journey that bleeds you, in which you leave things behind, stripping yourself of what doesn’t work for what the law of show business usually calls the general public, and sometimes what survives is just a shell. They didn’t need more.
How Bad Bunny managed to arrive here intact, insubordinate, is something that only history and the people can explain. He reached the highest instance of public stardom in the most powerful country in the world without having his name amputated along the way. He did it as a Latin American, not as a Latino, a fundamental difference. Before, you had to surrender your surname to access a quota of representation. And the unprecedented thing about seeing him at the Super Bowl wasn’t an unheard-of spectacle, but a familiar one, intimate, where Bad Bunny didn’t sing in Spanish about a Caribbean landscape, because that would simply be the enésima colorful postcard, but performed on the language.
In the United States, it’s less about speaking Spanish than about being silent in it. The sound of a language can be used as a decorative object, but not its silence, nor its image, the drawing of the echo. None of this is trivial or gratuitous. In a world openly fascist, no symbol of comfort should be thrown away.
