Will Bad Bunny speak out at the Super Bowl?

National Post, 7 February 2026

A full-throated protest song would be welcome during Sunday's halftime show

Might we get a moment of musical protest at the Super Bowl?

Such is the fracturing of the previously shared worlds of news and music that I no longer expect to know much about whichever current pop star is booked to play the Super Bowl halftime show. This year was another step into our separate worlds, when it was announced that Bad Bunny would headline the show.

I had never heard of him. But a great many have. On Spotify, he has been the most-streamed artist a record four times — in 2020, 2021, 2022 and 2025. He was first non-English artist to top the list.

The NFL’s timing was unwittingly perfect. Not since the 2004 Super Bowl, when Janet Jackson symbolically ushered in the pornographication of American culture, has an artist been more timely.

Bad Bunny is, I learned, a Puerto Rican rapper who sings mostly in Spanish, brings a certain fashionably gender-fluid vibe to the otherwise machismo culture of rap and — why not? — occasionally dabbles in professional wrestling. Not cheering from the audience. He grapples in the ring.

Bad Bunny’s politics tend leftward and he is a fierce critic of the Trump administration’s signature immigration policies. He is on something of a roll, winning big at the Grammy Awards last week, at which he spoke out against the aggressive and lethal ICE tactics in Minneapolis.

When his selection for the Super Bowl was first announced a few months back, there was grumbling from Trumpworld that the NFL should have made a more Trump-adulating choice, perhaps the Village People singing How Great Thou Art before a golden statue of the president.

The NFL is seeking to grow its Spanish market, so the hottest Latino star was worth the risk, even if the NFL ownership, as rapacious and vulgar as any assemblage this side of FIFA or the International Olympic Committee, would otherwise be sympathetic to Trump, bringing as he does rapacity and vulgarity to new depths. In any case, Trump is not going to the Super Bowl this year, despite Bad Bunny’s affinity for Trump’s first sports love, pro wrestling.

I have no idea what he will sing, as I am wholly ignorant of the Bunny oeuvre. A full-throated protest song would be welcome though, a reminder of the power of protest music. The fin-de-regime spectacle of the Super Bowl does not invite disruptions to the gambling-fuelled orgy of commercial excess, but sometimes music is meant to sound a discordant note.

More than 15 years ago, Bruce Springsteen played the Super Bowl. His particular genius is that he has mastered commercially successful protest. He returned to the genre last week, releasing The Streets of Minneapolis, which quickly became one of the top-selling songs online.

It’s not subtle; Springsteen sings of “King Trump’s private army,” denounces the “lies” of his senior officials, and promises to remember those who have died in the “streets of Minneapolis” protecting the “stranger in our midst.” He conceded that, as a song, it is bit of a “soapbox.”

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