On the first day of this month, Bad Bunny took to the Grammy stage to accept—along with two other awards—the prize for Album of the Year. It was the first time a Spanish-language album had been recognized with the top prize at music’s most prestigious awards. Three days from now, he will also be the first to fill the Super Bowl halftime show with Hispanic music. To discuss this highly anticipated and controversial performance, the Puerto Rican star held a news conference on Thursday in San Francisco, where he admitted that “last night, I couldn’t sleep because I was thinking about it.”
The Super Bowl, where this year the New England Patriots will face the Seattle Seahawks, is consistently the most watched television program of the year in the United States, and more than 130 million people watched last season’s halftime show, which featured rapper Kendrick Lamar. The shows, which last only about 30 minutes, are usually kept under wraps to build anticipation, so the artist born Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio hasn’t revealed much, if anything. As for guests, he simply mentioned his friends, family, “the Latino community,” and people around the world who love his music, without revealing whether anyone else will come on stage with him. “I want people to have fun. It’s going to be a huge party, it’s going to be what people can always expect from me,” he said.
“I know that I told them that they had four months to learn Spanish. They don’t even have to learn Spanish. It’s better if they learn to dance,” he added.
The NFL, Apple, and Roc Nation announced in September that the Puerto Rican artist would be this year’s headliner. The choice of an artist who sings in Spanish, in addition to generating enormous anticipation within the U.S. Latino community, sparked a wave of criticism, spearheaded by President Donald Trump, who announced that, unlike last year, he would not attend the event. “I think it’s a terrible choice. All it does is sow hatred. Terrible,” the president said at the time.
Bad Bunny, a Puerto Rican and therefore a U.S. citizen, has always been a vocal critic of the U.S. president’s policies and has spoken out against ICE. “Before I thank God, I must say: ICE out,” he said in his Grammy acceptance speech on Sunday, to a standing ovation from the Los Angeles audience: “We are not savages, we are not animals, we are not aliens. We are human beings. We are Americans.”
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