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The news is lying again!
Not directly of course. Indirectly, and ya I know it's not really a surprise. But I like Scott's approach to lying, "if it's worth your time to lie it's worth my time to correct you".
In this case, my newsfeed got clogged up with articles about the bad bunny halftime show because I was looking up reactions to it after some of the previous TheMotte discussions. One of the lines repeated in just about every article was that bad bunny was the most viewed half time show in all history. Which immediately struck me as disingenuous.
First of all none of them meant "most viewed at the time of airing". It's based on playback data after the fact. Usher and Kendrick Lamar both had more viewership during the performance. This is a bad metric for multiple reasons. Viewership generally goes up over time. Internet viewership of things has definitely gone up. None of the articles I saw gave relative numbers on this, so I don't even know how much of a success this should be. It would be like judging star wars movie success by how many people watched on the first week of the theater release, and not adjusting at all for more theaters/people/etc.
Second of all the in moment halftime show viewership is generally a function of how many people are watching the Superbowl. The halftime show does create a viewership bump as some people tune in for it specifically. I think this viewership bump is actually more important than total viewership of the halftime show. The viewership bump makes the Superbowl more of a cultural moment. The "cultural moment" is what makes the Superbowl such a commercial success.
The metric that I think we should judge halftime shows on is the relative viewership bump as a percentage and not absolute numbers. Since viewership has generally been going up year over year for the event.
The bulleted data below was put together by Gemini AI, using methodology I requested. Basically how much viewership was bumped by the halftime show:
By this metric I think bad bunny was a failure. In the 2010s a 1-3% bump was standard. Lady Gaga was an outlier during that era.
Third and final point is: stop trying to make fetch happen. I've lived most of my adult life in a media environment where they can just endlessly repeat something in order to make it true. I'm sick of it. I think most people are sick of it.
They want to manifest cultural items into success, and they use the fudgiest numbers and lying stats to make it part of the narrative.
They couldn't manifest the woke tv shows to success, and they aren't doing it here either.
For what its worth in European countries Bad Bunny exploded after the super bowl. For example in Switzerland there are currently three BB songs in the top 10.
https://top40-charts.com/chart.php?cid=23&date=2026-02-15
And he is top #1 in the global Spotify chart:
https://www.facebook.com/phmusicworld00/posts/bad-bunnys-dtmf-remains-at-1-on-the-global-spotify-chart-with-82-million-streams/1217992550479741/
The Superbowl is a big enough stage that it benefits artists to be on such a big platform. If I remember correctly the singers are not paid much for their performance. Their compensation is in exposure.
Your point basically reinforces that bad bunny was well compensated for the performance.
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I can't recall a halftime show that impressed me more, particularly. He was definitely a lot better than Kendrick or Dre or Usher, because mercifully I didn't understand the words.
But I think most of the Discourse around this misses the point. The NFL as an organization wants to market more to hispanics at home and abroad, hispanics in America are less bought in to the NFL than whites or blacks, while Mexico and Latin America offer potential for growth. Move that godawful team in Jacksonville to Mexico City one day?
This was a calculated decision to punt on Anglo audiences that the NFL already owns to appeal to hispanics.
It seems to be like the tension is between the Superbowl as a piece of TV entertainment, and the Superbowl as part of American civic religion. The 'proposition nation' needs propositions, and if that proposition is 'we're going to replace you and make you speak Spanish, also Free Puerto Rico (even if approximately zero Puerto Ricans support this) then I'm sympathetic to the MAGA crowd for getting annoyed.
That's accurate, but a big underlying tension to the halftime show drama for a decade now is the degradation of pop music as a common part of American civic religion. When Michael Jackson, Justin Timberlake, or Prince played the halftime show it was expected that better than, what, 75% of viewers would enjoy at least some of their music? I don't think an act exists today that hits that kind of penetration. You're either picking oldies, like Bruce Springsteen, or what are ultimately by the standards of pop music up until the 2000s niche acts. Adjusting for population size, Thriller had a penetration of like 25% of the population listening to it; the best selling albums of 2025 like Taylor and Wallen only get to about a fifth of that. Morgan Wallen is notable as a crossover country star with sales so large that he shows up on the "normal" charts, but he's less than half of Shania Twain's penetration at her peak. The top selling acts of today are more like niche styles, where they used to be universal. The highest penetration acts are ten or twenty years out of date, which brings accusations of being stale, the modern acts are loved by 10-20% and hated by 10-20%, and mostly have lyrics that can't be repeated on television. Spanish language being the hack around this.
Growing up I just sort of understood this, I don't know who told me exactly, but in elementary school I thought of it as just a thing you were supposed to do that one listened to Counting Down the Hits with Casey Kasum every weekend to know what was going on in the world, and that not liking what was popular was somehow a bad thing. A Good American was supposed to appreciate Linkin Park, Eminem, Shania Twain, Cher, and Metalllica; at least a little. The county fair could be counted on to get one or two real pop acts every year, and young people went to them whether it was your favorite band or not, because it was a big time pop show in our little town.
I guess I have trouble understanding how anyone is getting worked up about Bad Bunny when Kendrick and Dre were unquestionably "worse" on culture war grounds. I didn't have to explain what was being bleeped out to my parents. Playing foreign rap music was basically how I got around requests for rap when I managed a gym with a "family friendly" mandate on the radio.
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What I think you’re missing is that a lot of people are upset that there are now enough Spanish-speakers in the US such that it makes business sense to try to appeal to them.
Sure you can patiently explain to boomercons/MAGAs that, really, it’s an understandable if cynical business decision. But that is not the root of the tension. They will still be mad and you’ll still assume they’re simply not understanding business incentives.
They will not believe it's an understandable if cynical business decision. And they will be right.
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Sure, but what I see out there is the Red Tribe and the Blue Tribe getting performatively mad at each other, with the Red Tribe acting as though the halftime show was coordinated by some perfidious cabal of Oberlin professors and the Blue Tribe declaring that they are the normal ones. When the reality is that this was coordinated by such evil libtards as Robert Kraft and the Walton family, and that is the agenda that needs to be questioned.
Average tribesmen often have no idea why they're mad, and they use arguments as soldiers. I'm reasonably confident that what I said is the real crux of the issue, and anything from either side that doesn't acknowledge it is just another soldier.
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And course it was put on by some perfidious cabal of over line professors. That’s obvious. Sure they wanted to reach out to Latin audiences. They chose island boy sex passion video. They chose 100% Spanish. You are motte and baileying this.
Funny thing is if Kid Rock put on an identical performance instead of a black/jew production company we would have AOC lecturing on how white men oversexualize brown bodies and brown people are not welfare queens. And let’s be clear on one thing the money the NFL wants is the wealthy Mexican money not Caribbean’s. It’s not targeted correctly.
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Tangential a bit but I set Bad Bunny's performance to what is imo superior reggaeton: the short-lived genre of "acid reggaeton"/"aciton." Chile > Puerto Rico.
https://x.com/DainFitzgerald/status/2022019554441146867
Music by the incredible Uwe Schmidt, or Atom TM.
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I thought there was a dip of about 12 percent from the peak in the first half?
Also, Nielsen utilized a new method to count which increased viewership by about 10% (meaning the halftime show was even less watched live compared to the Lamar show). But of course it also means the SB wasn’t viewed as much aw last year.
This was being reported the day after. I have no clue the difference between the two data sets.
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I had never heard of "Bad Bunny" before the Superbowl.
Now all I know is that someone let him "sing" (is that singing?) fairly sexually suggestive lyrics on live television because they were in Spanish and presented alongside historical symbols of Puerto Rico, a U.S. territory since 1898. (Still less sexually suggestive than exposing a naked female breast to everyone, I guess.)
A bunch of my social media contacts are also telling me that "Bad Bunny" is a symbol of love overcoming hate, which like... what?
Mad props to whoever is running his PR I guess. Er, that's Public Relations, not Puerto Rico...
Bad Bunny had a billboard up at the top of the stadium proclaiming "THE ONLY THING MORE POWERFUL THAN HATE IS LOVE". Therefore, Bad Bunny's halftime show was about a message of love and if you didn't like it it's because you're full of hate.
(I don't even remember seeing this billboard at all during the show itself, it primarily showed up online during social media discussion afterwards.)
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I thought I saw data that half time viewership fell significantly versus the game but yes it was not the most watched. It’s not all Bad Bunny’s fault because the game was dreadful. It both lacked star power and was just not good football. I started playing on my phone by the second quarter.
One thing I’ve been playing with is whether the promotion of Bad Bunny is essentially “leftist are the real racists” evidence. I think the show was promotion Third Worldism and not just Latino culture. In very much the same way when Algebra becomes racists. Or the SAT. In the ‘90s the left and the right had differences but both sides actually believed things like affirmative action could fix things, yelling about black families, rap culture value promotion, etc were important parts of diversity. It was believed that with some assimilation pressure we could all be equal.
The right is probably more explicitly racists and willing to say things like don’t like browns or worse Haitians in because they are too dumb to be Americans. The left though I think believes the same things. A non-racists left would say things like diversity is our strength but also be against oversexualization of brown women. I don’t believe their is a belief on the left that the imported people can assimilate to all the cultural traits most would agree make a good society.
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I did not enjoy the bad Bunny halftime show.
I was only vaguely aware of him beforehand, and I don't like his music very much now that I've heard it in a concentrated way.
I did find the Superbowl halftime show being almost entirely Spanish to be darkly hilarious.
That being said, I don't find your analysis super convincing. I'm not really sure how people watch the Superbowl (I'm not a sports paypig). So the small bump shows us that bad Bunny doesn't have enough star power to drive people to tune in. This makes sense to me as I feel like he's probably much more popular in Spanish countries.
But total views absolutely matter, regardless of their "channel". The superbowl was a week ago. So all the people viewing his show, regardless of when or how, are participating in the shared cultural moment. If they watch it on a legit superbowl stream, on cable, on YouTube after, or on a deep fried tiktok with 3 layers of reaction video, they watched it.
Wokesters hyping him/the show up as amazing are silly. But the views, no matter how they happen, do matter.
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What does that mean?
It's an example of a forced meme, in which someone tries to astroturf something into popularity rather than it becoming popular through genuine organic means. Specifically it's a reference to the film Mean Girls, in which the character Gretchen keeps using the word "fetch" in conversation (as an adjective meaning "cool") in hopes of making it catch on.
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It's a line from the movie Mean Girls. Similar connotations as the Steve Buscemi "greetings fellow kids meme" only in regards to manufactured trends. IE this trend is clearly not organic it's being actively promoted/pushed on people.
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It's a reference to the film Mean Girls. A character is trying to encourage the use of 'fetch' as a slang term, meaning basically 'good' or 'cool'. Eventually another character angrily shuts her down with, "Stop trying to make fetch happen. It's not going to happen!"
In internet slang today, fetch is basically trying to force a meme artificially, through over-use.
So shines a good deed in a weary world.
It is hilarious to me that five separate people chimed in to explain 'fetch'. I was the third, and when I wrote mine, the first two were invisible, and indeed we post mere minutes apart.
Has fetch happened after all?
I'm still waiting for yar to come back in.
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It's from Mean Girls, where a character tries to turn "fetch" into the cool new slang word and is eventually told "stop trying to make 'fetch' happen; it's not going to happen".
In this context, @cjet79 is telling the media to stop trying to meme things into existence.
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In "Mean Girls" Lacey Chabert's character kept using "fetch" as an adjective, trying to start it as a trend. Eventually Rachel McAdams' character came at her with "Stop trying to make fetch happen, it's not going to happen."
https://youtube.com/watch?v=jjt9Qx9MBPk
Ah, that makes sense.
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