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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 The highest penetration acts are ten or twenty years out of date, which brings accusations of being stale, the modern acts are loved by 10-20% and hated by 10-20%, and mostly have lyrics that can't be repeated on television.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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