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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.
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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