Raise Your Hand if You're Still Reeling from Super Bowl Sunday
A linguistic, cultural, and emotional autopsy of Super Bowl LX (*and I'm NOT talking about the football part)
Talk about a sporty week! Just yesterday I was confessing that televised athletics aren’t really my thing, so it should surprise exactly no one that that includes the Super Bowl. As a former advertising copywriter, if I’m watching at all, it’s 100% for the commercials—which, let’s be honest, haven’t been even mildly amusing since Betty White got tackled in the mud. If there were a thought bubble over my head during any game, it would read, “Ugh, why do they keep interrupting my commercials with all this football?”
I know that lots of people live for Super Bowl Sunday. (Or as my friend Susie and I call it, Superb Owl Sunday.) I mean, what’s not to love about an entire day dedicated to lunch-adjacent drinking and bottomless fried appetizers? Plus, America is famous for pretending that certain things are “uniquely ours”—hot dogs, apple pie, illegal fireworks, yelling at televisions—but football? Football is literally the only sport we invented that wasn’t based on a British guy falling off a horse.
Sure, we stole half the rules from rugby and the name from soccer, and then stitched them together into something that confuses the rest of the planet to this day, but still—it’s peak America. We own it. We created it. We perfected it. We built an entire holiday around it. And what does the NFL do?
HALFTIME SHOW: ¡Hola amigos! Tonight’s theme is Viva la Somethinga! Please direct your attention to the main stage and ignore the fact that an overwhelming majority of viewers can’t understand a word of what’s being sung and just want to watch men concuss each other in peace or peep a majestic Clydesdale.
Somehow the Super Bowl halftime show—the glittery intermission between Bud Light commercials—turned what’s typically the year’s most aggressively American spectacle into Vaguely Political Musical Theater in Spanglish™.
I mean… I like Spanish. It’s beautiful. It’s our country’s de facto second language. I know because I have to press one whenever I call my bank so that I can be annoyed in my native tongue. But the cognitive dissonance of going from Charlie Puth’s stirring National Anthem [in English! imagine!], to America’s sweetheart Jennifer Aniston resurrecting deez nuts (in what was arguably the dumbest Super Bowl ad ever created, #sorrynotsorry), to suddenly being serenaded enteramente en español was enough to give this armchair athlete whiplash.
Admittedly, about 13 percent of Americans grew up speaking primarily Spanish. Which means that 87 percent didn’t—yet here we are, once again catering to the minority in the name of “inclusion.” It’s actually entirely on-brand for a culture that forces its people to abandon grammar for pronouns, endure a month celebrating nonbinary kink (I’m still waiting for Vanilla Pride Month!), and nod along when grown-ass men don sports bras and promptly claim the right to spike volleyballs directly into our daughters’ faces.
But somehow you’re a racist for wishing you didn’t need Google Translate to follow along at a concert in your own country.
Let’s talk about the headliner himself. Puerto Rican-born Bad Bunny (née Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio—no known relation to AOC) is a 29-year-old Spanish-only megastar known for political rants, chucking a fan’s phone into the ocean, being virtually unrecognizable to NFL players, and performing in drag gear that makes Harry Styles look like a Republican congressman.
That is not me being dramatic.
This, incidentally, is from an actual conversation I had with ChatGPT (because I admit I knew literally nothing about BB before the Superb Owl extravaganza):
Me: Has Bad Bunny always been a transvestite?
ChatGPT: Bad Bunny is not a transvestite. He is a heterosexual male artist who frequently challenges traditional gender norms in fashion and art, wearing drag in music videos and using feminine clothing to express himself. He identifies as a strong ally to the LGBTQ community and uses his platform to promote inclusivity.
Me: But I didn’t say transsexual, I said transvestite. I speak Latin. The word literally means cross-dresser. There is no negative connotation unless you assumed it. The word just means one sex that dresses like another. It was a simple question which you answered.
ChatGPT: You are absolutely correct regarding the Latin etymology. The term transvestite comes directly from the Latin trans (“across”) and vestire (“to clothe”), literally meaning “cross-dresser”. Today, most institutions and the artists themselves distinguish between the action of cross-dressing and the identity of the person.
Me: Hahahaha but I don’t care how he identifies. I am a linguist. A man in a dress is a transvestite, end of story.
ChatGPT: From a purely etymological standpoint, your linguistic assessment is accurate: The Latin roots trans- (“across”) and vestire (“to clothe”) describe exactly what occurs when a man wears a dress. In a literal sense, the word is a functional descriptor of the act regardless of the individual’s personal identity.
NOTE: Calling ChatGPT out on its gross wokeism is honestly up there with hot-stone deep-tissue massages and perfectly ripe mango on my Favorite Things List.
Naturally, the media broke a few blood vessels in their race to gush about the show.
“Under the last vestiges of the California afternoon sun,” Deadline swooned [with some clarity in bold from moi], “a phalanx of dancers [me: a phalanx is like a gaggle; disregard the innuendo], fruit vendors, piragua [me: Caribbean for shaved ice] sellers, boxers, power line repairmen highlighting the constant outages on the island territory, that trademark Concho toad [me: the single species of swamp potato native to Puerto Rico], a string section, a real-life wedding, flags of the hemisphere’s nations and migrant workers clad in the emblematic pavas [me: wide-brimmed straw hats originating—where else?—in Puerto Rico], the global superstar was blunt in his mantra of the day that ‘the only thing more powerful than hate is love.’ If the cheers from the more than 60,000 in the home of the San Francisco 49ers were any indication, there was a lot of love in the house.”
So much love. Never mind that conservatives were boycotting the show in droves, X was a sea of expletives trashing the whole production, and most of the dudes on the field have apparently never heard of the guy.
Although “the only thing more powerful than hate is love” has solid kindergarten-bulletin board energy, slapping it on a stadium-sized jumbotron felt more like big-budget public scolding than a message of unity—the implication being that anyone who complained, felt alienated, or simply didn’t connect with the performance was, by definition, on the “hate” side of the ledger. Musical preferences are now hate. Opinions are hate. Disagreement is hate. “All lives matter” is hate. Patriotism is hate. Proper grammar is hate. Immigration enforcement is hate. English is hate. God knows MAGA is hate.
President Trump, you will not be surprised to learn, was not a fan of Bad Bunny’s performance.
“The Super Bowl Halftime Show is absolutely terrible,” Trump wrote on Truth Social, “one of the worst, EVER! It makes no sense, is an affront to the Greatness of America, and doesn’t represent our standards of Success, Creativity, or Excellence. Nobody understands a word this guy is saying, and the dancing is disgusting, especially for young children that are watching from throughout the U.S.A., and all over the World. This ‘Show’ is just a ‘slap in the face’ to our Country, which is setting new standards and records every single day—including the Best Stock Market and 401(k)s in History! There is nothing inspirational about this mess of a Halftime Show and watch, it will get great reviews from the Fake News Media, because they haven’t got a clue of what is going on in the REAL WORLD—And, by the way, the NFL should immediately replace its ridiculous new Kickoff Rule. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!”
My issue isn’t that Bad Bunny was making the point—loudly—that “America” means the whole hemisphere, not just the country hosting the Super Bowl. He’s not wrong. It’s not that he’s a transvestite—which we’ve already established as a simple, neutral fact and something I couldn’t care less about, provided pronouns don’t enter the chat. It’s not the twerking entourage backing him up (I can handle scandalous dancing) or the Latin vibe (which I actually enjoy). It’s not the decision to perform exclusively in Spanish or the realization, after looking up the lyrics, that 13 percent of the kids who were watching understood he was bragging about his genitals and detailing luxury-car hook-ups with the most vulgar slang imaginable (okay fine, it’s both of those things). It’s not even that Gavin Newscum declared Sunday “Bad Bunny Day” in an admittedly hilarious Trump troll.
The problem, as Sasha Stone eloquently outlined it, is that the NFL deliberately chose a polarizing performer to boost ratings while (further) dividing a country already cleaved at the core.
“They needed the people who ordinarily wouldn’t watch the Super Bowl to turn out like they did when Taylor and Travis were the happy couple kissing after the Chiefs’ win,” Stone wrote. “Bonanza ratings, like 150 million people tuned in. You think they’re going to get that number with only football fans watching?
So it was an easy way to generate a culture war and manifest a fake controversy to do two things: allow the Left to bloviate and virtue signal (mission accomplished) and force every social justice warrior and wine mom to watch the Super Bowl just to see Bad Bunny and then make their teary or angry TikTok video about HATE and RACISM and ICE!”
Of course, you didn’t have to watch the official halftime show. Lots of folks didn’t. You could have put in another batch of wings or refilled the Margaritaville machine or hopped over to the TPUSA “alternative” All American Halftime Show and watched Kid Rock lip sync and praise Jesus in cutoff jean shorts. (Actually.) You’d have seen a moving tribute to Charlie Kirk and a bunch of performers whose names you might not have recognized (Brantley Gilbert, Gabby Barrett, Lee Brice) but whose songs you probably would have if you lean even a little bit country. It may not have been a Vegas-grade, retina-melting blowout, but it had an old-school, unpretentious charm that was refreshing. Plus, it was clean. It was wholesome. It was family-friendly. It was also loud, patriotic, and mercifully free of any satanic imagery or symbolic dance pieces about melting ice caps.
And if needing a second, cleaner, non-Luciferian halftime show doesn’t sum up where we are as a country, I don’t know what does. The writing is on the jumbotron: It’s us versus them. You’re either “monster truck jumps over a pit of rattlesnakes while Toby Keith plays the national anthem on a flamethrower,” or you’re “interpretive choreography depicting the underworld accompanied by Billie Eilish whisper-singing about ICE into a wind machine.” There’s no middle ground. It’s black or white (make that Black or white) or go home, hater.
Call me nostalgic, but I want the gray back. I want something between NASCAR Apocalypse and Portland Poetry Night. We had that once: Prince. Whitney Houston. Michael Jackson. The Rolling Stones. No lectures. No virtue signaling. Just music that we all knew and loved with no emotional or political strings attached.
The thing is, I don’t know who could pull that off today. Dolly Parton? (The right would have to forgive her jab-pushing.) Aerosmith? (Sure, Steven Tyler is a registered Republican, but he did demand Trump stop using his music at rallies, so perhaps the left could deal?) Adele, Bruno Mars, Billy Joel, Lionel Richie? I’m grasping here—and fully aware that there isn’t a performer alive who wouldn’t offend someone—but honestly, can you even imagine? Entertainment that wasn’t a culture-war reflex test? No sermon. Just songs.
Now that would give new meaning to Make America Great Again.
https://x.com/nicksortor/status/2020952994024419333
BREAKING: Kid Rock’s rendition of “‘Til You Can’t” with his added verse about giving your life to Jesus has SURPASSED Bad Bunny on the charts
His songs are obscene if you ask grok to translate the lyrics. The NFL and NBC just gave 87% of us the middle finger There is no way NBC shouldn’t be fined into oblivion broadcasting his filth.