Can we all calm down about Bad Bunny?

So the internet tells me that someone very, very famous did a big show at the weekend – something involving American football?

Being neither a big fan of American football nor of what passes for music these days, I thought I would swerve this particular skirmish in the culture war, just like I mostly managed to do with the super-cringe Grammys earlier this month. But last Sunday’s Super Bowl halftime show, it turns out, has been unavoidable. Opening X this morning felt like being in the middle of a screaming match between a Boomer parent and a Gen Z brat.

The big national question for Americans today, according to the internet anyway, is this: is Puerto Rican, Spanish-language rapper called Bad Bunny (yes, that’s really the name he performs under) THE BEST THING TO EVER HAPPEN TO AMERICA? Or is Bad Bunny (honestly, I cannot with that name) THE WORST THING TO EVER HAPPEN TO AMERICA?

Well, my deeply middle-aged opinion is that, while this young man’s music sounds to me like dentists’ equipment being operated, he did at least put on quite the show. It was a huge production – entertaining in the way an Olympic opening ceremony is. This was a complex undertaking involving lots and lots of people, sets and choreography, designed to send a specific message – some might say propaganda – to a big audience.

What that message was meant to be depends on which – pardon the pun – political foot you kick with. The BBC and the Guardian produced a number of takes before and after the Super Bowl on the lines of ‘Bad Bunny and his significance to America’, even though the last time I checked, they are British media companies. BBC News produced a fawning 25-minute segment on Bad Bunny ahead of the halftime show. And the Guardian review of the Super Bowl performance was inexplicably long, offering a strikingly intricate analysis of the many Puerto Rican cultural signifiers contained in his set. I genuinely only understood about a third of the article. It would have been better suited to a Bad Bunny fan site.

The right, predictably, hated the show. Not least because at the latest Grammys, Mr Bunny – who was the most-streamed artist on Spotify last year – said ‘ICE out!’, as he received his award. In one sense, conservatives’ irritation is partly justified. Many are rightly tired of our treasured pop-culture institutions being used as opportunities for woke virtue-signalling. And while most Americans can simply tune out of the Grammys, the Super Bowl is far too big to ignore.

Predictably, Donald Trump called Bad Bunny’s performance ‘terrible’, claiming, ‘Nobody understands a word this guy is saying’ (Mr Bunny performed entirely in Spanish). Perhaps it’s actually for the best that he and many others don’t understand Spanish, given the lyrics Bunny performed to tens of millions of people – with many, many children among them – are extremely explicit. I wonder how many Puerto Rican abuelas (grannies) were thrilled to hear him rapping about sex acts and big asses? Whether they understood a word of the performance or not, the libs have nevertheless been falling over themselves to praise Bad Bunny’s set.

Again, I’m no Super Bowl expert, but I’m pretty sure it used to be about celebrating all of America? If America’s (mostly white) cultural gatekeepers just included minority cultures, without also constantly accusing stars-and-stripes culture of being 21st-century Nazism, then we would all be good.

I’m all in favour of having a lengthy celebration of Hispanic culture in the US. It was a great idea to feature Puerto Rican sugar-cane fields and Brooklyn bodegas in Bad Bunny’s set design – why not? But it was also a shame the show couldn’t also pay tribute to American traditions that have always been valued by the football-watching audience – patriotism, Americana, etc. The United States is very diverse and extremely integrated, especially among blue-collar and lower-middle-class immigrant communities. Until about five minutes ago, minority Americans combined pride in their immigrant heritage with a love of their new home. Those folks don’t actually need Bad Bunny and his small army of dancers twerking – sorry, perreo-ing – in their faces to prove their authenticity.

In an attempt to push back against the woke takeover of American culture, the right did offer an alternative halftime show. To be brutally honest, Turning Point USA’s ‘All American Halftime Show’ was a bit naff, although it did get pretty big viewer numbers – another indication that politics has torn culture in two, and the left and the right are now living in different universes.

If I might make one polite suggestion to right-wing culture-makers: please, for the love of God, find someone other than Kid Rock? If I’m forced to choose between him and Bad Bunny, I will pick never listening to music again.

Do better, everyone.

Jenny Holland is a former newspaper reporter and speechwriter. Visit her Substack here.