Anonymous wrote:For those who want to read part of the review from an actual arts critic...
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/09/arts/music/bad-bunny-super-bowl-halftime-show-review.html
There are few, if any, performers in pop more popular and embraced than Bad Bunny, the 31-year-old Puerto Rican superstar who has been one of music’s dominant global innovators for a decade.
And yet Bad Bunny did something quite novel with his Super Bowl LX performance in Santa Clara, Calif., on Sunday night, turning it into an extended presentation on how to make a global opportunity intimate, personal and historically specific. Like his sixth solo album, “Debí Tirar Más Fotos,” which a week ago made history as the first Spanish-language album to win the Grammys’ top honor, and his 31-show residency in San Juan, Puerto Rico, last summer, he assiduously brought people to him, on his terms.
Here, it started in the sugar cane fields — once Puerto Rico’s cash crop, and a source of rampant labor exploitation. Bad Bunny began his show with the frisky “Tití Me Preguntó” from 2022, walking amid laborers in pavas chopping at stalks and tall plants forming something of a labyrinth. He strode past vendors of coco frio, tacos and piraguas; a pair of boxers sparring; a table of older gentlemen playing dominoes; women at a nail salon.
This was Bad Bunny’s private Puerto Rico, a place of cultural joy and political complication. The first two minutes of his 13-minute show took place largely within that maze, an almost-protected space that projected safety and ease, just before he emerged on the roof of La Casita, the replica of a traditional Puerto Rican home that served as the centerpiece of his set here (and also his residency performances), and began serenading the world.
Almost every minute that followed — performed almost entirely in Spanish, a Super Bowl first — featured a combination of musical astuteness, familial exuberance and sociopolitical statement.