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Slate: Bad Bunny’s Halftime Show Proved That for 'Oppressed' Groups, Joy Is Resistance

Brett T.
Brett T.  |  11:00 PM on February 09, 2026

This editor missed both halftime shows during the big game, but he's seen plenty of video of Bad Bunny's performance at the Super Bowl. The show was obviously choreographed with the TV camera in mind, because the view from the stands wasn't that great: 

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That's right. The run with a football through the sugar cane fields with the slave workers was definitely meant for the TV audience:

Matt Walsh was not a fan:

Most of the media was enamoured of the performance … even Elmo from Sesame Street chimed in to say that he was a fan of what The Washington Post thought was a family-friendly romp, filled with "the kind of wholesome, traditional family values that would have fit right in with some of the more sentimental commercials that appeared during the game."

To be fair, folks in the stands could see the electrical workers trying to keep Puerto Rico's fragile grid together:

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And why hasn't AOC fixed her abuela's leaky roof yet … the woman is rich now.

We haven't heard much about "joy" since the Kamala Harris campaign adopted it as its theme, but Slate thought that Bad Bunny's act applied a great lesson for those who are part of an oppressed group: "joy is resistance."

Nadira Goffe writes for Slate:

… there were plenty of other references to the politics of everyday life, including Bad Bunny’s choice to perform “El Apagón.” The song (meaning “the blackout”) is a protest tune about displacement and other inequities facing Puerto Ricans, named after the rolling blackouts the island has faced in the years since Hurricane Maria in 2017. Bad Bunny performed it while climbing a powerline pole, with a Puerto Rican flag in hand, as dancers were on top of other powerline poles. This is unsurprising for the artist, considering the album itself is about celebrating the beauty of Puerto Rico while also being heartbroken by the political reality of gentrification and the effects of the tourism industry that the island’s inhabitants face. Bad Bunny has always been good at effective political messaging because he’s not usually striving to be overtly political, but he is aware that he lives an inherently political existence—one in which nostalgia surfaces not only as an effect of time, but because of what gentrification and inequality take from you.

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Oh, so that was the message: "the political reality of gentrification and the effects of the tourism industry that the island’s inhabitants face."

Is this the worst take on Bad Bunny's halftime show? It could be.

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