Editor’s Note: An earlier version of this story, based on unverified source material, incorrectly stated that Harrison Ford had commented on the Super Bowl 2025 halftime show and that Bad Bunny was the headliner. Our investigation has confirmed that Kendrick Lamar is the headliner for Super Bowl LIX in 2025. The significant, language-based backlash is, however, a very real event directed at the NFL’s announcement that Bad Bunny will headline the Super Bowl LX halftime show in 2026. The following article is based on our independent verification of the actual controversy.

The Sound of a New America: Why the Backlash to Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl Is the Most American Thing Happening

There is a compelling, almost cinematic fantasy circulating in the American imagination. It goes like this: a bitter culture-war debate erupts, and just as the noise becomes unbearable, an icon of quiet, masculine integrity—a figure like Harrison Ford, gruff and universally respected—steps into the frame. He says something simple, profound, and laced with common sense, and in doing so, shames the extremists and reminds us of our shared values.

It’s a nice fantasy. But it is not what is happening.

What is happening is far more complex and, in its own way, far more revealing. The Super Bowl, that quintessentially American spectacle of sport and capitalism, has become the new front line in a proxy war over who, exactly, gets to define “American” culture. And the person at the center of the firestorm is not a politician, but a 31-year-old artist from Puerto Rico named Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio—known to the world as Bad Bunny.

When the NFL announced that Bad Bunny would headline the Super Bowl LX halftime show in 2026, the reaction from certain corners of the political right was not just critical; it was visceral. “The NFL is self-destructing,” tweeted conservative commentator Benny Johnson, who labeled the artist a “massive Trump hater” and “anti-ICE activist.” Fox News host Tomi Lahren incorrectly declared, “He’s not an American artist.” Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene used the announcement to advocate for a bill to make English the official language of the United States, calling the choice “perverse and unwanted.”

The criticism, nakedly political and linguistic, crystallized into a single, fearful idea: “America’s biggest event” should not be headlined by an artist who performs en Español.

This argument, however, collides with a force more powerful than political commentary: reality.

The idea that Bad Bunny is a “niche” or “foreign” entity is a delusion that can only be maintained by willfully ignoring the data. For three consecutive years (2020-2022), Bad Bunny was the single most-streamed artist on the planet. His 2022 album, Un Verano Sin Ti, became Spotify’s most-streamed album of all time. He is, by any objective metric, one of the biggest music superstars in the world.

Furthermore, the claim that he is “not American” is, by fact and by law, false. Bad Bunny was born in Almirante Sur, Puerto Rico. He is an American citizen, just as much as a resident of Ohio or Texas. His “foreign” language, Spanish, is spoken by nearly 60 million people in the United States.

What the backlash truly reveals is not a concern for ratings or a love of “traditional” football, but a deep-seated anxiety about cultural replacement. The critics are not really angry at Bad Bunny; they are angry at what his success represents: an America where the “mainstream” is no longer exclusively white or English-speaking. They are confronting a new demographic and cultural reality that does not require their permission to exist.

This is not the first time the Super Bowl stage has been used to navigate this tension. In 2020, Jennifer Lopez and Shakira co-headlined a performance that was a defiant celebration of Latina identity. Lopez, whose parents are Puerto Rican, unfurled a dual American and Puerto Rican flag cape. Subtle imagery—children in what appeared to be cages—evoked the border policies of the time. Even then, Bad Bunny made a brief cameo, joining Shakira on stage.

But the 2026 show is different. This is not a co-headliner or a cameo. This will be the first time the show is headlined by an artist performing entirely in a non-English language. It is a transition from shared inclusion to a full, unapologetic spotlight.

The NFL, for its part, is not making this choice out of a sudden burst of progressive altruism. It is a cold, hard business calculation. The league has been transparent about its “expansionist goals,” and the Spanish-speaking market—both domestically and globally—is its most coveted prize. Bad Bunny is not a risk; he is a key. He is a one-man marketing strategy to secure the loyalty of a new generation of fans.

The backlash, in this context, is simply the cost of doing business. In fact, it’s a bonus. The manufactured outrage from figures like Greene and Lahren generates millions of dollars in free press, turning the halftime show announcement from a simple press release into a national news event.

This is the uncomfortable truth of the 21st-century culture war: it is often a performance staged for the mutual benefit of the “outraged” and the corporation they claim to despise.

We are left, then, without our Harrison Ford. There is no grizzled movie star to step in and tell everyone to “get off his lawn.” The role of the “quietly defiant” hero has been filled by the artist himself. When asked on Saturday Night Live about his critics, Bad Bunny simply smirked and suggested that if Americans didn’t understand, they had “four months to learn Spanish.”

His response, like his music, is a rejection of the premise that he must translate himself to be accepted. He is not asking for a seat at the table; he is building his own, and the NFL is simply booking a reservation.

The debate, ultimately, is not about what language is “appropriate” for the Super Bowl. It is about what America sounds like. The critics demanding an “All-American Halftime Show” (an actual event being organized in protest) are clinging to a mono-cultural past that no longer exists. The NFL, its eyes on the future and its hand on its wallet, is placing its bet on a multi-lingual, multi-cultural present.

The “pure enjoyment of music,” as the fantasy version of Harrison Ford might have said, is winning. Not because of a moral argument, but because of an unassailable one: the numbers.