Super Bowl LX Halftime Show

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The most politicized Super Bowl halftime show ever: Just as Marquez said in his 1982 speech: "The challenge we (Latin America) face is the lack of a regular means to make our lives believable. Friends, that's the root of our loneliness." The Bad Bunny's performance featured a Puerto Rican hut on the grass, a power outage in Puerto Rico, and a shift in his image—no longer singing "Born in the USA" like Shakira and Jlo, no longer speaking his mother tongue and refusing to sing in English, no longer pursuing the American Dream. Those few telephone poles represented the infrastructure ruins of the imperial frontier (Puerto Rico). From childhood, nestled beside his parents, to the Grammys, waving the Latin American flag, everything was a betrayal of the American Dream on the imperial frontier, a possible rejection of translation. Just as kung fu isn't kung fu if it's not cool, and anime isn't just consumerist garbage if it's not juvenile, fantastical, and doesn't aspire to save the world, the Bad Bunny's Puerto Rican cultural show, by not addressing the theme of Macondo being swept away by a hurricane in Marquez's novel, wasn't Latin culture.

Many people don't understand why this is so impressive. To quote a comment from a netizen, the gist of it is: Imagine a certain place introduces a law requiring all citizens to speak Mandarin. As a result, the Spring Festival Gala production team resolutely finds performers who are proficient in various local dialects to perform in their respective dialects throughout the entire show. At midnight, they unfurl a banner saying that no matter what dialect you speak, you are a true Chinese person.

As someone who almost never listens to Latin music, Bad Bunny has always just been a sexually charged hot daddy to me. But this year's halftime show was truly satisfying and moving. Although I couldn't understand a single word, and the visual language was often chaotic, it featured diverse people. Despite the overall disarray, it evoked a sense of happiness, which is incredibly precious in this far-right, fragmented world. The global unity I so often dreamed of as a child seems to have vanished completely. It's as if no one remembers those aspirations for peace and a better future. We need people to tirelessly rewrite those dreams on that increasingly yellowed draft paper, to boldly assert their rights and love. When someone musters the courage to proclaim peace and love on such a grand stage, that's a hero. I'm truly grateful that someone is willing to create dreams for us in this terrible world. (Trump's scathing post after the show made it even more significant.)

The world cannot exist without Latin music 💃🕺 Benito's all-Spanish performance in this position is a powerful cultural statement, and its significance to the American Latin community is undeniable. However, if we only look at the performance itself, the music was really fragmented. The most captivating aspect of Reggaeton and Trap is that the Deembow rhythm gradually builds the listener up, but in this performance, almost everything ended just as the listener was getting into the groove, compressing many of the more exciting parts of the tracks into 15-second previews. In contrast, Shakira's performance in 2020, while also featuring a dense medley of songs and half the time, managed to connect the rhythms through arrangement and instrumentation, making it increasingly addictive. The cultural aspect was a powerful power move, but the musical experience was somewhat disappointing.

Ah, this is the board game I played, *Puerto Rico*! I recommend the annotated version uploaded by Bilibili user "Everyone Else Has a Name". I also recommend playing *Puerto Rico*, putting yourself in the shoes of a colonial lord and experiencing the feeling of competing with rivals to see who can exploit the local people and resources more ruthlessly. My so-called understanding of Western culture is limited to English-speaking cultures, so I won't force myself to say I really enjoyed this halftime show, because I'm completely unfamiliar with Latin American culture. But I was genuinely moved.