‘It’s gonna be a huge party’: Bad Bunny set for Super Bowl stage as Trump skips event | Music
Just a week after winning the Grammy for Album of the Year, Puerto Rican rapper Bad Bunny will take the stage at the Super Bowl this Sunday, making it the most-watched concert of the year in the United States.
The artist born Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio took home the music academy’s top award for 2025 Debí Tirar Más Fotos, a politically minded album infused with Puerto Rican music and culture. The album became the first Spanish-language work to take home the award, beating out competition from Kendrick Lamar, Lady Gaga and Justin Bieber.
While delivering his acceptance speech for best urban music performance, Bad Bunny echoed the anti-ICE sentiment that has inspired many Grammy speeches. “ICE out,” he said. “We are not savages, we are not animals, we are not aliens. We are people and we are Americans.” More broadly, he added: “The only thing stronger than hate is love.”
Eyes on both sides of the aisle will be watching to see if his performance on Sunday will contain more meaning.
At a Thursday press conference ahead of the show, Bad Bunny said: “I really want people to have fun. It’s going to be a big party. I want to bring a lot of my culture and what people have always expected from me.”
The announcement of the headline slot was met with both joy and hostility. While many artists and activists welcomed his booking, Department of Homeland Security advisor Corey Lewandowski said: “It’s a shame that they decided to choose someone who hates America so much to represent them at the halftime game.”
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said ICE will be “all over” the Super Bowl.
Bad Bunny broke records with a 30-night concert residency in San Juan last year, but decided not to bring the show to the U.S. out of fear for the safety of his fans. “There was a problem – the damn ICE might be out [my concert]”he said ID. “This is something we’ve talked about and are very concerned about.”
While hosting Saturday Night Live in October, he responded to critics by following his Spanish-language monologue segment with a winking shot in English: “If you don’t understand what I just said, you’ve got four months to learn.”
Since then, there has been a surge in social media posts about learning Spanish and Puerto Rican slang; Duolingo launched a “Bad Bunny 101” course last month to give newcomers a taste of the language.
Donald Trump stated in a speech that he will not attend this year’s Super Bowl. report The venue in Santa Clara, California, was “too far away.”
Regarding Bad Bunny and Green Day, who will perform before kick-off, the US president said: “I’m against them. I think it’s a terrible choice. All it does is sow hatred.”
The NFL stands behind the reservation. Commissioner Roger Goodell, when asked about Bad Bunny’s anti-ICE comments at the Grammys, called him “one of the greatest artists in the world. That’s one of the reasons we chose him… He understood the platform that he was on.”
Sunday’s NFL game will be Bad Bunny’s second appearance on the Super Bowl stage, following a 2020 guest appearance by Shakira and Jennifer Lopez in the 2020 co-headline slot.
“I really don’t want to give spoilers,” Bad Bunny said at the press conference. “It will be fun and easy and people will only have to worry about the dancing.”
Advertising rates for the Super Bowl, the most-watched US television event of the year, soared to $10 million for a 30-second spot, with many brands delivering their biggest campaigns of the year.
Celebrities who will appear in ads this year include Sabrina Carpenter, Ben Affleck, Bradley Cooper, Melissa McCarthy, Lady Gaga and Emma Stone, while some brands are targeting Generation Z with ads starring MrBeast, Addison Rae and Chicken Shop Date’s Amelia Dimoldenberg.
This year will also mark the Super Bowl’s first AI-generated ad for vodka brand Svedka, featuring a robot couple dancing with partygoers. Meanwhile, Anthropic and its AI assistant Claude are taking aim at Open AI’s ChatGPT with an ad promising “Ads are coming to AI, but not to Claude.” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman on Twitter/X in the name the ads are “a patently dishonest portrayal”.
