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Just a week after receiving the Grammy award for Album of the Year, the Puerto Rican rapper Bad Bunny will take on the US’s most watched concert of the year when he performs at the Super Bowl this Sunday.
The artist born Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio took home the music academy’s top honor for 2025’s Debí Tirar Más Fotos, a politically minded record infused with Puerto Rican music and culture. The album became the first Spanish-language work to take home the prize, beating out competition from Kendrick Lamar, Lady Gaga and Justin Bieber.
While making his acceptance speech for best música urbana performance, Bad Bunny echoed the anti-ICE sentiment that animated many Grammys speeches. “ICE out,” he said. “We are not savages, we are not animals, we are not aliens. We are humans and we are Americans.” He added, more broadly: “The only thing that is more powerful than hate is love.”
Eyes on both sides of the aisle will be watching to see if his Sunday performance will contain a more pointed statement.
In a Thursday press conference ahead of the show Bad Bunny said: “I really want people to have fun. It’s gonna be a huge party. I want to bring what people can always expect from me, and a lot of my culture..”
The announcement of his headline slot was greeted with both jubilation and hostility. While many artists and activists welcomed his booking, the Department of Homeland Security adviser Corey Lewandowski said: “It’s so shameful that they’ve decided to pick somebody who just seems to hate America so much to represent them at the half-time game.”
The homeland security secretary, Kristi Noem, said that ICE would be “all over” the Super Bowl.
Bad Bunny broke records last year with a landmark 30-night concert residency in San Juan, but decided against bringing the show to the US out of fear for his fans’ safety. “There was the issue of – fucking ICE could be outside [my concert],” he told i-D. “It’s something that we were talking about and very concerned about.”
He responded to critics while hosting Saturday Night Live in October, following a Spanish-language monologue segment with a winking kicker in English: “If you didn’t understand what I just said, you have four months to learn.”
Since then, there’s been an uptick in social media posts about learning Spanish and Puerto Rican slang, with Duolingo launching a “Bad Bunny 101” course last month to give newcomers a taste of the language.
Donald Trump will not be attending this year’s Super Bowl after stating in an interview that the venue in Santa Clara, California, is “too far away”.
In regard to Bad Bunny and Green Day, who will perform before kick-off, the US president said: “I’m anti-them. I think it’s a terrible choice. All it does is sow hatred.”
The NFL is standing by the booking. When asked about Bad Bunny’s anti-ICE comments at the Grammys, commissioner Roger Goodell called him “one of the greatest artists in the world. It’s one of the reasons we chose him … He understood the platform he was on.”
Sunday’s NFL game will mark the second time that Bad Bunny has appeared on the Super Bowl stage, following a 2020 guest appearance during Shakira and Jennifer Lopez’s 2020 co-headline slot.
“I really don’t want to give any spoilers,” Bad Bunny said at the press conference. “It’s gonna be fun and be easy, and people only have to worry about dancing.”
As the most-watched US television event of the year, Super Bowl ad rates have risen to $10m for a 30-second spot, with many brands presenting their biggest campaigns of the year.
A-listers set to appear in commercials this year include Sabrina Carpenter, Ben Affleck, Bradley Cooper, Melissa McCarthy, Lady Gaga and Emma Stone, while some brands are targeting gen Z with ads starring MrBeast, Addison Rae and Chicken Shop Date’s Amelia Dimoldenberg.
This year will also mark the Super Bowl’s first mainly AI-generated ad courtesy of the vodka brand Svedka, with a spot that features a robot couple dancing with human partygoers. Meanwhile, Anthropic and its AI assistant Claude are taking aim at Open AI’s ChatGPT with an ad promising that “Ads are coming to AI. But not to Claude.” On Twitter/X, the OpenAI CEO, Sam Altman, called the ads a “clearly dishonest portrayal”.
