the magic circle

I hadn’t actually planned to watch the Super Bowl yesterday. I have a friend who I watch it with some years, because his household gets really into it, and that more or less makes up for the fact that I’ve never cared much about football. (I feel like an 80s hipster when I say this, but it’s true.) But then another friend wanted to go out for dinner, and we sort of wound up watching the game because we’re in Seattle and every place with a TV had it tuned to the NFL.

As a non-football fan—even one living in Seattle, where Seahawks excitement was palpable leading up to the big day—the main thing I kept hearing about the game was the halftime show, and how outrageous some people thought it was that the NFL had booked a performer who didn’t even sing in English. To the point that those people decided to do their own show.

Which, sure, okay, why not. It’s not like we’re living in a Clockwork Orange reality where someone’s going to strap you into a chair and pry your eyes open while they stream Youtube at you. You can watch anything you want, including nothing.

The purpose, though, was to make a statement: that’s not American. This is. As outrage marketing goes, I guess it worked, though the Puppy Bowl got more viewers than the All-American Halftime Show.

Bad Bunny, on the other hand, doesn’t need that kind of marketing. Whether you’ve heard of him or not (and I really do not understand “I’ve never heard of X” as a metric as to whether it’s notable, especially for those of us too old to be a marketing demographic for youth culture), the guy is the top-streamed artist on Spotify for 2025.

If anything, the NFL needed him, not the other way around. In 2024, the NFL was quite candid about seeking to grow its audience, specifically among Hispanics. And no wonder: the Super Bowl might top 125 million viewers every year, but the final match of the 2022 FIFA World Cup hit 1.5 billion. American football (as distinct from what the rest of the world calls football) might be a religion for many, but if the NFL has a religion, it’s money.

What’s fascinating to me is how terrifying that is to at least some of the people who decided to spend halftime watching Kid Rock instead. I’m giving a pass to people who genuinely enjoy that lineup better, since in a vast and infinite universe, such people undoubtedly exist. There’s no accounting for taste. The rest, though, seem to feel a need to indicate political affiliation through their choice of entertainment. You can tell who these people are because they criticized this year’s choice on the (inaccurate) grounds that he’s not American, when they raised no such objections about The Who, Paul McCartney, or U2.

There is a shared understanding of the moment going on here, though, and you could see it in Bad Bunny’s show whether or not you understood a word of what he was singing. Visually as well as musically, his performance was crammed full of enough history and symbolism to fuel a raft of thinkpieces, annotations, and reaction videos. Especially if you feel like you missed a lot, go looking for some of those. It’s worth it, in part because among the many things Bad Bunny’s show was about, it was about the shaping of identity and how that happens. It was about the America that I was taught as a child to believe in: the one where we’re unified by our common humanity and belief in self-determination and flourishing for everyone, while honoring the diversity of cultures and histories that brought us all here.

The “All-American Halftime Show” seemed, instead, to be a straitjacket, or a Procrustean bed—something inspired less by possibility and potential, and more by an exclusive and constricted definition of what “American” actually means.

That’s part of this country’s history, too. But if it’s a choice between the two, I’ll go with the one that seeks to welcome instead of exclude.