Thirteen Minutes of Joy in a Divided Country

Last night, something extraordinary happened during the most watched sporting event every calendar year. Bad Bunny took the Super Bowl halftime stage and, for thirteen minutes, made over a hundred million people feel something — many of them without understanding a single word.

And that's exactly the point.

In a country that feels more fractured than it has in a generation — divided over immigration, the economy, Epstein files, and who belongs and who doesn't — a Puerto Rican artist performed almost entirely in Spanish on the biggest stage in American entertainment. No interpreters. He didn't code-switch for comfort. The Grammy-winning artist from Puerto Rico simply invited the whole country into his world, and trusted that music would do what music has always done: cross every cultural boundary.

A Stage Full of Ordinary Life

What struck me most about the performance wasn't the expert film work or the celebrity guests. It was how much of the performance was dedicated to ordinary life. The stage was built to look like a neighborhood. People cut sugarcane. A barber gave a fade. Elders played dominos. Nail technicians painted nails. Someone sold piragua (shaved ice) from a cart. A taco man did his business. A couple literally got married on the halftime stage, and the whole set became their reception.

There was a wedding cake and a little girl dancing and a boy falling asleep in the middle of the party the way children do at every family gathering, in every culture, on every continent. There was Lady Gaga singing a salsa version of "Die With a Smile" as the wedding singer — because of course there's always a wedding singer. Ricky Martin showed up, not to perform a crossover English hit from twenty years ago, but to sing in Spanish about the colonial history of Puerto Rico and Hawaii.

These are the textures of life. Not grand political gestures — though the show carried those too — but the intimate, human rituals that make cultures beautiful. Marriage. Work. Food. Music. Dance. Children. Grandparents. The sheer beauty of people living their lives fully and without apology.

I don't think anyone expected the performance to include a celebration of what makes us all human. A common tethering of the everyday and ordinary, a reminder that we have more similarities than differences.

If we can ignore the fringe voices who believed this performance was uncalled for, perhaps we saw, for thirteen minutes, our country — and maybe the world — united in our humanity.

Music Doesn't Need a Translator

The Super Bowl for the last sixty years has always included music. Beyoncé, U2, Prince, Michael Jackson, Bruce Springsteen, Kendrick Lamar, Janet Jackson, Lady Gaga, Jennifer Lopez, and many more. Imagine a halftime show or the national anthem being replaced by a lecture, or a short video on the history of the NFL, or America. Boring.

Music is the language of the heart.

And here's the thing about music that we keep forgetting in an era obsessed with content and context and discourse: music enters us before language does. Rhythm is older than words. Melody preceded grammar. The first thing a baby recognizes is not vocabulary but the cadence of a voice, the pulse of a heartbeat.

Music speaks truth on levels beyond mere words.

Bad Bunny himself said it best in the days leading up to the performance:

"They don't even have to learn Spanish. It's better if they learn to dance. There's no better dance than the one that comes from the heart. The heartbeat dance, that's the only one they need to worry about and have fun and enjoy."

The heartbeat dance.

That's all we needed. Interpreters optional. You could feel the love and joy in the music despite most people not understanding one lyric.

J.J. Watt, the retired NFL star — not exactly the demographic you'd expect to champion a Spanish-language reggaeton set — called the performance "a vibe" and admitted he couldn't understand a word. NBA star Jalen Brunson thanked Bad Bunny for the show. Across social media, millions of people who don't speak Spanish were moving, singing along, swept up in something that transcended the literal meaning of the lyrics.

The "vibe" was never in the words alone. It was in the horns and the drums and the way Bad Bunny's voice cracked with pride when the whole stadium moved with him. The vibe found roots in a wedding, a bodega, old and young dancing their hearts out, and the smiles of strangers moving to the beats.

This is what art does when it is confident in itself. It doesn't ask for permission. It doesn't explain itself. Interpretation often ruins it. Music opens a door to the heart and trusts you'll let it in.

Music as Resistance, Joy as Defiance

Bad Bunny's Super Bowl performance took place against a variety of contrarian voices. There had been political backlash to Bad Bunny's selection — calls that it was a "terrible decision," that a Spanish-language artist didn't have "broader appeal," that the show should feature someone more conventionally and narrowly American. Whatever that means. There were threats of ICE agents at the stadium. A conservative organization (Turning Point USA) held an alternative halftime show as counter-programming. President Trump posted his displeasure in real time.

And none of it mattered.

When the music started, the argument collapsed under its own weight. You cannot watch a wedding on stage — a real wedding, between two real people who love each other — and maintain that what you're seeing is a threat. You cannot watch a grandmother dance and an artist sing with his whole chest and a little girl spin in circles and call it un-American. You cannot witness that much joy and hold onto that much hate and fear.

Even the skeptics and harshest critics melted under the power of music, joy, and unity. For a moment you felt part of something much bigger than ourselves regardless of what the media tells us. The best music has always come out of times of resistance and change. Spiritual songs during the slave trade, church songs in times of revival and renewal, and protest songs of the '60s for Civil Rights and ending wars. Music is joyful defiance.

Bad Bunny's album Debí Tirar Más Fotos, the album that won the Grammy for Album of the Year just a week before the Super Bowl, was born from a retreat into Puerto Rico's interior, its mountains and small towns, its folk music traditions of plena and bomba. He described it as seeking refuge in the countryside, a form of resistance through rootedness. The album was not made for mainstream American consumption. It was made from and for home — created to celebrate being human in Puerto Rico.

And yet the world fell in love with it. Authenticity is its own universal language. When someone shows you who they truly are, with no filter and no apology, it resonates in a place deeper than demographics or market research.

What Art Reminds Us

We live in a time when so much of our public life is organized around division — who's in, who's out, who speaks the right language, who looks the right way, who belongs. Art has always been the counter-argument. Not because it ignores difference, but because it reveals the shared humanity underneath it.

A wedding is a wedding. A family gathering is a family gathering. The impulse to feed people, to dance with your children, to honor your elders, to sing songs that make your chest ache — these are not Puerto Rican things or American things or Latino things. They are human things. And when an artist puts them on a stage with enough love and specificity and courage, the borders between "us" and "them" start to feel like what they've always been: imaginary lines drawn because of our unresolved fear and suspicion of the other.

The NFL closed out its coverage of the halftime show with a message Bad Bunny has repeated all year, first at his concerts in Puerto Rico and again at the Grammys: "Lo único más poderoso que el odio es el amor."

The only thing more powerful than hate is love.

It sounds simple, yes. But it also sounds like Jesus, who said loving our neighbors isn't optional. Jesus also said, "He causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous." Not to mention the call to love our neighbors, and even our enemies.

In other words, grace is for all — Puerto Rican singers, and Indian mothers working in laundromats. Grace is for rich acolytes, and single mothers needing assistance to pay the bills. Grace for newborns, and those aging in retirement homes.

Maybe love in times of division feels naive. But last night, on a stage built to look like a neighborhood, full of people doing ordinary and beautiful things while extraordinary music played, it didn't feel naive at all.

It felt like the truest thing anyone had said in a long time. It felt like a glimpse into a Kingdom built for earth.

It felt like millions of hearts becoming one. Perhaps this is why interpretation isn't needed. We don't need to learn Spanish, we only need to dance.

-Ryan