Bunny B. Goode
We're watching the same failure loop.
The primal American rock song ends in prophecy: A shack-dwelling, near-illiterate from the middle of nowhere will play for packed nightclubs instead of railroad drifters, and Johnny B. Goode, son of the evergreens and the swamps, will see his name in lights. Does the prophecy come true? We suspect it might.
And on some level, we are obligated to believe that it will. In America, the line between nothing and everything and nowhere and somewhere — the line between, for instance, a grocery store in an obscure town in Puerto Rico and the biggest stage in all of music — is supposed to be thinner than anywhere else on Earth. That stage exists for only 15 minutes each year, during the Super Bowl halftime show.
The obscure Puerto Rican town I have in mind is Vega Baja, which is even lower on the American scale than southern Louisiana. It was there that Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio, son of a local truck driver and school teacher, worked checkout at an Econo supermarket while on break from the University of Puerto Rico at Arecibo, where he was studying communications in hopes of becoming a radio host. In 2016, by the last of his grocery-bagging days, Ocasio’s, known more widely as Bad Bunny, self-released music had scored him a record contract with San Juan tastemaker DJ Luian, and he was on his way toward a career-making joint single with the Columbian star Karol G. The 31-year-old is now the most commercially successful Spanish-language musician in history, the latest winner of the Grammy for album of the year, and by some metrics, the biggest pop star on Earth.
Bad Bunny in San Juan, Puerto Rico, in September. (Getty Images)
Those who are earnestly pissed about Bad Bunny playing the 2026 Super Bowl halftime show, and there are many, are not just wasting their emotion. They have forgotten their national inheritance. Americans should be thrilled that out-of-the-way places in their country, or at least in a territory with a disquietingly ambiguous relationship to their country, still produce artists like this. The critics of this booking probably have not actually listened to the artist they are attacking, which is their own sad loss. Sadder still is the attempt to counter-program Bad Bunny, as if it’s the duty of all good American patriots to ignore him. In one of its more ill-advised moves, Turning Points USA is throwing a Kid Rock-headlined alternative halftime show, with neither the talent nor the bookers aware of how tasteless the juxtaposition with the …
We're watching the same failure loop.
The primal American rock song ends in prophecy: A shack-dwelling, near-illiterate from the middle of nowhere will play for packed nightclubs instead of railroad drifters, and Johnny B. Goode, son of the evergreens and the swamps, will see his name in lights. Does the prophecy come true? We suspect it might.
And on some level, we are obligated to believe that it will. In America, the line between nothing and everything and nowhere and somewhere — the line between, for instance, a grocery store in an obscure town in Puerto Rico and the biggest stage in all of music — is supposed to be thinner than anywhere else on Earth. That stage exists for only 15 minutes each year, during the Super Bowl halftime show.
The obscure Puerto Rican town I have in mind is Vega Baja, which is even lower on the American scale than southern Louisiana. It was there that Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio, son of a local truck driver and school teacher, worked checkout at an Econo supermarket while on break from the University of Puerto Rico at Arecibo, where he was studying communications in hopes of becoming a radio host. In 2016, by the last of his grocery-bagging days, Ocasio’s, known more widely as Bad Bunny, self-released music had scored him a record contract with San Juan tastemaker DJ Luian, and he was on his way toward a career-making joint single with the Columbian star Karol G. The 31-year-old is now the most commercially successful Spanish-language musician in history, the latest winner of the Grammy for album of the year, and by some metrics, the biggest pop star on Earth.
Bad Bunny in San Juan, Puerto Rico, in September. (Getty Images)
Those who are earnestly pissed about Bad Bunny playing the 2026 Super Bowl halftime show, and there are many, are not just wasting their emotion. They have forgotten their national inheritance. Americans should be thrilled that out-of-the-way places in their country, or at least in a territory with a disquietingly ambiguous relationship to their country, still produce artists like this. The critics of this booking probably have not actually listened to the artist they are attacking, which is their own sad loss. Sadder still is the attempt to counter-program Bad Bunny, as if it’s the duty of all good American patriots to ignore him. In one of its more ill-advised moves, Turning Points USA is throwing a Kid Rock-headlined alternative halftime show, with neither the talent nor the bookers aware of how tasteless the juxtaposition with the …
Bunny B. Goode
We're watching the same failure loop.
The primal American rock song ends in prophecy: A shack-dwelling, near-illiterate from the middle of nowhere will play for packed nightclubs instead of railroad drifters, and Johnny B. Goode, son of the evergreens and the swamps, will see his name in lights. Does the prophecy come true? We suspect it might.
And on some level, we are obligated to believe that it will. In America, the line between nothing and everything and nowhere and somewhere — the line between, for instance, a grocery store in an obscure town in Puerto Rico and the biggest stage in all of music — is supposed to be thinner than anywhere else on Earth. That stage exists for only 15 minutes each year, during the Super Bowl halftime show.
The obscure Puerto Rican town I have in mind is Vega Baja, which is even lower on the American scale than southern Louisiana. It was there that Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio, son of a local truck driver and school teacher, worked checkout at an Econo supermarket while on break from the University of Puerto Rico at Arecibo, where he was studying communications in hopes of becoming a radio host. In 2016, by the last of his grocery-bagging days, Ocasio’s, known more widely as Bad Bunny, self-released music had scored him a record contract with San Juan tastemaker DJ Luian, and he was on his way toward a career-making joint single with the Columbian star Karol G. The 31-year-old is now the most commercially successful Spanish-language musician in history, the latest winner of the Grammy for album of the year, and by some metrics, the biggest pop star on Earth.
Bad Bunny in San Juan, Puerto Rico, in September. (Getty Images)
Those who are earnestly pissed about Bad Bunny playing the 2026 Super Bowl halftime show, and there are many, are not just wasting their emotion. They have forgotten their national inheritance. Americans should be thrilled that out-of-the-way places in their country, or at least in a territory with a disquietingly ambiguous relationship to their country, still produce artists like this. The critics of this booking probably have not actually listened to the artist they are attacking, which is their own sad loss. Sadder still is the attempt to counter-program Bad Bunny, as if it’s the duty of all good American patriots to ignore him. In one of its more ill-advised moves, Turning Points USA is throwing a Kid Rock-headlined alternative halftime show, with neither the talent nor the bookers aware of how tasteless the juxtaposition with the …
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