The controversy surrounding the Super Bowl

First of all, the Super Bowl was perhaps the most boring game of American football I’ve ever seen. I’d honestly rather see a tree grow from a mere seed. Additionally, I was unaware of the vomit of commercial breaks that would plague the event. One second RFK Jr was telling me to eat ‘real food’, the next was a Burger King promo and then the Backstreet Boys started singing about T-mobile for some reason. 

There was, however, one redeeming quality to this - Bad Bunny’s halftime show.

America and the world in general is amidst a politically polarizing era, everyone has an opinion and any opinion opposing theirs is wrong. Based on this, the fact that a Spanish-speaking artist whose songs are in the language he naturally speaks, was somehow a humongous controversy. 

President Trump called Bad Bunny’s show “absolutely terrible” and “one of the worst ever”. So now we’ve heard his stance on the matter, I will now give the contents of mine. 

In my estimation, the half-time show represented more about the good side of America than any flag or national anthem could ever. You see, aside from the native Americans, the U.S is a nation built and lived purely from immigration. That’s not a liberal ‘woke’ line of argument, it’s a fact. 1 in 5 of all Americans speak a language other than English as their first and while many Americans may not have understood Bad Bunny’s lyrics, at least 40 million of them did. Think about how huge this performance must have been for the Hispanic community. A group so huge, finally celebrated on the biggest stage of a country they have helped so much to build.  

It’s something the average English speaker takes for granted, the fact that most songs we hear are in our own language, just actually think about how much of a privilege that is. God forbid those with English as their first language had to endure 15 minutes of not understanding what exactly was being sung. Now while it sounds like something some guy with dreadlocks from Bristol would tell you on your gap year, the whole point of music is that it emphasises the ability to feel, and shouldn’t necessarily require a deep understanding. The music made the people move, isn’t that the point of a halftime show?

The online consensus is that Bad Bunny’s performance unified much of a broken nation. Meanwhile in Washington, Trump said the performance was a ‘slap in the face’ to America and exclaimed ‘nobody’ understood what ‘this guy’ was saying. These words openly disregard the many Americans who enjoyed this show, many of whom are already scapegoated under selfishly populist narratives.

Therefore it is my opinion that words like these from the leader of the U.S are the true ‘slap in the face’ to the ideals of freedom and liberty the nation at hand was founded upon.