‘It’s become more about politics than music’: what will Bad Bunny bring to the Super Bowl?

Grammy-winning Puerto Rican star is in the center of US culture wars before leading this weekend's half-time show

A few days after Christmas 2022, Bad Bunny, the Puerto Rican reggaetonero, appeared without warning on one of the most unlikely of stages: the roof of a Gulf Oil gas station in San Juan. To a massive crowd singing every word, he performed a surprise concert, along with friend and collaborator Arcangel, that was part hype-y music video shoot, part exultant post-tour homecoming, and part pointed critique. He ended the set with El Apagon (The Power Outage"), a clubby protest anthem about local displacement and the rolling blackouts that have plagued Puerto Rico, a US commonwealth" (read: colony), since Hurricane Maria in 2017.

Bad Bunny sang it from a roof on Santurce's Calle Loiza, a thoroughfare in a former working-class Black neighborhood now dotted with Airbnbs. But you do not need the full context to get the show's contagious energy. Though I have never walked Calle Loiza, nor do I speak Spanish, the gas station show is still my favorite concert to rewatch via online fan clips: electric, organic, genuinely popular. In terms of reach, critical acclaim and longevity, Bad Bunny rivals - and sometimes outsells - the likes of Taylor Swift, Kendrick Lamar, Beyonce and Drake, though it is hard to imagine those peers appearing so unguarded, so public, as he does on that roof.