Every year, I look forward to the Super Bowl halftime show almost as much as the game itself. It’s one of those uniquely American moments where everything else stops. Families are in their living rooms, kids are running around with plates of wings, grandparents who don’t know a first down from a field goal are watching along, and for fifteen minutes everybody is focused on the same thing. No politics. No drama. No division. Just music. Just fun. At least, that’s how it used to be.
This year, sitting on my couch, I kept turning up the volume because I thought something was wrong with my TV. I’m not kidding—I thought my speakers were blown. I grabbed the remote, hit volume up, up, up, and still couldn’t understand a single word coming out of Bad Bunny’s mouth. Not one. And that’s when it hit me: it wasn’t the television. It was the show.
Now look, I respect success. I respect hustle. Bad Bunny built a global following, and that’s not easy. Nobody can take that away from him. But the Super Bowl isn’t a niche concert for die-hard fans who already know every lyric. It’s not a late-night festival crowd. It’s the biggest stage in America, and if you’re headlining it, the bare minimum expectation is that people can actually hear you sing.
Instead, what we got felt like fifteen minutes of flashing lights, smoke machines, camera cuts every half second, dancers flying everywhere, and vocals buried under a pile of speakers. It was all spectacle and no connection. I kept waiting for one moment—just one—where the music would cut through. It never came.
That’s the difference between this performance and the ones people still talk about years later. When Prince played guitar in the pouring rain, you felt it in your chest. When Bruce Springsteen ran across the stage, you heard every lyric like he was singing straight to you. Beyoncé was crystal clear. Even Shakira and J.Lo brought huge Latin energy while still making sure every word, every hook, every beat landed.
Music is supposed to communicate something. It’s language, emotion, storytelling. If the audience can’t understand what’s being said, what exactly are we connecting to? At that point, it’s not really a concert—it’s just background noise with fireworks.
The NFL keeps missing the point. The Super Bowl isn’t about chasing what’s trendy on streaming apps. It’s about bringing the whole country together. People who speak English, Spanish, or both should be able to follow along without subtitles or a decoder ring. Representation is great. Quality matters more. You can sing in any language, but if the sound mix is muddy and unintelligible, nobody wins.
By the time it ended, I couldn’t name a single song he performed—and that tells you everything. The best halftime shows stay with you for years. This one was gone before the second-half kickoff.
Maybe I’m old-school. Maybe I just like my concerts to sound like concerts. But if you’re going to take the biggest stage in America, give us something we can actually hear, something we can sing, something that brings the country together.
It’s the Super Bowl, not a nightclub at 2 a.m. And next year, I hope the NFL remembers that.