>From a great FB post by Sirantos Fotopoulos There is something magnificently revealing about the sight of conservative racist America clutching its pearls over a Puerto Rican reggaeton artist gyrating across the most aggressively commercial sporting event on the planet. It is the sort of moment when ideological contradictions, normally camouflaged beneath flags and halftime fireworks, burst into view like a rigged stage prop collapsing under its own theatrical excess. Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl halftime performance was a cultural Rorschach test, exposing the neuroses of American nationalism, the vampiric adaptability of capitalism, and the enduring capacity of pop art to provoke — even when embalmed in corporate spectacle.
To understand the outrage, one must first appreciate the venue. The Super Bowl is not a football game with a musical intermission. It is late capitalism’s holiest religious shrine, where corporate titans, military pageantry, celebrity worship, and national myth-making converge in an orgy of commercial piety. It is precisely the kind of ritual Guy Debord warned us about when he described modern society as an “immense accumulation of spectacles,” where lived reality is replaced by commodified representation. The halftime show is the Eucharist of consumerism: a consecrated moment where culture, advertising, and ideology merge into a single marketable hallucination. Into this choreographed liturgy marched Bad Bunny dragging with him the irrepressible rhythms of reggaeton, a genre forged in Afro-Caribbean resistance and diasporic improvisation. His performance, draped in Puerto Rican imagery, Spanish lyrics, and unapologetically transnational identity, represented the arrival of a cultural form born from colonial peripheries onto the empire’s most sacred altar. It was, in short, a symbolic inversion: the colony serenading the colonizer during its most expensive national ceremony on its highest of holy days. This was bound to enrage a certain segment of the American right, which has increasingly transformed its patriotism into a defensive reaction against demographic reality. The MAGA movement, despite its populist rhetoric, thrives on cultural nostalgia — the fantasy that American identity was once stable, homogeneous, and immune to global currents. Bad Bunny’s presence punctured that illusion. Here was an artist performing primarily in Spanish, celebrating Caribbean identity, and commanding global audiences without submitting to Anglo-American cultural translation. For those invested in racist cultural supremacy disguised as patriotism, this is not merely uncomfortable. It is existentially destabilizing. Yet the irony — delicious, devastating, and quintessentially capitalist — is that Bad Bunny’s performance was also a triumph of the very system his symbolism complicates. Capitalism possesses an extraordinary ability to convert cultural resistance into profitable ornamentation. The same economic machinery that once marginalized reggaeton now packages it as premium global entertainment. The NFL did not host Bad Bunny out of anti-colonial solidarity; it did so because multicultural spectacle sells streaming subscriptions, advertising slots, and international market share. This is commodity fetishism in its most dazzling form. The audience consumes not simply music but the aura of cultural rebellion, neatly branded and corporately sponsored. The Puerto Rican flag becomes both a political symbol and a merchandising opportunity. The Spanish lyric becomes both cultural affirmation and algorithmic market expansion. The spectacle transforms history into aesthetic, struggle into choreography, and identity into a consumable lifestyle. Pier Paolo Pasolini, that prophetic pessimist of consumer civilization, would have recognized this moment instantly. Pasolini feared not political repression but consumer capitalism’s capacity to flatten cultural and spiritual depth into standardized pleasure. He warned that transgression, once commodified, loses its disruptive power. Bad Bunny’s gender-fluid aesthetics, anti-colonial undertones, and erotic irreverence might once have scandalized moral conservatives and challenged social orthodoxy. Within the spectacle, however, these gestures risk becoming TikTok choreography — provocation reduced to entertainment décor. Still, the MAGA backlash inadvertently confirms Bad Bunny’s residual power. Cultural hegemony, as Antonio Gramsci understood, depends on controlling symbolic authority. When a Puerto Rican reggaeton artist headlines America’s most nationalistic sporting ritual, it signals that the symbolic terrain of American identity is shifting. Reactionary outrage is therefore less about music and more about the erosion of cultural monopoly. It is the sound of a ruling myth losing narrative control. Predictably, right-wing populism does what it has always done when confronted with economic and demographic anxiety: it translates material insecurity into cultural grievance. Rather than interrogating corporate globalization — the very force that elevated Bad Bunny’s global platform — racist critics direct their ire toward linguistic diversity, immigrant identity, and perceived moral decline. It is a masterclass in false consciousness: capitalism expands global markets while political outrage scapegoats cultural visibility. But the left would be foolish to celebrate too quickly. The same spectacle that alarms cultural conservatives also neutralizes radical potential. The halftime show transforms anti-colonial symbolism into multinational branding. It converts Afro-diasporic musical traditions into algorithm-friendly global pop. It allows audiences to experience emotional solidarity without confronting structural inequality. The revolution — if it appears at all — arrives televised with a corporate sponsor and a streaming partnership. Thus Bad Bunny occupies a paradox worthy of tragic opera. He is both prophet and idol. Prophet, because his artistry carries echoes of colonial history, sexual liberation, and cultural defiance. Idol, because global capitalism has sanctified him as a commodity deity, complete with merchandise, brand partnerships, and carefully curated spectacle. The prophet destabilizes cultural hierarchies; the idol stabilizes market hierarchies. The two coexist uneasily within the same glittering performance. The culture war surrounding the halftime show therefore reveals less about Bad Bunny than about America itself. It exposes a nation wrestling with globalization while pretending to defend tradition. It showcases a capitalist system capable of absorbing rebellion faster than critics can articulate it. And it demonstrates that popular culture remains one of the last arenas where ideological contradictions can still erupt into public consciousness — albeit wrapped in choreography and fancy theatrics. The most subversive truth of the entire affair is this: Bad Bunny did not invade the Super Bowl. Capitalism invited him, racist nationalism panicked, and the audience danced anyway. The spectacle rolled forward — as it always does — transforming protest into performance, identity into product, and conflict into ratings. And somewhere between the rhythms and the fireworks, America glimpsed its future — a multilingual, culturally hybrid, globally mediated society — and recoiled at the mirror, unsure whether it was witnessing decline, evolution, or merely the logical endpoint of the empire it built. -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. View/Reply Online (#40612): https://groups.io/g/marxmail/message/40612 Mute This Topic: https://groups.io/mt/117739295/21656 -=-=- POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. #4 Do not exceed five posts a day. -=-=- Group Owner: [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://groups.io/g/marxmail/leave/13617172/21656/1316126222/xyzzy [[email protected]] -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
