All the crackheads, the critics, the cities,
and all my heroes at the methadone clinics…
for the crooked cops and the cluttered desks
for the shots of Jack and the caps of meth
– Kid Rock, “Bawitababa”
Super Bowl LX, according to the numbers, drew an average audience of 124 million viewers or more, which is, as I’m reading, the second most of any in NFL history. The halftime show, headlined by Bad Bunny, peaked with more than 137 million viewers, as much attention was focused on the Puerto Rican pop star’s presence.
Part of that was due, no doubt, to Bad Bunny’s fanbase, but also because of the brain-rotted culture war nonsense surrounding the performance. You see, Bad Bunny made the cardinal sin in Trump’s America of criticizing ICE before he accepted his Grammy Award for Album of the Year a week before his Super Bowl performance.
This extreme act of sacrilege further provided the impetus for Turning Point USA to host its own “alternative” halftime show, which was aired concurrently with the official show, and drew a reported six million viewers as a streaming broadcast on the group’s YouTube and Rumble pages. It has, according to reports, drew more than 15 million additional viewers since the initial streaming.
The response to Bad Bunny’s performance was varied, but for this argument, I’ll cite a couple of the more extreme ones. Fox News’ Megyn Kelly went into a full-blown racist tirade in an interview with Piers Morgan on the topic, essentially claiming that the Puerto Rican performer had no right to be there, and essentially negated the existence of Spanish-speaking Americans.
Florida Rep. Randy Fine went a step further by claiming Bad Bunny’s lyrics were explicit and called for federal punishment for the NFL and NBC for airing the show.
I’ll confess that before the culture warriors began making hay over the halftime show, I had no idea who Bad Bunny was, but then again, I am not the target demographic that the Super Bowl halftime entertainment is geared toward. The last one I looked forward to seeing and sat through, with excitement, as well as open ears and eyes was when the late, great Purple One, Prince Rogers Nelson: His Royal Badness, performed in 2007. Of course, who couldn’t love Prince, one of the greatest geniuses of the modern era? Other performers that I enjoy have performed the halftime show through the years, like Aerosmith, the Who and Hank Williams, Jr., but the more recent shows feature bookings of acts that I don’t really know about nor care to listen to and watch. Bad Bunny is no exception to that.
What I do find amusing, though, is the choice of headliner for the Turning Point show: Kid Rock. What was, to my understanding, anyway, billed as a family friendly alternative halftime show, featured one of the most vulgar performers in the history of mainstream rock music. While I haven’t the slightest inkling of what makes Bad Bunny so popular, I do know a bit about Mr. Robert Ritchie from Detroit.
When Kid Rock first rose to prominence on his Devil Without a Cause album in the late 90s, he was one of the reasons why I stopped listening to mainstream rock music. Before the dawn of acts like Kid Rock, Staind, Limp Bizkit and so many others, there was a lot of great, catchy heavy rock bands out there, with well-composed lyrics and actual melodies, and there was a variation in vocal sounds. For example, Dave Mustaine of Megadeth sounded nothing like Phil Anselmo from Pantera, and NOBODY sounded like Alice in Chains’ Layne Staley.
Kid Rock, who adopted the nascent rap-rock hybrid, with heavy metal guitars married to hip-hop beats and rapped verses and shouted choruses, purloined sounds and aesthetics from several popular rock acts who were huge before his initial wave of popularity, which began in 1998.
One thing that always drove me up the wall about him, aside from his inane lyrics and songs that all seemed to sound the same, was his attempt to appropriate a redneck/white trash vibe that was done, and done well, by musicians like Les Claypool of Primus and Beck (in his pre-Scientology “Loser” days).
Whereas Primus and Beck, as well as the Rev. Horton Heat, used redneck/hillbilly shtick in a sort of fun, post-modern way, Kid Rock applied it in a way that was all kinds of tacky, and in essence, became the de facto favorite musician for those who likely have their kids’ names tattooed somewhere upon their body, but do not have custody of said kids.
One of the biggest complaints from most folks about Bad Bunny’s performance, which I haven’t yet seen, is that he did not sing in English. Kid Rock, however, opened his show with his trash-metal anthem “Bawitaba,” which features a chorus of nonsensical gibberish and verses that celebrate an over-the-top Bacchanalian rock star lifestyle.
From what all I have read, Bad Bunny avoided political messaging during his performance, and instead shared messages of love and pride in America. Seems pretty wholesome to me, but again, I haven’t watched the actual performance yet. I am curious about the budget for the show, however, and I’m sure that for the money it took to book Bad Bunny and for the overall production, the Super Bowl could’ve easily booked several acts like Tyler Childers, Sturgill Simpson, the Turnpike Troubadours and George Strait, but alas, I am not the target demographic, so my favorite current mainstream acts probably wouldn’t get booked.
Having watched most of the TPUSA show, I can conclude that while Bad Bunny and others put on a show about why this country is great, and expressed it in their own way, it didn’t line up with the expectations of MAGA, i.e. it wasn’t all about them, henceforth an alternative program, or emotional support concert, if you will.
In America, capitalism presents a myriad of choices, and this dichotomy displays that exercise, but what is counter to our ways and beliefs is exclusion. From what I saw in a great many comments shared online about Bad Bunny is an idea that he should not have had the opportunity, nor the platform, to perform due to certain political convictions. That is woefully un-American. As much as Kid Rock, and other TPUSA halftime performers like Brantley Gilbert, cause me to yawn or question their success, I would never advocate for any of them to be denied a gig. That’s gatekeeping, which is despicable and, again, antithetical to American ideals.
Bad Bunny does not have to agree with the people in power to have a platform and audience, for that would be fascism, and as a consumer, I’m not forced to listen to either him or Kid Rock.
