Ambivalent about Bad Bunny

The only thing more powerful than hate is love

I am relentlessly optimistic, but I’m not sure any part of human history backs up that billboard. To my eye, this is an aspiration rather than a reality. But I want to believe. And I hope this will be a through-line for everyone’s day after the Super Bowl. In fact, I intend to write this very line down and stash it in a couple places I’ll stumble upon later in life.

If you take nothing else from this entire piece, you should take this away with you:

The only thing more powerful than hate is love.

~ Bad Bunny

The Ambivalent Political Party

Yesterday, after Squirt gave me his thoughts on The Push and the Pull, he came up to my office and we had a dialogue for around an hour about many different things. First we dug into my childhood a bit because he intellectually understood that I didn’t grow up with one of his three Grandpas but he learned some new details from reading. From there we ended up talking a bit more deeply about one of his pet causes - that children should be empowered to vote earlier than eighteen in America. I love that this is top of his mind at his age - what he wants to see change in the world - and I adore that he is willing to talk about and defend his beliefs.

In the course of this conversation we talked a bit about my voting history, which can be most easily summed up as being someone who has voted for both parties at different levels. However, I hastened to add, it has been a very long time since I’ve voted for a Republican. Or been happy about voting for a Democrat I support. He hears enough discussions with Spouse and I, and inserts himself into them, that neither of these sentiments were a surprise to him. He knows I despise both political parties but we had never discussed why very deeply.

So I used the framing of lowering the voting age so we could have a dialogue. I put voting age on an axis. If we are trying to find the voting age that is reasonable there are two extremes: incredibly old and incredibly young. One extreme is that everyone can vote. Put the blob of a newborn in front of the button and let them vote along with everyone older. Alternatively, do not allow anyone to vote until they have reached retirement age. Now defend these two positions.

Both are, of course, pretty silly. But both are also very close to the extremes that the parties tend to cleave towards for almost any position. It is incredibly hard to find a Democrat who will agree that there should be any abortion restrictions whatsoever. It is similarly hard to find a Republican who will entertain any gun control restrictions at all. Reversing the party and position works as well. Republicans are not interested in any abortion freedoms, Democrats mostly would remove guns from private ownership almost entirely. The answers, of course, are invariably in the middle of the extremes.

Just like our supposed voting age restriction.

We didn’t actually reach an accord of course. He had some ideas like a “voters test” to earn the right to vote. Though he also agreed that at a certain point everyone should get to vote irrespective of their passing or failing this test. And he was unclear on who actually gets to write the test. And we went round and round a bit before he came to a statement that made my heart burst with pride:

Dad, we just need an Ambivalent Political Party.

~Squirt

If this Substack accomplished nothing else but to have my son approach this big, beautiful, complicated world with an open heart and mind it will be a resounding success.

Baffled

The fuck does this have to do with Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl show?

~ Some Reader

I am wildly ambivalent about the Bad Bunny’s show. I have so very many thoughts about this shared experience last night with Spouse and Squirt that I want to work through them a bit. I can already tell this will run long and wander a bit but, fuck it, people can nope out if they want.

I adore music. I don’t know a goddamn thing about music, mind you, other than what I like. I listen to somewhere around 5 hours of music every day bouncing around in genres and I get enjoyment for most types. Rap, country, throat-singing, classical, and the list goes on. I’ve even grown to like the Beatles thanks to my family’s obsession. But I do not listen to very much music in a language other than English. I need lyrics usually to tie things together, I find music with other languages to be dissonant, perhaps because I don’t know much about music. I can appreciate music in other languages but the idea of someone who doesn’t speak Spanish listening to exclusively Spanish lyrics baffles me.

Charitably, around 20% of Americans can speak some amount of Spanish. That is to say, around 80% of the people watching the Super Bowl headliner had no fucking clue what dude was rapping about. Rapping on a shitty mic with horrible acoustics while jaunting around the field of a game that is almost entirely exclusive to America. This baffles me. And it begs the question: what is the point of the Super Bowl Halftime show?

Just Business

The answer, which I really only arrived at with the benefit of Spouse’s insights on our morning walk, is that the Halftime show is about making money. Putting money in the pocket of the NFL. Pumping up that revenue. Maximizing the advertisement value. There was zero downside to inviting Bad Bunny to do the Halftime Show from a business perspective.

The NFL calculated that nobody was going to skip the Super Bowl because of Bad Bunny. Based on my MAGA neighbor’s party they were right! Bad Bunny surely calculated that it would be phenomenal for his career, cannot fault him for doing it. No such thing as bad press, right? If Trump has taught us nothing else it is that divisiveness is fantastic for business.

But what is good for business is not necessarily good for the country.

A problem with the American political climate is that we do not have dialogues with each other anymore. Every interaction with someone who disagrees with you is about proving how they are wrong and you are right. They are stupid, and you are smart. They are tasteless while you are erudite.

I don’t believe I’m much of a xenophobe. I don’t believe that skipping music in a language I don’t understand, music that cannot speak to me on anything like the number of levels of an English language song, makes me a bad guy. In short, I think saying that I found Bad Bunny’s performance lacking because it was all in a language 80% of the viewership of the show doesn’t speak is perfectly defensible.

And yet, I do have to be defensive. I have to open with things like “well, I’m not a racist but…” which, generally, is already a ‘losing’ proposition in rhetoric. Shit, I spent 1,000 words building up to saying it and it’s still a little problematic. This is the scenario that was created by inviting Bad Bunny. That I immediately have to defend wanting to hear music in the language that America generally speaks.

“Well, the music wasn’t for you!” But, why would it not be for me? It’s an American game. 80% of America speaks English and not Spanish. Who was the music for if not America?

“Well, he won a Grammy! His music is good!” I will stipulate to this fact, but I still need to ask — how many folks who voted in the Grammys speak Spanish? Was it a quality decision or was it a business decision to vote for him? Awards are fine but I’ve followed the Hugo awards in speculative fiction long enough to know that quality takes a backseat to other concerns. What were the concerns this time around?

“Well, the show was amazing even if I couldn’t understand the words!” Totally agreed here. A real wedding on the field of the Super Bowl? Holy shit! Celebrity cameos. Amazing dancing! Those were all real businesses in Puerto Rico, no shit? I especially liked the political commentary with the powerlines and him giving that kid who was wrongly held by ICE his Grammy. And the underlying message that his culture is a part of America, that loves conquers hate, that America is more than just the United States of America.

An Amazing Show

With one massive flaw — most of us had no fucking clue what he was singing. And now I’m being gaslit into thinking I’m a bad guy because I just wanted to have words I could understand? That I’m uncultured and I’m what’s wrong with America? Nah, fuck that. It’s not too much to ask that a uniquely American game have a bit more English singing than just Lada Gaga.

Putting on a show in a language that 80% of the country doesn’t understand is divisive. It doesn’t mean he’s a bad artist. It doesn’t mean Puerto Rico isn’t part of the country. It doesn’t invalidate that it’s perfectly fine to speak and sing in Spanish in the United States of America. Nothing about the performance was wrong or shouldn’t happen in America, but I worry that the impact was not positive. I worry that, in the pursuit of that almighty dollar, the NFL just pulled the country as a whole a little bit more apart.

But Trump! Yes, fucking obviously. This is a drop in the ocean that is already boiled because of Trump. And it’s why it feels silly to muddle this over at all. Of all the things to rage about this one is inconsequential. It’s not really worth the ink being spilled on it. Except I cannot feel that the event was a step backwards, because it’s created an environment where I cannot say without a thousand word defense that despite some incredible aspects…man…the Halftime Show kinda sucked.

Thus, ambivalence. I can recognize amazing showmanship. I can recognize that it was simply good business to do this in the Age of Trump. I can appreciate that Bad Bunny seems like an incredibly decent American who wanted to speak to America. But I will also recognize that doing it all in Spanish means he was only speaking to a small portion of America. I can recognize that not liking it while watching the Super Bowl is perfectly defensible. I can point out that it probably wasn’t a net positive for the country and it did not turn down the temperature or, really, change a single mind.

Thanks for coming to my dialogue. And remember, only we can make this true:

The only thing more powerful than hate is love.