Goosebumps, tears that weird, fizzy mix you can’t explain

Confession: I ‘watch’ the Super Bowl for the ads and for the halftime show. I know. Sacrilege to any real fans.

But then this year Bad Bunny came on and I just… fell apart in the most satisfying, wholehearted way.

You know that moment where you’re not even sad, you’re just overwhelmed because something on a screen has grabbed you by the heart. That.

What we saw wasn’t just a performance. It was this bright, high-production, almost cinematic world where every frame felt deliberate, like a moving mural, but somehow it still felt… happy. Like actual joy. (Rare! In 2026!)

And it was moment after moment of Latin American life, not as a ‘theme’ but as truth.

Sugarcane fields, dominoes, someone working on a car, a little drink stand. The sleeping kid at the wedding (love). Those iconic plastic chairs that exist in every backyard across the world. Big and specific and ordinary, all at once. Just pure genius.

And then there was also a wedding, a real one with a priest, on the world’s biggest stage. It made me laugh and cry at once because it was so simple and so bold.

Then the moment that broke me: Bad Bunny hands his Grammy to a kid, to himself as a child. Gone. Fully gone.

And here’s the thing. A Puerto Rican artist, performing in Spanish, unapologetically, on the biggest stage in the world, without sanding down the edges to make it easy for a global audience, is not just entertainment.

It’s cultural. It’s political. It’s a statement about whose stories get the big lights, whose language gets to fill the room, whose joy gets to be centred without permission or apology.

And this week I have been watching it on endless repeat, like a teenager with a massive, unbearable crush.

And then the emotional punch, Bad Bunny’s message: ‘The only thing more powerful than hate is love.’

Love is a word that can make you roll your eyes. And then a performance like this comes along and you don’t get to.

Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl Halftime show left me a mess, happy and hopeful at the same time.

Bad Bunny, thank you for sharing a story of hope with the world.

P.S. And oh, did you see the trees? Hundreds of performers dressed as sugarcane and palms so the whole set could roll in like a moving island, unhinged and fabulous. Love!