‘Together, We Are America’

For most of his Super Bowl performance, Bad Bunny “had been mugging merrily to the camera, flaring his eyes and making hammy gestures to illustrate his words,” Spencer Kornhaber writes. But as exploding power lines evoked the electrical outages that have plagued Puerto Rico in recent years, anger seemed to twitch in his face as he rapped his song “El Apagón” (“The Power Outage”).

“Through affect alone, he got across a sense of betrayal that many Puerto Ricans of his age—commonly called the ‘crisis generation’—have spoken of feeling after a string of political scandals and natural disasters amid ongoing gentrification by mainlanders,” Kornhaber continues.

“That message was, indeed, political,” Kornhaber writes. “So was his culminating statement of ‘God bless America,’ which he followed by listing countries in North and South America, thereby asserting the transnational nature of the culture that he represents. Pushing toward the camera with throngs of drummers, he closed by holding up a football with a message on it: ‘Together, We Are America.’ It was a pointed message but also a conciliatory one, a unity slogan.”

📸: Ishika Samant / Getty