It really shouldn't have been any surprise, that the Bad Bunny performance would be so ridden with vile content (in whatever language it was "sung" in). Or there was one person who is now a bit more educated on matters than I had been before this morning. I understand now, and I see that "entertainment" like what happened at the Super Bowl is just going to continue and grow increasingly worse.
It turns out that ever since 2020 or so the Super Bowl halftime shows have been produced by Jay-Z. The guy who made an unconscionable amount of money rapping about gangs, drugs, sex, violence... you get the picture. I will never understand why it is that some of the most negative aspects of the human condition are so commonly deemed to be high art to be praised by all. But we are far from the glorious years of the Renaissance.
So of course the halftime shows are going to be vulgar. They ultimately derive from vulgar minds. Minds motivated by lots and lots of money, something the NFL as an entertainment powerhouse amply provides.
Yes, the Bad Bunny performance had audience numbers. "Largest ever for a halftime show", it's being raved. It was fifteen minutes that cost tens of millions of dollars and hundreds of man hours to construct and choreograph. It was money well spent indeed, if the goal was to arrest the attention of moral misanthropes from sea to shining sea.
The Turning Point halftime program had much less lead time, involved far fewer people, did not have the bankrolling of a multimedia corporate monster, and still pulled in a sizable audience. Yet this somehow "lost" to Bad Bunny.
It doesn't impress me at all. In fact, the more I think about it, the more disappointed I am in my fellow man, that he has sold out his principles in defending an "entertainer" and system that denigrates human life instead of lifting it up.
But those are things for "mass men" to celebrate. I am not a mass man. For all my occasional dalliances with pop culture, my mind is still poised toward something higher. It's why I wrote my book the way that I did. It could have been something else, more "marketable". But I knew who I intended my readers to be and so I wrote for them. I feel like I'm going to be the least successful writer in human history sometimes. For all of my talk of being a writer, I have never achieved anything remarkable. But I can take pride in knowing what I have to offer is authentic. Something that I didn't have to sell my soul to produce. And that I will never attempt to insult the intelligence of my readers with.
Perhaps someday the National Football League will come to its senses, and again produce Super Bowl halftime entertainment that reflects the better of human nature. But that is not going to be anytime soon. Not while men of vulgarity are calling the shots and presenting THEIR perverse vision of American identity and culture.
It didn't happen on this occasion. But give it time. If the league continues catering to the least common denominator, eventually there will be a halftime special competing with the "official" one of the Super Bowl. And it will be so wildly successful that there will be board members of the NFL turning in their resignations come Monday morning.
Until then, if I need entertainment while waiting for the second half of the game, I will do as I did this past weekend: watch the In Living Color halftime show from 1992. A product of a much better and more innocent time, when we weren't expected to hate others without sound reason.
