Teyah Parent

Watching the recent Super Bowl Halftime performances by Kendrick Lamar and Bad Bunny felt 

less like consuming media and more like watching a layered cultural message. As a sociology major (and a leftist), I kept thinking about how both performances happened during a tense political climate and how each artist balanced corporate spectacle and political messaging. Both 

performances have a story to tell of resistance, but each was done in a vastly different way. 

Lamar’s performance was a critique of structural racism, surveillance, and democracy. 

The staging, the rigid forms of the dancers, the intense lighting, and the militarized visual language screamed systems of discipline and control. When Lamar moved through tight 

choreography and shifting group formations, it mirrored the pressures of navigating racial capitalism. The sense of being watched, sorted, and contained. Lamar has always been outspoken about how state power, policing, and economic stratification shape Black life. What he did that made it powerful was how he used the aesthetics of militarization and control within the very heart of an institution like the National Football League (NFL), which often markets patriotism and nationalism as ideals. There was a contradiction. Here is an artist critiquing American mythologies of meritocracy and freedom while performing at the apex of American culture—on its biggest stage. That contradiction is the message. Lamar’s set functioned as a negotiation within hegemony. He was never outside the system, but instead he used his platform inside of it to destabilize the dominant narrative.

Benito, Bad Bunny, approached the politics of the current administration through the diasporic pride of cultural assertion. He didn’t hold back. He didn’t water anything down in a multicultural “diversity” sense. He made Puerto Rican identity inherently political. The language, the rhythm, and the visual references to Latin American life were not diluted for English and American palatability. In today’s society, Latin American Culture is squashed into a marketable demographic as something that can be sold back through sanitized imagery. These visuals that he presented to the audience celebrated Latin music, the culture and the aesthetic. Not as add-ons to 

American culture, but as anti-assimilationists. He said that this is America, and Latinos are American. America is not just the United States; it is every country on the American continent from Canada to Chile. Bad Bunny’s politics were not delivered through a critique of institutions or policies, but through the refusal to abandon his culture and “assimilate” like the racists want him to. He spoke only in Spanish and refused to present Latino identity as apolitical, because after all, everything is political. 

Both artists used joy as part of their resistance. With Kendrick’s moments of collective movement and Bad Bunny’s emphasis on the dancing, the wedding and having fun, they were not aesthetic choices; they were sociopolitical ones. In a society that frames marginalized existence as traumatic, collective joy is a counter-narrative, insisting that there is humanity beyond suffering.

And yet again, we can’t ignore the contradictions. Both performances occurred inside a massive corporate event funded by billion-dollar advertising tied to institutions that have historically marginalized the very communities being represented. It raises another question: does radical imagery lose its power when mediated through spectacle? My response: maybe. Millions of viewers, many of whom might have never interacted with these themes in academic or activist 

spaces, were able to be exposed to these challenges to dominant ideology. You probably expected me to tell you which one I thought was better. I won’t. Because this isn’t about entertainment, it’s about recognizing the context they were speaking to—an unprecedented political moment shaped by rising nationalist and racist rhetoric. Both Kendrick Lamar and Bad Bunny used the empire’s biggest stage to insist on an alternative narrative about identity, belonging, and power, and that is radically political.