‘It’s going to be a huge party’: Bad Bunny prepares for the Super Bowl stage as Trump skips the event | music

Just one week after taking home the Grammy for Album of the Year, Puerto Rican rapper Bad Bunny will take part in the most-watched U.S. concert of the year when he performs at the Super Bowl on Sunday.

The artist born Benito Antonio Martinez Ocasio received the Academy of Music’s highest honor for 2025’s Debí Tirar Más Fotos, a politically oriented record infused with Puerto Rican music and culture. The album became the first Spanish-language act to receive the award, beating out competitors Kendrick Lamar, Lady Gaga and Justin Bieber.

While giving his acceptance speech for Best Urban Music Performance, Bad Bunny echoed the anti-ICE sentiments that have animated many Grammy speeches. “The ice came out,” he said. “We are not savages, we are not animals, we are not aliens. We are human beings and we are Americans.” He added more broadly: “The only thing stronger than hate is love.”

Eyes on both sides of the aisle will be watching to see if his performance on Sunday contains a sharper statement.

At a press conference on Thursday before the show, Bad Bunny said: “I really want people to have fun. It’s going to be a huge party. I want to bring what people can always expect from me, a lot of my culture.”

The headline announcement was greeted with both jubilation and hostility. While many artists and activists welcomed his booking, Corey Lewandowski, a Department of Homeland Security advisor, said: “It is absolutely shameful that they decided to choose someone who seems to hate America so much to represent them at halftime.”

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said ICE will be “everywhere” at the Super Bowl.

Bad Bunny broke records last year with a 30-night concert in San Juan, but decided not to take the show to the US out of fear for the safety of his fans. “There was a problem – the dreaded ICE could be outside [my concert]”It’s something we’ve been talking about and very concerned about,” he told i-D.

“If you don’t understand what I just said, you’ve got four months to learn it,” he responded to critics while hosting Saturday Night Live in October, following a monologue clip in Spanish with a wink in English.

Since then, there has been an uptick in social media posts about learning Spanish and Puerto Rican slang, with Duolingo launching a “Bad Bunny 101” course last month to give newcomers a taste of the language.

Donald Trump will not attend this year’s Super Bowl after saying in an interview that the venue in Santa Clara, California, is “too far away.”

Regarding Bad Bunny and Green Day, who will perform at a concert before kick-off, the US President said: “I am against them. I think it is a terrible choice. All it does is sow hatred.”

The NFL stands by the reservation. When asked about Bad Bunny’s anti-ICE comments at the Grammys, commissioner Roger Goodell called him “one of the greatest artists in the world. That’s one of the reasons we chose him… He understood the platform he was on.”

Sunday’s NFL game will mark the second time Bad Bunny has appeared on the Super Bowl stage, following a 2020 guest appearance during Shakira and Jennifer Lopez’s 2020 co-headline event.

“I really don’t want to give away any spoilers,” Bad Bunny said at the press conference. “It will be fun and easy, and people will only have to worry about dancing.”

As the most-watched US television event of the year, Super Bowl ad prices have soared to $10 million for a 30-second ad, with many brands delivering their biggest campaigns of the year.

A-list celebrities are set to appear in commercials this year, including Sabrina Carpenter, Ben Affleck, Bradley Cooper, Melissa McCarthy, Lady Gaga and Emma Stone, while some brands are targeting Generation Z with ads starring MrBeast, Addison Rae and Chicken Shop Date’s Amelia Dimoldenberg.

This year will also see the first AI-generated Super Bowl ad for vodka brand Svedka, with a spot showing a pair of robots dancing with human partygoers. Meanwhile, Anthropic and its AI assistant, Claude, are targeting Open AI’s ChatGPT with an ad promising, “Ads are coming to AI. But not to Claude.” On Twitter/X, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman called the ads a “clearly dishonest portrayal.”