Good Lovin' Gone Bad

The National Football League has chosen one Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio, known professionally as Bad Bunny (though I will defer to his birth name to show my contempt for preposterous hip-hop stage names), to headline the Super Bowl LX halftime show in February.  As I understand it, it's the first time a male Hispanic musical artist has been chosen to headline this prestigious gig.

Well, he is a Hispanic male.  But a rapper and a World Wrestling Entertainment participant could hardly be called musical or an artist any more than the Super Bowl half time show could be considered prestigious.

Martínez Ocasio has been attacked by the far right for having lashed out at Trump for his immigration policy and for planning to perform in Spanish, like he usually does in his shows.  Inevitably, many re-state football fans want to know why there hasn't been a country and western performer hasn't been invited to perform at the Super Bowl halftime show for the past twenty years.  Lee Greenwood - 83 years old and known for only one song, the spectacularly unlistenable "God Bless the U.S.A.," which owes its existence to the existence of beer-commercial jingles - has been suggested as a possible substitute.   

Martínez Ocasio has remained undeterred, insulting MAGA Republicans when hosting "Saturday Night Live" in Spanish and telling his detractors to learn the language quickly if they want to know what he said.  The biggest complaint MAGA football fans have with Martínez Ocasio headlining at the Super Bowl is the fact that he is from Puerto Rico, and they are incensed at the idea of a foreigner performing at the Super Bowl.  They had no problem with Rihanna, a Barbadian, or British bands such as the Rolling Stones and Coldplay, or the Irish band U2 performing at the Super Bowl.

You know what's funny?  I'll tell you.  What's funny is that the NFL has actually had any non-American performers at Super Bowl halftime shows when American football is virtually unknown and irrelevant outside the United States.

You know what's even funnier?  MAGA complaining that Martínez Ocasio isn't American when Puerto Rico is a U.S. territory and its inhabitants have been American citizens since 1917.

This, of course, is all just something for me to laugh at, as I am averse to American football and I am a rock and roll fan, thankful that rock has become too culturally and commercially irrelevant to be considered ever again for inclusion in a Super Bowl halftime show.  Because the whole all-American jock ethos represented by American football is everything I imagined rock and roll to be against.

But hip-hop - especially hip-hop performed by a WWE star named after a naughty rabbit - is a perfect fit for the vulgarity of a Super Bowl halftime show.

So, for that matter, is the sort of smarmy contemporary country music represented by Lee Greenwood.