In recent years, Americans have known what to expect from our Neronian Super Bowl halftime shows: mediocre music veneered over with gaudy, flashily lit, but ultimately empty and meaningless sets.
As seen again this year, the usual array of supporting dancers twerk and simulate intercourse, in sync with the main singer, mindlessly grabbing his/her genitals—apparently to highlight the explicit sexual allusions of mostly nonsensical lyrics.
For some strange reason, this Roman orgiastic ritual is supposedly designed by the NFL each year to appeal to American families of all ages as they gather together around the living room TV on their festive cultural holiday.
But the script has now grown predictable and trite. This year’s mess jumped the shark and had a force-multiplying boring effect on one of the most tedious Super Bowl games in history.
The decision to have Bad Bunny as the main attraction to sing solely in Spanish—only 14 percent of the U.S. population is fluent in Spanish, while 90 percent is proficient in English—was apparently designed to grow the NFL’s global audience, particularly in the Western Hemisphere, or perhaps to shock America to get accustomed to its new official multilingual identity.
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