Cannonball with Wesley Morris Bad Bunny and the Art of Protest
Feb 12, 2026
Sasha Weiss, culture editor at The New York Times Magazine and critic, joins to unpack Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl set. They probe sugarcane staging and historical echoes. They debate subtle versus overt protest, camera intimacy, counter-protest gestures, and how pleasure and personal address function as protest in music.
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Invitation As Protest
- Bad Bunny's halftime show functioned as both overt and subtle protest by inviting audiences into his cultural worldview.
- The performance used intimacy and counter-programming to challenge dominant narratives without confrontational rhetoric.
Shrinking The Stage To History And Community
- The show collapsed a vast stage into a specific sugarcane field and a neighborhood party to evoke historical violence and present-day community.
- That shrinking of scale made the political personal and rooted protest in shared joy and fellowship.
Joy As Disarming Strategy
- Bad Bunny balanced historical evocation with joyful, intergenerational celebration to disarm viewers.
- He framed cultural specificity as an inclusive invitation rather than an exclusionary message.
