Super Bowl 60: Grammy winner Bad Bunny’s upcoming halftime performance is a highly anticipated moment to come. The 31-year-old rose to every moment in a monumental year.
Bad Bunny won the Grammy for album of the year a week ago for “Debí Tirar Más Fotos,” a love letter to his native Puerto Rico that was the most streamed release of 2025. It was the first time a Spanish-language album took home the top prize.
Now, Bad Bunny is taking on a show that is already a landmark for Latin American culture by its very existence, the Associated Press reported.
Bad Bunny is set to become the first Latino solo artist to headline a Super Bowl halftime show, as well as the first to perform entirely in Spanish.
Bad Bunny will make history
Bad Bunny, the Puerto Rican superstar born Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio, is one of the most streamed artists on the planet.
Bad Bunny will break a nearly six-year National Football League (NFL) tradition by performing primarily in Spanish when he takes the stage at halftime of the Super Bowl on Sunday, The New York Times reported.
Something similar happens to those who are deaf or hard of hearing, the report says.
It says that instead of offering a halftime stream in American Sign Language, as it usually does every year, the NFL is having the musical act interpreted in Puerto Rican Sign Language, a unique dialect used on the island that academic researchers and other experts believe is endangered.
Puerto Rican Sign Language is not the same as American Sign Language. Celimar Rivera Cosme uniquely captures the rapper’s slang for the play’s deaf audience.
Using LSPR, as Puerto Rican Sign Language is known, deaf fans can experience Bad Bunny’s hits — songs with titles like “Me Porto Bonito” and “Tití Me Preguntó” — as closely as possible to how the singer intended.
The NYT report added that the Bad Bunny show, which will air on NBC, is unlikely to have English subtitles.
“We knew we needed to represent the language and culture played in the show,” Anna Isaacson, the NFL’s senior vice president of social responsibility, said in an email, adding, “ASL and LSPR are not the same thing.”
When is Bad Bunny performing?
Bad Bunny is expected to perform on Sunday, February 8th between 8:00 PM and 8:30 PM ET (5:00 PM – 5:30 PM PT).
He is the first solo artist writing in Spanish to headline a halftime show. The show usually starts 90 minutes after kickoff, which is around 8:00 PM ET.
‘I don’t know how I feel’
Bad Bunny said this week that fans don’t need to learn Spanish to enjoy his set — but they should be ready to dance — in a reference to his “Saturday Night Live” monologue last October.
“To be honest, I don’t know how I feel. There’s a lot going on. I’m still in the middle of my tour. I was just at the Grammys last week. That’s all,” he said in English at an Apple Music press event on Thursday, the AP reported.
“I’m excited, but at the same time, I feel more excited for the people than for me — my family, my friends, the people who have always believed in me,” he said. “The moment, the culture — that’s what makes these shows special,” he said.
