Everyone on the planet may smell like stale Budweiser and crumbled Fritos while watching the Super Bowl, but Bad Bunny doesn’t care. In a new trailer for his halftime show performance, he’s making a promise: “The world will dance.”
The clip shows the artist wandering through a surrealistic neon landscape (it’s Puerto Rico, note the Flamboyant tree), until he pulls up his own song using Apple Music on his iPhone (ibid) to play “Baille Inovidable.” The cover art for the single is just a couple of lawn chairs with nobody in them in a similarly colorful landscape, but that’s neither here nor there because in this world, the world in which everybody will dance, dancers spin like tops out of the darkness one by one to shake Bad Bunny from his stoicism as soon as he cranks his own song on Apple Music. Soon, he’s dancing (and smiling), too.
The dancers are women and men. They’re old and young. One father even holds his child while dancing with Mr. Bunny. Most notably, the dancers are racially diverse. The decision to make a video like this is clearly a subtle rebuke of the Trump administration, which has threatened to send ICE agents to the Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara, California, where the Super Bowl will take place. The message of Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl performance is unity (the message of Bad Bunny in general, really) and it begins with this trailer.
Last year, Bad Bunny, who released the album of the year, revealed he’d skipped touring the United States over worries related to how the Trump administration had treated Latinos. “There was the issue of — like, fucking ICE could be outside [my concert],” he said. “And it’s something that we were talking about and very concerned about.”
Everyone has always been welcome at Bad Bunny’s concerts, but now that he’s playing the United States’ biggest concert, he’s driving that message home with this trailer.
