Every year, the Super Bowl tries to show us what we think we look like. Flags, fireworks, familiar faces. But this year, America looks different. Bad Bunny is headlining the Super Bowl halftime show. A Puerto Rican artist, singing in Spanish, with a catalog that smells like krippy kush and coastal heat. When the country tunes in, it won’t just be watching a performance. It will be staring at its own reflection.
For decades, the Super Bowl has been the nation’s most carefully curated moment of self-image: unity, patriotism, spectacle. Yet here comes Benito Martínez Ocasio, global reggaetón icon and the most-streamed artist on earth, a man who once rapped “marihuana y bebida, gozándose la vida como es [marijuana and alcohol, enjoying life as it is],” at the center of the screen. The question isn’t whether America is ready for him. It’s whether America has already become him.
The Smoke and the Silence
Bad Bunny’s catalog is steeped in cannabis culture. Krippy Kush made the slang global. Hoy Cobré featured Snoop Dogg, a joint between generations. Yonaguni ends with “y un blunt.” And Callaíta, his billion-view anthem, turns marihuana y bebida into a mantra of pleasure and autonomy.
But there’s also that old interview clip where he admits he quit smoking years ago. “I like to be clear-minded,” he says. “It didn’t work for me anymore.” It’s honest, almost tender. He separates the plant from the posture. Weed served its season. Then he moved on.
That contradiction (songs that smoke, an artist who doesn’t) isn’t hypocrisy. It’s maturity. Weed was a language he helped normalize. Now he lives the meaning beyond the ritual. In a country still learning to separate culture from criminalization, that’s progress in itself.
America …
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Author: Javier Hasse / High Times
