Arts & Entertainment
Super Bowl Halftime Performers on Making History With Bad Bunny
Latin American culture was on full display on Super Bowl Sunday with Bad Bunny’s historic halftime show. The artist, Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio, was the first solo Latino halftime headliner, and the show was almost entirely comprised of Spanish-language music.
The performance averaged more than 128 million viewers and was praised for celebrating Puerto Rican culture and Latinidad at a time when many Latino communities in the U.S. are being targeted in the Trump administration’s nationwide immigration crackdown.
The show also received some criticism.
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President Donald Trump on social media called the performance “the worst ever.” And two Republican members of Congress called for an investigation into the NFL, dubbing the performance “pure smut.”
Among the 700 performers on the field with Bad Bunny were Lyrik Cruz and Giancarlo Guerrero, two Latino artists with Chicago connections. They joined “Chicago Tonight” to reflect on sharing their culture on one of the largest platforms in the world.
From Humboldt Park to the Super Bowl
When asked about the conservative backlash, dancer, choreographer and creative director Lyrik Cruz said, “To be honest, I do keep an ear open, yes, but there is nothing that can take away what this moment was meant to be and what it ended up being.”
The Chicago-born Humboldt Park native was one of hundreds of dancers brought on to perform with Bad Bunny and Lady Gaga.
For Cruz, the moment marked a highlight in his career, one that he believes is a culmination of decades of practice.
Before performing at the Super Bowl, Cruz choreographed and taught routines for almost every song that appeared on Bad Bunny’s “Debí Tirar Más Fotos” album — simply for the love of the music and the rich history behind it.
“Once he announced in September that he was doing the Super Bowl, you know, from that moment, just internally and with my agents, I was like, I need to find out who’s going to be doing this, and I want to be involved to whatever capacity, even if it is just waving a flag back and forth,” Cruz said.
For the first time since he was in his 30s, 45-year-old Cruz signed up for what he called “a cattle audition.”
He received an email on Jan. 7 confirming he was booked for the Super Bowl and “needless to say that I f---ing lost my brain cells at that point,” Cruz said. “You know at 45, never did I think that my Super Bowl dream would have become a reality.”
Cruz said tears came to his eyes at the start of the halftime show when the cuatro, a Puerto Rican guitar, was played. Seeing Puerto Rican culture take center stage with reverence for the people’s history was something he described as “community healing.”
From Classical Music to Reggaeton
For Giancarlo Guerrero, the artistic director and principal conductor of Chicago’s Grant Park Music Festival, performing at the Super Bowl was “definitely very different, unlike anything I’ve ever done and I think anything I will ever do in the future.”
The six-time Grammy Award-winning conductor thought it was a joke when he first heard that Bad Bunny wanted him for the show.
“But very quickly I realized that it was not a joke and I had to basically decide whether I wanted to be part of it, which was very easy,” Guerrero said.
This was not Guerrero’s first time playing in genres different than his own. Although he’s trained in classical music, he has collaborated with all sorts of musicians in genres like jazz and rock.
“Music is the universal language,” Guerrero said. “And something what I admire about Benito Bad Bunny is the fact that he’s not stuck in just one style.”
Guerrero recalled conversations with Bad Bunny in which the artist said he admired the sound of a live string orchestra over a synthesizer.
On the halftime stage, Guerrero said, he saw artists from all over the world with different backgrounds. He spoke with dancers, musicians and even the people in grass suits that made up the set.
“Music is the most important part, regardless of who’s performing and what type and what language,” Guerrero said. “It’s music that unites us. It’s the universal language, and I think all of us in our field are going to be forever grateful for that.”
Guerrero started his career when he joined the Costa Rican youth orchestra as a percussionist. Exposure to the genre changed his life.
“To me, the message altogether is that all music is fantastic and all music needs to be celebrated regardless of where you come from,” Guerrero said. He added that “urban music or salsa or reggaeton has the same impact as classical music — in the end — it reaches out. It exposes people the way I was exposed to.”
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