Lady Gaga’s Appearance at Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl LX Halftime Show Was Cultural Appreciation

Wayne “Big Sarge” Ince

media Unsplash

Introduction: The Stage, the Moment, and the Misfire of Outrage

After reviewing other articles and various comments, I felt compelled to write this piece. Additionally, an overwhelming amount of social media content about the Super Bowl 60 halftime show has become a significant distraction, bordering on the absurd. For instance, why are individuals on the right becoming so agitated, such as in the Megyn Kelly meltdown, with casual MAGA supporters focusing more on 13 minutes of Spanish singing than on the Epstein files and the illicit activities of a convicted sex trafficker and his associates?

 If someone is involved in the file and has connections to Epstein, questions will need to be addressed. This isn’t just about politics and people disagreeing, because Bill Clinton got impeached for messing around with a staffer in the White House. Thus, why would the Justice Department assert that adhering to the law and investigating serious allegations would “collapse the government”?

The problem isn’t concerns about the game, the halftime performance, or Latin music; rather, it’s the resistance to embracing America’s diverse culture and the persistent promotion of a narrowly defined, exclusionary form of American identity. It’s fascinating when people respond with Bad Bunny’s proclamation of love, and how it powerfully counters the false idea that hate is somehow reserved.

By making it legal for ICE to racially profile (https://www.npr.org/2025/09/13/nx-s1-5507125/the-supreme-court-clears-the-way-for-ice-agents-to-treat-race-as-grounds-for-immigration-stops) Americans, the Supreme Court majority is doing the White House’s bidding. So, Bad Bunny’s performance during Super Bowl 60 halftime included a powerful rendition of a traditional Latin American song. He used the platform, much like Kendrick Lamar did last year at the Super Bowl, to highlight issues of racial injustice and call for unity among diverse communities. This act of singing in Spanish served not only as a cultural expression but also as a form of resistance against policies that disproportionately target minority groups. You know like taking a knee.

A reminder Puerto Rico needs infrastructure and aid, not white fury over a language that displays America’s rich diversity. Let that sink in - ICE regularly stops, detains, and interrogates brown and black citizens, and MAGA are fine with that but are upset that an American performed in Spanish at a sporting event for approximately 20 minutes. That is a proverbial slingshot to the forehead for anyone on the Red Hat moral high ground.

Don’t Shoot the Messenger

The anxiety about white supremacy being undermined, and the common practice of denigrating Americans with slightly darker skin or non-European features. Trump’s presidency fueled racism, and many MAGA folks and their silent supporters see the push against “wokeness” as a fight they need to win. They had to use a phrase for civil rights and then act on it because they didn’t have their own word. Black conservative consultants especially in Florida working for Gov. Ron Desantis (remember the slavery was job-training debacle) helped market and manage the use of adopted terminology by sharing their knowledge, and this was a factor.

Love’s strength will always conquer hate. Preventing your child from befriending another child because of their skin color, language, or how they look is a form of cultural exclusion and damage. This shows that some parents from white majority backgrounds wish to pass on Christian family values to their children, and they may do so (attend a parent-teacher association or school board meeting to witness these appeals).

Although both football and stock car racing are dangerous, it’s important to recognize that the “forceful collisions” in football are fundamental to the sport’s strategic depth and the athleticism it requires. Yet, opponents claim that the routine depiction of such violence, particularly when examined alongside societal fears concerning the protection of children from purportedly “damaging” contact with minority groups, demonstrates a troubling lack of fairness.

According to this perspective, our entertainment choices emphasize physical danger at the expense of fostering social growth and understanding, which in turn raises ethical questions about our values and the influence on younger generations. That’s why I’m like, stop with over-the-top whitesplaining of football and American culture as if America is exclusionary.

We get it (or at least my small circle, and I do), Megyn Kelly and Charlie Kirk’s widow. You don’t need to hide behind “great replacement theory,y” so simply state what you really mean instead of code words. You may not want your daughters and sons to interact with non-whites, but it is limiting their social growth due to protection or your insecurity and personal prejudices.

I received many social media comments on a post that said “Love conquers hate,” with the comment “so prove it.” My response, “What?” But yet that babble proliferates, and my marginal writing is gatekept, and black military commanders are quietly fired - it happened again the other day without fanfare outside the military community.

Let’s recap the SuperBowl

On February 8, 2026, Bad Bunny—born Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio—delivered a thirteen-minute halftime performance at Super Bowl LX that was immediately recognized as a watershed in American popular culture. Fresh off a historic Album of the Year win at the Grammy Awards, the Puerto Rican superstar transformed the fifty-yard line at Levi’s Stadium into a living mural of his island’s heritage: sugarcane fields, a neighborhood vecindad complete with a barber shop and domino tables, the iconic casita, piragua vendors, and a pulsing salsa orchestra. Flags from every nation in the Americas paraded across the field. A real couple exchanged wedding vows at midfield. And in a moment that distilled the show’s entire ethos—love as the antidote to division—a young boy clutching Bad Bunny’s Grammy statuette stared into the camera while the scoreboard behind him read: “The only thing more powerful than hate is love.”

Among the surprise guests who emerged from the casita was Lady Gaga, who performed a salsa-inflected rendition of her hit “Die With a Smile” before dancing with Bad Bunny to “Baile Inolvidable.” She wore a baby-blue Luar dress with red heels and a pair of flor de maga—the national flower of Puerto Rico—pinned to her chest. The moment was joyful, brief, and deliberate. And yet, immediately, a segment of the online discourse declared it an act of cultural appropriation, arguing that a non-Latina pop star had no business performing in a salsa arrangement during a celebration of Latino identity. Some suggested that Latina artists like Karol G or Young Miko, who were already present inside the casita, should have taken the musical spotlight instead.

I believe that the criticism was not only misplaced but represents a fundamental misunderstanding of what cultural appropriation actually is—a misunderstanding that, if left uncorrected, cheapens the term and blunts its power in the very moments when it is genuinely needed. Through the lens of critical social relativism and by examining well-documented instances of actual cultural appropriation in the entertainment industry, I want to draw a clear distinction between the exploitative extraction of marginalized cultural expression and the invited, mutually celebratory exchange that occurred on that stage in Santa Clara.

Breaking Ranks Books

I. Defining the Line: What Cultural Appropriation Actually Requires

The term “cultural appropriation” has become so reflexively deployed in American discourse that its analytical precision has eroded. Scholars, including Linda Martín Alcoff, have defined the concept as the adoption of cultural elements by members of a dominant group from a subordinated culture, particularly when those elements are trivialized, commodified, or stripped of their original meaning. The critical distinction—one that the Lady Gaga detractors largely failed to make—lies between appropriation and exchange. Appropriation is characterized by a power asymmetry in which the borrower profits from or trivializes cultural expressions while the originating community receives nothing in return, or worse, continues to face marginalization for those same expressions. Exchange, by contrast, occurs within a framework of mutual consent, respect, and reciprocity.

I understand that some readers may mistake their personal feelings for objective truths, adopting an “I feel what I feel, regardless of what you say” stance, and that’s perfectly acceptable. This reflects contemporary discussion, predating the Russian information warfare efforts that planted the seeds of current disinformation and fabricated news, which have since blossomed into the present-day divisions of “right-wing” and “left-wing” narratives.

What happened at Super Bowl LX was unambiguously the latter. Bad Bunny—the headliner, the creative architect, the person with absolute control over every element of his show—personally invited Lady Gaga to participate. He choreographed the moment. His band played the salsa arrangement. His stage, his cultural narrative, his terms. Gaga did not insert herself into Latino culture uninvited; she was welcomed onto a stage that a Puerto Rican artist had designed as a love letter to his people, and she arrived dressed in garments that honored that heritage down to the national flower on her chest. The agency, at every level, remained with the culture being celebrated.

Moreover, the relationship between Bad Bunny and Lady Gaga is not incidental or transactional. Since at least 2020, Bad Bunny has publicly expressed deep admiration for Gaga’s artistry and cultural impact. He wore her Chromatica merchandise while voting in Puerto Rico’s gubernatorial election. He cited her music as a source of comfort during his lowest moments. He credited drag choreography rooted in Gaga’s catalog as part of his creative development. When Gaga took the stage at the Super Bowl, she did so as someone whose work had genuinely shaped the headliner’s artistic identity—an arc that began in a young man’s admiration from Bayamón and culminated on the biggest stage in American sports. To reduce that arc to “a white woman singing salsa where she doesn’t belong” is to deny Bad Bunny his own creative agency and flatten a nuanced artistic relationship into a crude racial checklist.

II. What Appropriation Actually Looks Like: Case Studies in Extraction

To understand why the criticism of Lady Gaga misses the mark, it is instructive to examine instances where cultural appropriation has been rightly identified and condemned—cases that share none of the collaborative, consent-based characteristics of the Super Bowl performance.

Iggy Azalea and the Commodification of Black and South Asian Identity. The Australian rapper Iggy Azalea became a lightning rod for appropriation discourse, and deservedly so. Her music video for “Bounce” opened on an Indian urban neighborhood before presenting Azalea in traditional Hindu wedding attire and a bindi—a spiritual symbol representing awakening in Hindu practice—while performing rap music in an adopted African American Southern dialect. The layered offense was not merely aesthetic. Azalea built a commercial persona on what critics described as a “blaccent,” adopting a vocal identity associated with Black American women in her music while reverting to her natural Australian accent in interviews. As Africology scholar Timothy Welbeck (https://liberalarts.temple.edu/directory/timothy-welbeck) observed, the disconnect was stark: a performer extracting sonic Blackness for profit while bearing none of the social burden that comes with actually being Black in America. No one from either the African American or Hindu communities invited or endorsed this performance. The cultural material was taken, decontextualized, and monetized.

Katy Perry’s Geisha Performance at the 2013 AMAs. When Katy Perry took the American Music Awards stage in full geisha costume—kimono, white face paint, and a choreography of bowing and fan-waving backup dancers—the backlash was swift and warranted. The performance reduced a centuries-old Japanese artistic tradition to a costume change, deploying its visual markers for spectacle while demonstrating no meaningful engagement with the culture those markers represent. No Japanese artists were involved in the creative process. No Japanese cultural voices were amplified. Perry’s geisha was a prop, not a person—an Orientalist fantasy projected onto an awards show stage for the benefit of a pop singer’s brand of calculated shock value.

Pharrell Williams and the Commercialization of Sacred Hindu Practice. When Pharrell Williams partnered with Adidas to create a clothing line inspired by Holi—the Hindu festival of colors—the criticism centered on a valid, specific complaint: a sacred religious ceremony was being repurposed as a commercial aesthetic. The spiritual significance of Holi, its roots in Hindu theology and community devotion, was flattened into a colorful marketing campaign designed to sell sneakers and sportswear. Similarly, Williams posed for the cover of Elle UK wearing a Native American headdress—a sacred object in many Indigenous traditions—as though it were a fashion accessory. In neither case was the originating community consulted, compensated, or centered. A figure operating from a position of economic and social power extracted the cultural material for commercial gain.

Miley Cyrus and the Performance of Disposable Blackness. Miley Cyrus’s “Bangerz” era remains one of the most studied cases of cultural appropriation in recent pop history. Having been raised as a Disney child star, Cyrus abruptly pivoted to hip-hop aesthetics—dreadlocks, cornrows, grillz, twerking—and populated her performances and music videos with Black women whose bodies served as background scenery to her own provocative reinvention. Music critic Jody Rosen wrote at the time that Cyrus was leveraging the sexual symbolism of Black female bodies for her own commercial transformation. When the shock value of that persona was exhausted, Cyrus returned to her country roots, shedding the Black cultural signifiers as easily as a costume. The disposability of the appropriation was the point: Blackness was something to try on and discard at will, a rebellious phase rather than a lived reality.

Gwen Stefani and the Harajuku Girls. For her 2004 solo album Love. Angel. Music. Baby., Gwen Stefani employed four Japanese and Japanese American women as silent, costumed accessories who accompanied her in public and in promotional materials. Dubbed the “Harajuku Girls,” they were styled after a Japanese youth fashion subculture and presented as living props—mute, ornamental, and entirely subordinate to Stefani’s commercial brand. When confronted with the criticism years later, Stefani dismissed it: “There’s always going to be two sides to everything. You can look at it from a negative point of view if you want to, but get off my cloud.” The dismissal was as instructive as the offense itself: a refusal to engage with the power dynamics at play, a refusal to see the human beings who had been reduced to decorative objects in service of someone else’s creative vision.

III. The Critical Difference: Consent, Context, and Creative Agency

What connects the cases above is a consistent pattern: unilateral extraction of cultural material by a figure from a dominant culture, without the consent or creative involvement of the originating community, in a context where the cultural material is trivialized, commodified, or reduced to spectacle. Apply those criteria to Lady Gaga’s performance at Super Bowl LX and the comparison collapses at every point of contact.

Consent: Bad Bunny invited her. He has spoken publicly about his admiration for her. She did not petition to be included in a Latino cultural moment; she was asked to join one by its architect. As Gaga herself wrote afterward: “Thank you, Benito, for including me in this powerful, important, and meaningful performance.”

Context: The performance took place in a show that was entirely controlled by and centered on Puerto Rican culture and identity. Gaga did not headline. She did not redirect the cultural narrative toward herself. She occupied a supporting role in someone else’s story, performing a salsa arrangement prepared by Bad Bunny’s band, wearing a dress designed by Luar—a Puerto Rican fashion label—and adorned with Puerto Rico’s national flower. The cultural framing remained firmly in Puerto Rican hands.

Creative Agency: Unlike Katy Perry’s geisha or Stefani’s Harajuku Girls, Gaga’s appearance amplified rather than displaced the cultural voice at the center of the performance. The moment did not exist to serve Gaga’s brand; it existed to demonstrate that the celebration Bad Bunny was offering was generous, inclusive, and open—a party to which everyone was welcome, provided they came with respect. As Bad Bunny told the crowd: “Dance without fear, speak without fear.”

There is a profound irony in the suggestion that Gaga’s presence somehow diminished the performance's Latinidad. The entire political project of Bad Bunny’s halftime show was about inclusion—about asserting that Puerto Rican culture is American culture, that Spanish-language music belongs on the biggest stage in American entertainment, and that love and unity are stronger than the nativist forces seeking to erase Latino identity from public life. To then police who may take part in that celebration based on ethnicity is to replicate the very exclusionary logic the show rejected.

IV. Critical Social Relativism and the Cost of Misapplied Outrage

Critical social relativism asks us to evaluate cultural practices and exchanges within their specific social, historical, and power-dynamic contexts rather than applying rigid, decontextualized rules. It is a framework that insists on nuance—and the Lady Gaga controversy is precisely the case where a failure of nuance does real damage.

America in February 2026 is a nation in which the Department of Homeland Security’s secretary threatened to deploy Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents to the Super Bowl. A nation in which a conservative activist organization staged an “alternative halftime show” headlined by Kid Rock because the actual headliner was Puerto Rican. A nation in which the President of the United States called the selection of the most-streamed artist on the planet “ridiculous” and claimed not to know who he was. A nation in which a five-year-old child was reportedly detained by immigration authorities. In this political landscape, Bad Bunny’s halftime show was not merely a concert. It was an act of cultural defiance—a refusal to shrink, to code-switch, to translate for comfort. He performed entirely in Spanish on the year's most-watched television broadcast and closed by singing “God Bless America” while naming every country in the Americas.

Within that context, Lady Gaga—one of the most commercially successful and culturally influential artists in the United States—dancing salsa in a Puerto Rican-designed dress and singing in a salsa arrangement at the invitation of a Puerto Rican headliner carries a specific and powerful message: this culture is not something to be feared, excluded, or othered. It is something to be celebrated, take part in, and embrace. Gaga’s appearance did not dilute the performance's Latinidad; it showed that the world’s biggest pop stars are eager to enter the Puerto Rican cultural space on Puerto Rican terms. That is not appropriation. That is the opposite of appropriation. That is cultural power.

When we deploy the language of cultural appropriation indiscriminately—when we apply it to an invited guest at a celebration with the same fervor we apply it to a pop star donning sacred garments for shock value—we dilute the concept’s moral authority. We make it easier for actual appropriators to dismiss legitimate criticism as performative outrage. We hand ammunition to the very cultural gatekeepers who weaponized accusations of “political correctness” to avoid reckoning with genuine harm. In a nation as divided as this one, the precision of our moral vocabulary matters. Every misapplied accusation of appropriation makes the next legitimate accusation harder to land.

V. The Message on the Football

At the close of his performance, Bad Bunny held up a football. Written on the pigskin were words that also appeared on the stadium’s scoreboard: “Together, we are America.” It was a statement directed at the 128 million people watching, and at a political establishment that had spent weeks delegitimizing his presence on that stage. Together. Not separately. Not sorted by ethnicity or language or national origin into approved categories of cultural participation.

Lady Gaga understood this. “Thank you Benito for including me,” she wrote. “I am so humbled to be a part of this moment.” The language is deliberate: including, humbled, a part of. Not centering herself. Not claiming the culture. Participating, gratefully, in a celebration to which she was warmly invited by the man whose culture it was to share.

The true appropriators of this story were never on the field. They were the politicians who denied the legitimacy of a Puerto Rican artist headlining an American tradition. They were the cultural commentators who insisted that a mostly Spanish-language performance was somehow un-American. They were the architects of a system that simultaneously extracts the labor and cultural vitality of Latino communities while threatening to deport the people who sustain them. That is appropriation at a scale that dwarfs any pop music controversy—the appropriation of an entire national identity, “American,” and its violent restriction to a single language, a single shade, a single story.

Bad Bunny’s halftime show was the corrective. Lady Gaga dancing salsa inside it did not contradict that correction. It was its proof of concept. A world in which a Puerto Rican artist can invite a global pop icon to dance on his stage, on his terms, in his language, wearing his island’s flower—and 128 million people watch—is a world in which cultural appropriation’s victims are winning. Not because their culture has been taken, but because it has been offered and received with the grace it deserves.

Sources Consulted

• Berklee Online. “Cultural Appropriation in Music.” Take Note, October 2025.

• CBS Sports. “2026 Super Bowl Halftime Show Takeaways: Bad Bunny’s Set List Was a Cultural Game Changer.” February 2026.

• Cornell University, Feminist, Gender and Sexuality Studies. “Gwen Stefani Is Only the Latest Glaring Example of Cultural Appropriation in Pop Music.”

• Deadline. “Bad Bunny Tan Bueno in Historic Super Bowl Halftime Show.” February 2026.

• E! Online. “Lady Gaga Speaks Out About ‘Meaningful’ Appearance at Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl Halftime Show.” February 2026.

• Elle. “Lady Gaga Has a Heartfelt Public Message for Bad Bunny.” February 2026.

• Newsweek. “Bad Bunny’s Long History With Lady Gaga, Explained.” February 2026.

• NPR. “Cultural Appropriation in Pop Music: When Are Artists in the Wrong?” February 2016.

• Parade. “Why Lady Gaga’s Super Bowl Performance Didn’t Sit Right with Fans.” February 2026.

• Reader’s Digest. “10 Examples of Cultural Appropriation You Haven’t Thought About.” August 2025.

• Rolling Stone. “Bad Bunny Makes History at the Super Bowl with Puerto Rican Pride.” February 2026.

• Rolling Stone. “Lady Gaga ‘Wouldn’t Have Missed’ Chance to Join Bad Bunny.” February 2026.

• Slate. “Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl Halftime Show Had a Deeper Meaning.” February 2026.

• The Fader. “Music’s 8 Most Cringe-Worthy Acts of Cultural Appropriation in 2014.” December 2014.

• The Temple News. “How to Separate Cultural Appreciation, Appropriation in Music.” July 2019.

• Variety. “Bad Bunny Stuns the Super Bowl with Lady Gaga, Ricky Martin and a Real Wedding Ceremony.” February 2026.

• Variety. “Lady Gaga Says Bad Bunny Super Bowl Halftime Show Was ‘Absolute Honor.’” February 2026.

• Vice. “Bad Bunny and Lady Gaga’s Friendship Goes Back Way Further Than the Super Bowl.” February 2026.