Trump’s Super Bowl culture war

On the subject of terror-stricken tribes, one might also spare a thought for the high-ups at the National Football League. With Bad Bunny set to appear as the half-time entertainment at Super Bowl LX – at Levi’s Stadium, in Santa Clara, this coming Sunday – you can bet your bottom billion that league commissioner Roger Goodell would have preferred the singing superstar to just thank his parents, his producer and God instead.

As the most profitable sports league in the world, the NFL is one of capitalism’s apex predators. Alienating viewers who remain partial to Donald J Trump is bad for business. 

Although the league reserves final approval of the choice of half-time artist, since 2020, the selection process has been delegated to Jay Z’s company Roc Nation. Details of this year’s booking were announced after Bad Bunny had already spoken out against the orange man in the White House. 

In what might at first have seemed like a drastic sanction, he made it known last September that his blockbusting Debí tirar más fotos world tour would not be visiting the United States. “There was the issue that… ICE could be outside [the venues] and it’s something that we were talking about and very concerned about,” the performer told i-D magazine. 

It goes without saying that the National Football League is not by inclination a hotbed of revolutionary political ferment. As the umbrella body representing the sport’s billionaire class, for one thing, at least five of its 32 team owners are vocal supporters of Donald J Trump (one, Woody Johnson of the hapless New York Jets was UK ambassador in the first Trump administration). Anyone seeking a crash course in the group’s political leanings need look no further than the blacklisting of San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick for taking the knee – at Levi’s Stadium, as it goes – during the singing of the national anthem in 2016. 

A decade later, dissenting voices tend no longer to intone alone. In the arts, certainly, for the first time in half a century, the point has been reached where musicians and performers who fail to speak out are beginning to look complicit. Down at the barricades, the question is being asked: which side are you on? 

As it must, the tone has turned radical. With its references to “King Trump’s private army,” Bruce Springsteen’s new song Streets Of Minneapolis, issued last week, is as trenchant as the MC5 or Gil Scott Heron. Over at the Grammys, meanwhile, Billie Eilish needed just seven words with which to skewer the president’s regime of racial supremacy. “No one is illegal on stolen land,” she said. 

To no one’s surprise, the news of Bad Bunny heading to the Super Bowl saw diapers being filled all over the shop. No sooner had the announcement come than the Trump administration was letting it be known that ICE agents would be present at Levi’s Stadium. 

Meanwhile, the president, who attended last year’s big game, will not be there this time around. Perhaps he will tune out Bad Bunny in favour of the alternative halftime show being staged by the late agitator Charlie Kirk’s far right pressure group Turning Point USA, which will feature performances by Kid Rock and a country singer who once placed third in a TV talent show. 

Perhaps recognising the threat posed by such esteemed competition, last month, the National Football League added Green Day to their Super Bowl roster. As a band who threw their first haymaker at the commander in chief at the American Music Awards a full decade ago – “no war, no KKK, no fascist USA,” went the chant – the presence on the docket of these local punk superstars suggests either that the NFL believes it may as well be hanged for a sheep as for a lamb, or else its vetting department has gone on strike. Either way, the addition is welcome. 

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Come the weekend, of course, watertight contracts might conspire to limit the Great Super Bowl Rebellion to a subtle gesture by Bad Bunny or a sneakily altered line from Billie Joe Armstrong. Worse still, the revolution could be denied the oxygen of publicity by network dump-buttons or a producer cutting to a commercial break. Beyond the imaginations of the romantic and the hopeful, it might not even exist at all. 

But in a corner of America that gave life to such pillars of rebellion as the Black Panthers, Grateful Dead, the City Lights bookstore, and punk groups including the Dead Kennedys and Millions Of Dead Cops, until Sunday at least, the resistance is real.