The Turning Point USA All American Half Time show was a smashing success. Millions of people tuned in to watch the nation's first alternative half time show. The plan to have the show was announced by Jack Posobiec after the NFL revealed that Puerto Rican trap performer Bad Bunny would headline the Super Bowl Half Time Show. No, Jack hadn't cleared it with Turning Point before making the announcement on X, but the team pulled it off anyway and while more than 6 million people were watching as it aired, it's since racked up some 25 million views.
The show opened with Posobiec welcoming everyone in before an electric guitar rendition of the Star Spangled Banner a la Jimmy Hendrix. Performances by Kid Rock, Brantley Gilbert, Lee Brice and Gabby Barrett rounded out the spectacular with Kid Rock adding a new verse for Charlie Kirk. This is the first time something like this has been accomplished and the fact that it was a huge success is a testament to how divided our country is culturally. Lots of Americans—more than 6 million, to be exact—were tired of being fed a constant diet of leftist cultural offerings. People really responded to the new half time event, and those who didn't stuck with Bad Bunny.
Bad Bunny's half time show was entirely in Spanish, which made it tough for many people to follow, especially if you're not super into trap music, which let's face it, many of us are not. English is the lingua franca in the United States. There are many millions of people who speak their native language as well as English, and that's a far greater number than the population who just speaks Spanish or speaks Spanish and English. Chinese Americans, Korean Americans, Armenian Americans, Russian Americans, Brazilian Americans, Haitian Americans, and countless others couldn't understand it either.
They call the Super Bowl Half Time Show the biggest stage in music, but for lots of people, it just fell flat. It was more like Hispanic fan service than a cultural event for all of America. Looking back at some of the best Super Bowl Half Time Show performances brings us face to face with some of the greatest talent the nation has to offer: Prince, Ella Fitzgerald, George Burns, Chubby Checker and The Rockettes, Michael Jackson, Clint Black and The Judds, Diana Ross, The Blues Brothers, The Temptations, U2, Paul McCartney, Madonna, Beyonce, and so many others.
Bad Bunny isn't even in the top 20 and his performance, which some are calling a love letter to Puerto Rico, was in a language most of the lifelong NFL fans couldn't understand. There was also a language of symbols in the performance, which may have been just as confusing. There were messages about colonialism and resistance. Bad Bunny used a maze of sugarcane fields, which Puerto Ricans say were used as a tool of American oppression, and people wearing traditional pava hats. The coco frio was about the island "resisting" the cultural imperialism of Coca-Cola. A New York City bodega was one of the sets, and it had a "we accept EBT" sign in the window. The use of power lines symbolized the ongoing power crisis in Puerto Rico, a US territory.
The performance may have been about reclaiming and preserving Puerto Rican culture, created with influences from European, indigenous, and American culture, but it reclaimed it on American music's biggest stage and it did it at the expense of the shared culture of the American people. Puerto Rican and Hispanic culture isn't shared, it's niche. So many of the images and references in the Bad Bunny extravaganza were unknown to American audiences and Americans, who for years have been told that the ephemera of other cultures does not belong to Americans, know they can never be part of that culture, all they can do is watch it.
That's not what we saw with the TPUSA All-American Half Time Show. I'm not even a country fan but these performances welcome, open, not couched in symbols about how awful America is. Instead, the performances, and the existence of the show itself, celebrated American culture and Americans. It said "we don't have to constantly watch and listen as people who benefit from the greatness of America slander America to her face." The show was another step in the parallel economy and parallel culture that emerged over the past several years to buck the trend of America hatred that's flooded our cultural airwaves.
It's been over a decade since Americans have received shared culture in a shared way. When television fractured into cable, we began to lose cohesive culture, but when cable fractured into streaming services, Oscar nominated movies and Grammy nominated albums were only viewed by a fraction of the population, and conservatives were awakened by Covid to the rifts in shared values, the divide came shockingly into focus.
The TPUSA All-American Half Time Show was not a culmination but a beginning. Americans don't have to accept the cultural offerings that are handed to them, or all too often shoved down their throats. This should remind every American, all of us, that we can just do things. If you don't like the state of play, break the rules, make new ones, take a page from a past Super Bowl Half Time Show sensation and "express yourself."
