super bowl 60:Grammy winner Bad Bunny’s upcoming halftime performance is a highly anticipated moment to come. The 31-year-old has been rising to every moment in a monumental year.
A week ago, Bad Bunny won the Grammy for album of the year for “Debí Tirar Más Fotos,” a love letter to his native Puerto Rico that was the most streamed release of 2025. It was the first time an all Spanish-language album had taken home the top prize.
Now, Bad Bunny takes on a performance that by its very existence is a landmark for Latino culture, news agency Associated Press reported.
Bad Bunny is set to become the first Latino solo artist to headline the Super Bowl halftime show, and he’ll also be the first to have an entirely Spanish performance.
Bad Bunny to make history
Bad Bunny, the Puerto Rican superstar born Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio, is one of the most-streamed artists on the planet.
When Bad Bunny takes the stage at halftime of the Super Bowl on Sunday, he will break a nearly six-decade National Football League (NFL) tradition by performing primarily in Spanish, The New York Times reported.
Something similar will happen for those who are deaf or hard of hearing, the report claimed.
It said that instead of offering a stream of the halftime performance in American Sign Language, as it typically does each year, the NFL is having the musical act interpreted into Puerto Rican Sign Language – a unique dialect used on the island that academic researchers and other experts consider endangered.
Puerto Rican Sign Language is not the same as American Sign Language. Celimar Rivera Cosme will uniquely capture the rapper’s slang for the game’s deaf viewers.
By using LSPR, as Puerto Rican Sign Language is known, deaf fans can experience Bad Bunny’s hits — songs with titles such as “Me Porto Bonito” and “Tití Me Preguntó” — as close as possible to how the singer intended.
The NYT report added that Bad Bunny’s performance, which will air on NBC, is not likely to be subtitled in English.
“We knew we needed to be representative of the language and culture being performed in the show,” Anna Isaacson, the NFL’s senior vice president of social responsibility, said in an email, adding, “ASL and LSPR are not the same.”
When does Bad Bunny perform
Bad Bunny’s performance is expected to be between 8:00 pm and 8:30 pm ET (5:00 pm – 5:30 pm PT) on Sunday, February 8.
He is the first solo Spanish-language artist to headline the halftime show. Performance normally starts 90 minutes after kickoff, which is around 8:00 pm ET.
‘I don’t know how I’m feeling’
Bad Bunny said this week that fans didn’t need to learn Spanish to enjoy his set — but they should be prepared to dance — a reference to his “Saturday Night Live” monologue from last October.
“To be honest, I don’t know how I’m feeling. There’s a lot. I’m still in the middle of my tour. I was just at the Grammys last week. All of that,” he said in English on Thursday at a press event hosted by Apple Music, AP reported.
“I’m excited, but at the same time, I feel more excited about the people than even me — my family, my friends, the people who have always believed in me,” he said. “This moment, the culture — that’s what makes these shows special,” he was quoted as saying.
