Where We Stand When the Music Ends
Listening is not passive.
Long after the lights dim and the cameras cut away, music lingers in the body. In energy, in memory, in the internal realizations of how we understand one another. History has never been shaped by people who heard music and remained untouched by it. The songs that endure - spirituals, protest songs, hymns carried across oceans, rhythms born from labor and migration - do more than entertain. They ask us to decide who we are when the performance is over, and how we will live alongside one another once the applause fades.
That question returned to me while watching the halftime show. Who are we when the performance is over?
The field did not look like a football field anymore. Sugarcane rose where yard lines should have been, and dancers moved through it with an ease that felt less like choreography and more like memory - a reminder that culture is not invented for spectacle but carried forward through bodies, through work, through generations. For a moment, the stadium felt relocated somewhere else, somewhere already alive with history and movement but rarely centered in mainstream American storytelling. And did you see that the “grass” were people?! Amazing artistic decision to keep the feel in tact despite Superbowl restrictions.
Bad Bunny stood in the middle of it, singing entirely in Spanish. No translation. No apology. Presence.
Almost immediately, the reactions divided along familiar lines.
Some viewers described feeling moved without fully knowing why; others questioned whether a performance delivered in a language they did not understand belonged on such a stage. The conversation quickly became less about music itself and more about who is allowed to define what feels accessible, familiar, or American.
Yet what stayed with me was quieter than the arguments - the way music can place us inside another culture without asking us to master it first.
As a music therapist, I have watched this unfold countless times. Someone responds emotionally to a song whose lyrics they cannot translate. A melody lands before meaning arrives. Rhythm reaches the nervous system before the analytical mind has time to evaluate. A person who cannot follow the words still feels held by the sound.
We live with this reality more often than we admit. Audiences attend operas sung in Italian or German and surrender to the emotional arc without fluency. Gregorian chant continues to resonate across centuries, even when the language feels distant from modern speech. Old hymns carried in Latin remain sacred for listeners who do not understand every phrase. Many of us work to lo-fi instrumental playlists with no lyrics at all, allowing texture and tone to shape our focus and labor landscape. Film scores swell beneath stories we experience viscerally long before we could explain their structure. Jazz improvisation communicates through breath, phrasing, and relational listening rather than literal translation. We know jazz has been controversial…
Music has never depended solely on language. It speaks through movement, memory, and shared feeling - through what we recognize in ourselves even when we cannot name it.
What unfolded during the halftime show was not only a performance but a vision. Flags from across the Americas moved together across the field - not arranged hierarchically but held side by side - suggesting a hemisphere bound by histories that intersect whether we acknowledge them or not. Beneath the choreography was a message that felt both simple and deeply urgent: love over hate, connection over division.
The halftime show has always served as a cultural mirror. Prince’s (2007) rain-soaked performance, Beyoncé’s (2013/2016) unapologetic presence, Shakira and Jennifer Lopez (2020) bringing bilingual identity into the center of a global broadcast - again and again, audiences have been asked to decide whether unfamiliar expression feels like expansion or threat.
Bad Bunny’s performance felt less like a challenge than an invitation: to experience culture without needing it to reshape itself into something familiar first.
There is something revealing about our instinct to judge art based on immediate comprehension. When we say, “I don’t get it,” we often mean that we do not recognize ourselves within it yet.
But music is not obligated to center every listener equally. Sometimes its work is to widen the frame - to ask us to sit inside a perspective that does not revolve around our own.
In therapeutic spaces, discomfort often signals possibility. A client may resist a song initially - unfamiliar language, unfamiliar rhythm - only to find that staying present long enough transforms resistance into curiosity. Listening becomes less about control and more about relationship.
I have always loved music across genres and cultures, not because it is always comfortable, but because it reveals something innate about being human.
Some music unsettles me. Some leaves me unmoved. Some feels like home in ways I cannot fully articulate. That range is not a failure of taste; it is evidence that music is doing its work honestly.
And yet listening does not exist outside of context.
The reactions surrounding this halftime show revealed deeper tensions - not only disagreements about art but competing visions of belonging.
We are living in a moment when rhetoric from positions of power has grown sharper, more divisive, and at times openly dehumanizing, language that reduces people to caricature or frames cultural difference as threat rather than richness.
When leaders speak this way, the effects ripple outward, shaping how communities perceive one another and how younger generations learn who is welcome within the story of a nation.
Music cannot solve these tensions on its own. But it can illuminate them.
What unfolded on that field offered a different vision - one rooted not in exclusion but in shared humanity across borders, languages, and histories. A reminder that unity is not sameness, and that connection does not require complete understanding.
The halftime show will fade, replaced by another artist and another debate. What remains is the question it leaves behind: how we choose to listen to one another when language feels unfamiliar, when culture feels new, when the story being told does not center us.
