The cultural stakes of the Super Bowl halftime show, from Madonna to Bad Bunny

For about 12 minutes each year, the Super Bowl becomes something more than a football game. It turns into one of the most powerful cultural stages in the world - a compressed spectacle where music, branding, politics and identity converge in front of a massive global audience. Long after the final score fades, those minutes are replayed, debated and absorbed into public memory.

For Joanna Love, those moments are not just entertainment. They offer a window into how American culture negotiates power and belonging in real time.

A UCLA alumna and associate professor of music at the University of Richmond, Love is completing a book that examines Super Bowl halftime shows, along with the expanding musical ecosystem around them, as cultural flashpoints. Her work traces how the NFL's carefully cultivated image of "America," built around patriotism, national unity and a historically male-dominated audience, frequently collides with artists whose music brings its own audiences, histories and meanings onto the field.

"You insert these musical moments that are their own spectacles," Love said. "It's when they collide with the Super Bowl's brand and broadcast that they become incendiary."

This year's halftime show, headlined by Bad Bunny, sparked familiar pregame debate. Despite being one of the most-streamed artists in the world, his selection has prompted commentary about language, identity and what constitutes a "mainstream" American performer. For Love, that reaction reflects a long-standing tension at the heart of the event.

"The Super Bowl is still one of the last truly appointment-based programs," she said. "People stop what they're doing to watch it together, in real time, even if they're tuning in just for the commercials or the halftime show."

Love's scholarly interest in halftime shows began unexpectedly while she was a graduate student at UCLA's Herb Alpert School of Music. She recalls watching Madonna's 2012 halftime performance while writing about the singer's infamous 1989 Pepsi commercial, research that later became part of her book "Soda Goes Pop: Pepsi-Cola Advertising and Popular Music."

That moment, Love said, was quietly subversive. The camp theatricality of Madonna's "Vogue" performance brought queer aesthetics onto one of television's most mainstream stages. More strikingly, Madonna performed "Like a Prayer" on broadcast television years after religious imagery in its music video sparked widespread backlash and led Pepsi to pull her 1989 commercial, called "Make A Wish," amid boycott threats.

"To perform 'Like a Prayer' on that stage, after all of that past controversy, was a bold move," Love said. "I remember thinking, 'How is this happening?'"

The question stayed with her.

In her forthcoming book (tentatively titled "Turf Wars: The Politics of Musical Co-branding at the Super Bowl"), Love situates the halftime show within a larger network of co-branded musical moments, from pregame ceremonies and commercials to national anthems and tributes. Together, they construct the Super Bowl halftime show and NFL as a symbolic expressions of American identity - sometimes aligning seamlessly, other times exposing fault lines.

Some of the most intense backlash, Love said, has emerged around performances by women, particularly during presidential election years, when expectations about patriotism, gender and visibility are heightened.

The infamous Janet Jackson-Justin Timberlake "wardrobe malfunction" in 2004 marked a turning point.

The NFL did not feature another female headliner for eight years, instead leaning heavily into established, male-led acts drawn from classic rock and legacy pop, such as Tom Petty, Paul McCartney, Prince, Bruce Springsteen and the Rolling Stones.

This was a turn toward familiarity and perceived "safety," Love said.

Madonna's performance marked the league's first return to a solo female headliner. That return, however, did not signal a retreat from controversy.

The halftime show, Love said, often becomes most volatile when women use the stage to assert visibility, identity and belonging.

She's traced how the pattern resurfaced in later performances by women whose halftime appearances carried layered political meaning. Beyoncé's 2016 appearance drew attention for its engagement with Black history and activism. In 2020, Jennifer Lopez and Shakira foregrounded Latina identity, immigration and U.S. territorial politics - and included a guest appearance from Bad Bunny.

For Love, these moments are especially charged when they unfold within a singularly male sport that has effectively sidelined athletes such as Colin Kaepernick, who sat for and eventually kneeled during the national anthem to protest racial injustice and police violence during the 2016 season.

Over time, the NFL's audience has changed dramatically, Love pointed out. Global viewership has expanded, streaming has reshaped how music circulates, and artists no longer need English-language radio play to reach American listeners, who are already familiar with the musical styles that artists like Bad Bunny fuse: rap, trap, Reggaeton, R&B and others.

"Spanish-speaking artists don't have to cross over in the old way anymore," Love said. "The audience already knows the music."

That reality helps explain why Bad Bunny's performance feels both inevitable and contentious, another reminder that the Super Bowl's halftime stage - however brief - carries enormous symbolic weight.

For Love, those 12 minutes of spectacle offer a rare opportunity to watch culture at work.

"It's not just about music," she said. "It's about power, audience, and who gets to be seen and heard at the center of American life."