About Bad Bunny And Puerto Rico’s Electric Grid
Last night’s Super Bowl halftime show featured...electric linemen?
Of all the things I might have imagined seeing during a Super Bowl halftime show, electric linemen on power poles were not on the list. And yet, last night during a segment of Bad Bunny’s performance called “El Apagón,” or “the blackout,” there they were: three linemen on power poles, which at times sprayed out showers of sparks. Bad Bunny himself even climbed atop a power pole while singing.
On a blog called Grimy Goods, writer Sandra Burciaga Olinger declared that the segment “carried powerful symbolism” and was a reference to “the ongoing struggle for electrical power in Puerto Rico, due to a fragile grid that results in frequent power outages, especially after devastating hurricanes like Irma and Maria.”
That’s exactly right. It was an amazing sequence that vividly illustrated the island territory’s tattered electric grid. Puerto Rico was featured in our 2019 documentary, Juice: How Electricity Explains The World, which Tyson Culver directed. Bad Bunny’s performance was amazing on many levels. He sang entirely in Spanish, a historic first for the Super Bowl. But for me, his performance brought back a flood of memories from of our trip to Puerto Rico in 2018, where we spent several days interviewing puertorriqueños about electricity and their tattered power grid. In fact, the island was hit by a blackout while we were there. As part of that documentary project, we excerpted several interviews. Here are three of my favorites.
Of all the many interviews we did, this one stands out. More than six months after Hurricane Maria hit Puerto Rico, Iris Ortiz and her family were still without power:
I also love this interview with Arnalado Castellano, the owner of a restaurant, who told us about the importance of electricity and cold beer.
And finally, this interview with Senator Anibal Jose Torres was a gift from the documentary gods. While we were talking to him, the island went into a blackout. He told us the outage would probably last a couple of hours. Instead, the power stayed off for the next eight hours.
You can watch more interview segments, and learn about our documentary at Juicethemovie.com. You may also watch the entire documentary on Amazon and AppleTV.
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Excellent! I hope some of the millions who watched Bad Bunny's Superbowl halftime show on February 8, 2026 will learn about the investigative journalism contained in your 2020 movie, Juice: How Electricity Explains the World. Your entire movie is available at no cost here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oYMXNn56kTo
Thank you for pointing that out, Robert. I didn't watch the game or Bad Bun, but did read a bit and heard on radio about both (more about BB than The Game). Yet you are the first person to have said anything at all about his power pole stage props and what they signify!