Kimmel Mocks Bad Bunny Backlash: Kid Rock’s Biggest Song Is “Literally Gibberish”

Jimmy Kimmel joined Jon Stewart in calling out MAGA’s “performative” outrage over Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl halftime performance

“If Bad Bunny had stopped by the White House and made nice with Donald Trump like Nicki Minaj did, or Kanye West, or the Village People, MAGA would have no problem with Bad Bunny at the Super Bowl,” Kimmel surmised during his opening monologue on Monday’s episode of Jimmy Kimmel Live. “They’d pretend to love him, too. They’d be like, ‘Dame tu cosita! I love that one!’ But since Bad Bunny isn’t a fan of Trump, and since they knew that at halftime there would be a bunch of confused white people sitting on their couches going, ‘What the hell is this?’ they decided to make it a ‘thing.’

“I guess all the snowflakes are so upset they might have to listen to Spanish for eight minutes, they decided to make their own halftime show and, of course, like everything they do, it was a disaster,” Kimmel added. They couldn’t stream it, they didn’t get the rights, and Kid Rock’s lip-sync was screwed up.”

The late-night also pointed out the irony in MAGA complaining about not being able to understand anything the Spanish-speaking Bad Bunny was performing when Kid Rock’s most popular song, “Bawitdaba,” is “literally gibberish.” “Do you think Donald Trump knows what ‘Bawitdaba’ means? Kid Rock doesn’t even know what that means,” Kimmel quipped.

Which brought Kimmel to his main point:

“Did I know any of the songs Bad Bunny was singing? Absolutely not. Never heard even one second of one of them. Did I understand any of what he was singing? Yes: the word ‘nona.’ That was it.

“But since when do we need to know what singers are saying? Michael Jackson, maybe the greatest Super Bowl performance of all time, was like, ‘Shamone! Shamone! You know it!’ I didn’t know it. Nobody knew it. We didn’t know it then, and 33 years later, we still don’t know what the hell that means. But that’s the point: it doesn’t matter. It’s the halftime show at a football game.

“I don’t know all the words to any song. I don’t even know the words to songs I think I know all the words to. When I do karaoke and see the lyrics on the screen, I’m often shocked. Words I’ve been singing for 40, sometimes 50 years, are wrong. I recently found out it’s not ‘wrapped up like a douche, another roller in the night.’ So, stop.

“This is not about excluding people; it’s the opposite of that. English has had a lot of at-bats over the last 60 years of Super Bowls. It’s been a long run since ‘Come on, shake your body, baby, do that conga.’ The biggest artist in the world is Bad Bunny, so maybe let Spanish have a turn for once, right?”

Watch Kimmel’s full monologue below.