The child that took the Grammy that Bad Bunny was giving at the stage of the Super Bowl halftime was not a real-life headline figure. The boy was a young performer who was hired to play the role of the “young Benito,” a fact that was significant as the scene was fast-paced, it viralized faster, and immediately gathered erroneous rumors on the internet.
The halftime performance of Bad Bunny during Super Bowl LX agreed with big visuals and small intimacy simultaneously: an apartment inside a stadium, the field designed like a local neighborhood “casita,” and the closing note, which said, “The only thing more powerful than hate is love.” The faintest beat in the midst of all that was the one that people played over and over again like the Bad Bunny kneeling to hand an award statuette of Grammy to a small boy like committing a future that was hard earned back to the same person still learning how to dream, how to dream.
Lincoln Fox was 5-year-old child Lincoln Fox (named Lincoln Fox Ramadan), a child actor/model. A representative of a talent agency claimed that the segment was a symbolic representation of giving a Grammy to his younger version, and the boy was selected because he looked the most like a young Bad Bunny. Lincoln posted on Instagram after the show that he will remember this day forever. and said, “It was my truest honor.”
Such an affirmation was necessary since social media was quick to identify the boy as Liam Conejo Ramos, another 5-year-old whose name has been on the internet rampage. The rumor went viral in part because the audience was already predisposed to see meaning: Bad Bunny had already given a halftime performance that was predominantly sung in Spanish, and the rest of his popular image had already been associated with themes of dignity and belonging. Therefore, when the Grammy handoff occurred, a good number of people interpreted it as a direct mention of a particular child, and not an off script segment of halftime narrative.
The follow-up post by Lincoln tilted towards the emotional purpose of the scene, as well as admitting the real child in the middle of rumor mill. The caption referred to an emotional, unforgettable day as being cast as the young Benito, and positioned the handoff as “a symbolic moment where the future hands the past a Grammy.” He added a brief message to Liam Ramos, who is a child actor, in the same post, sending love, an unusually close way of an account by a child actor to find itself in the middle of a national speculation, and a reminder of how easily an artificial moment can tumble into real life stories.
Even the actual performance provided viewers with a lot to discuss besides the handoff. The celebrity cameos to Bad Bunny were Pedro Pascal, Cardi B, Karol G, and Jessica Alba among others, and one could also see athletes in the mix. It also combined intimate details with cultural references, such as Puerto Rican scenery, which was a part of the staging. And in one of the least noticeable details of the viral moment, Bad Bunny told the child, Cree siempre en ti, that is, always believe in yourself.
What the viewers learned was the version of the rumor which was less complicated than the rumor itself: the boy was a working child actor, who was hired to play a part created around reflection and encouragement. However, the pace of the confusion showed yet another thing that is how a single friendly picture, transmitted to such great numbers of viewers, could turn into the projection on which the hopes, fears, and suppositions of people were encircled, even before the credits even figuratively rolled.
