A thread unites two great TV ceremonies – the opening of the Olympics and the halftime of the American football Superbowl – which will pass the baton this night from the Meazza in Milan to the Levi’s stadium in Santa Clara: the alien language of some of their protagonists, Ghali and Bad Bunny.
Arabic and Spanish, Arabisms and Spanglish, second and third generation mutant vocabularies, family languages, of memories, of travel, of the self. The Arabic was rejected in the reading of the verses of Gianni Rodari (he who would have approved with enthusiasm), unspeakable for the Islamophobic racism spread liberally by the right-wing government, from TV to the latest social media. We are waiting for Bad Bunny’s performance already defined by Trump himself as “absolutely ridiculous”.
How much sporting ceremonies matter in the fetid culture war underway is well remembered on the occasion of the inauguration of the Paris Olympics directed by director Thomas Jolly: the assault of the armies of darkness on the real or presumed “lgbtq+” Last Supper, before the incredible uproar over the Moroccan boxer Imane Khleif. We should know which side we’re on by now. Candidly, those of Roc Nation (of rapper Jay Z), the organizers who called Bad Bunny to the Superbowl, explained that this year they wanted to address the very promising Latino audience, as any common sense entrepreneur would have done. Tonight in California Bunny will sing exclusively (or almost) in Spanish, something that in fact had never happened there. He is one of the greatest pop stars of the moment, a miracle of local and global, salsa and trap, views counted in billions, Grammy award for the best album of the year (never happened to a Latin artist).
I should have taken more photo it’s a wonderful album of tropical nostalgia and desire for the future. Beginning of his Grammy acceptance speech: «Ice Out! We are not savages, aliens, we are human and Americans.” Practically a great one. It’s a shame to summon the decrepit Nazis of Illinois to welcome him, but that’s how it is. Last year Bad Bunny canceled all concerts in the US due to fears that ICE would guard the stadiums. Ice will show up outside the Superbowl, it has already been announced.
We, in our own small way, just because it is still so close and we are embarrassed by the insult to intelligence suffered by the entire audience at home, still have to deal with the filming of Ghali’s performance, confused among the dancers without even a close-up, without the commentator Petrecca even announcing his name.
From a glance, the only brief for the organizers-directors of the Milan-Cortina 2026 show (the producer Marco Balich, the opera director provocateur Damiano Michieletto, I wouldn’t willingly put him on my CV) should have been: no inclusions, no LGBT+ or other oddities, in Bocelli and Pausini, beautiful Italy, bye. And futurism? Salvator Gout? The little Alpine? Oh well, next time.
But if you really want to trace the chain of command that made it possible to censor an international feed probably already the result of exhausting negotiations that Ghali himself revealed (the Italian anthem? No really; Rodari in Arabic? For heaven’s sake, there’s no time) and they made him pay for this too, the Italian Rai director was Pierluigi Bonelli (did he pull some mixer lever?), the responsibility of the ineffable Paolo Petrecca director of Raisport, the input entirely up to full of its political references, that is, the Telemeloni government. That is, Petrecca knew almost nothing about the ceremony (but frankly there was little and nothing to explain), but he knew very well what would happen to Ghali, the propal, the Arab, the Maranza inside, the first and only singer who three years ago uttered the word genocide on TV at his own risk (this one, for example).
It will remain among the worst pages of this country’s TV broadcast. He beats himself with the cutting and treatment of the video of the policeman in Turin from which we just emerge, battered to boot.
