They were shrouded in grasses. An estimated 500 people formed large hedges, holding Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio’s (aka Bad Bunny’s) performance within them. In many traditions, hedges are natural ways to fence or create boundaries, but they also represent an in-between zone that connects our physical world to the spirit world. They’re witchy spaces you enter to shake off the limits of reality. You go to them to invoke the spirits and ancestors — to do magic.

The hedges on the stage were a border: They delineated where Benito’s world started and ended. And in this case, we were welcomed in, but on his terms. The screen flashed, “Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio presenta el espectáculo de medio tiempo del Súper Tazón.” Then the camera panned over the scene and plunged us inside.

Benito was born with Venus (the planet of love, art, and creativity) at 2° Aries. Refusing to perform in anything but his native tongue was a display of true Venus-in-Aries trailblazing. There was no checking to make sure everyone was comfortable. This is a placement that goes all in, and fast. It isn’t afraid to self-express. It’s more than okay making a scene.

Benito also has a stellium (meaning multiple planets) in Pisces — including his Sun, his Mars, his Saturn, and possibly his Moon (we don’t know his exact birth time). As a Jupiter-ruled water sign, Pisces prioritizes connection and compassion, and is skilled at imagining vast spaces. He was born with both Uranus and Neptune conjunct in Capricorn as well — an astrological signature he shares with his millennial cohort. When combined, this manifests as boundaryless inspiration and imagination (Neptune) disrupting (Uranus) tradition and rules (Capricorn). He’s willing to bend (or break) expectations around genre, gender, and success, not just in the music industry but in the way he presents himself as an artist to the world. So it’s no surprise that while his Spanish-singing pop predecessors crossed over into English, he refused. When people asked him about performing at the Super Bowl in Spanish, he said, “English is not my first language. But it’s okay, it’s not America’s first language either.”

With both his Saturn and Mars — the malefic planets — in a whole-sign conjunction with his Sun, he’s also had to learn how to work with challenges head-on. He’s had to channel his courage (Mars) to face what’s tough, and work with blocks (Saturn) as creative fuel (hi, Pisces Sun). And the Super Bowl Halftime Show wasn’t the first time he’s done this. When protests erupted in Puerto Rico in 2019 in the wake of Hurricane Maria and leaked messages from Governor Rosselló, Benito left his European tour to join the protest back home. Mars is sharp, and Benito has learned how to wield his art like a weapon. He raps about the chronic, rolling blackouts in Puerto Rico, calls out crooked politicians, and speaks out against domestic violence, while couching the lyrics in bouncy perreo beats. Instead of ignoring pain, heartbreak, and setbacks, he leans in and reworks them on his terms in sing-along-able salsa tunes.

At his Super Bowl Halftime Show, Benito submerged us in his universe, in his language, in his message — expanding beyond the usual bounds of a stage. He situated his performance in both the real world, featuring real people and places, and an imaginary world all his own — where el Sapo Concho was animate, where people did acrobatic tricks on sparking telephone poles instead of getting killed by them, where it was possible to fall through roofs and get back up and dance through the streets without fear or shame.

He grooved past barbershops, jewelers, and fruit vendors. He walked past Villas Tacos in Highland Park, Los Angeles, and accepted a shot from Toñita, the legendary owner of Caribbean Social Club — a historical holdout in long-gentrified Williamsburg, Brooklyn. He took us through his childhood home in Puerto Rico. He waved the Puerto Rican flag in its original light-blue color (before the US changed it to a darker blue to match its own). Then suddenly, Ricky Martin was covering Benito’s LO QUE LE PASÓ A HAWAii — a song that explicitly draws parallels between the US staging a coup to steal Hawaii and pillage its culture and land for profit, with Puerto Rico’s fate — as José Eduardo Santana played a cuatro, an instrument from Benito’s home island. But we never lingered anywhere or in any song for too long — things moved at the speed of Aries.

This ramping up, this siege of the senses, paralleled what’s going on in the sky. Saturn (the planet of borders) and Neptune (the planet that dissolves them) have been inching closer and closer together, and on February 20th, they’ll come together in Aries. This is a generation-defining moment that has been building for years — and Benito’s Super Bowl performance served as an example of what this combination can do. It amplified the potential of this astrology to break down the flimsy walls of convention. This is a reality-redefining moment. And it brings about the pressing need to fight for all we hold dear and to lay bare the stakes in whatever way we can.

Because Benito’s natal Venus is within two degrees of this upcoming astrology, it means that the Saturn–Neptune conjunction is landing in his chart in ways that define and open up how his unique artistic expression (Venus in Aries) lands in the world. And when he played on the world’s largest stage exactly as he pleased, he showed us just how powerfully Saturn and Neptune can dissolve a narrative together: that someone who bagged groceries, who spoke a different language, who grew up in a territory that the US has exerted colonial rule over, couldn’t do what he was doing. He showed the world that he could be himself, that he could make the art he wanted to make, and that he could incite joy in the face of terror, without toeing the line, and succeed.

What’s more, as Saturn prepares to leave Pisces and enter Aries, this moment served as a literal manifestation of the end of his Saturn return. The Saturn return is a major moment of claiming and owning our decisions, no matter the consequences, and ultimately understanding the freedom that comes when we do so. It marks a turning point, a stark before-and-after in our lives — and for artists, it often corresponds with pivotal moments in their careers. Benito is no exception. (See: the release of DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS, the launch of his three-month-long concert residency in Puerto Rico, the Grammy Award for Album of the Year, and the Super Bowl Halftime Show.)

The camera tracked Benito tightly throughout his live performance. We were there, moving with him as he sang. We interacted with the people around him as they talked, got their hair cut, played dominoes, and danced feverishly. We witnessed the joy of a couple getting married. This was Neptune in Aries at its best, showing limitless possibility. After months of seeing people get taken away, killed, and beaten in our neighborhoods, of images of children being held with their hands behind their backs, here, in Benito’s world, was everyone who ICE has been allowed to target and profile and detain, dancing. Here we all are alive, on your screen.

As the show built to its finale, Benito named almost every single country on the American continent and the islands off of it, changing the meaning of the words “God bless America” — the only English sentence he said that night. He was flanked by the flags of every territory and country in the Americas, with more and more people surrounding him. The border of plants shifted and rearranged until everyone burst through. Benito’s world exploded onto the field.

In the last seconds of his performance, he held up a football that said, "Together we are America.” Then he spiked it, hard, onto the ground — declarative and triumphant, as if to affirm the celebration. But it also felt defiant and tactical. As I watched him throw the football, I felt like I was watching a fantasy — one that America has been pushing since its beginnings — crack under the weight of its own fallacy.

A friend of mine who has a green card texted me and told me that it gave her hope. Another friend whose partner is undocumented said she cried the whole time. Someone else told me he wished Benito had pushed things farther, that he could have gone beyond a message of unity. But his speeches at the Grammys were right there, woven into the show, inflecting everything he did. “If we fight, we have to do it with love,” he said when accepting the award for Album of the Year. If Venus in Aries had a catchphrase, I think that would be it. Though the planet of love and art can have a tougher time in Aries, it learns to do things its own way — to be unafraid of being combative, bold, and a trailblazer. “ICE out,” Benito said at the Grammys. And at the Super Bowl, he showed us what that world might look like, could be like. That Venus in Aries’ brashness, its heady rush, its insistence on going all out, was on the stage. Every strut, every flirty look given straight to the camera, even the billboard behind him (the only text in English the entire show) that read, “THE ONLY THING MORE POWERFUL THAN HATE IS LOVE,” had an edge to it.

I watched all of this unfold at a Super Bowl party, and soon after, someone there got a text from a friend. It was a video of the stadium in Santa Clara from earlier that afternoon. The person in it yelled, “Yoooo, I’m a plant!” into the camera, turning to show everyone beside them in their plant costumes. I watched the video, I watched the person showing it to me watch his friend moments before he and the rest of the “plants” formed that moving, shifting border.

Then I turned back to the TV. A commercial showed two robots dancing, and a vodka logo flashed. But I was still stuck on the last moments of the show. Even after Benito threw the football, and the crowd roared, he kept singing, and the hedges moved again. But this time, they moved with him, flanking him as he left the arena. All together, he and everyone beside him birthed something new. Something fervid and alive. Then the spectacle was over; he tore his mic off.