How Bad Bunny Did It
A few years ago, I visited my childhood home and heard a surprising sound: the bright and bouncy music of the Puerto Rican rapper Bad Bunny. My parents are white Baby Boomers who speak no Spanish and have never shown a taste for hip-hop, but they’d somehow gotten into Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio, whose sex-and-rum-drenched lyrics they couldn’t begin to decipher. The vector of transmission appeared to be the streaming service hooked to their smart speakers. When in need of a pick-me-up, Mom would shout, “Alexa, play Bad Bunny,” and make her Southern California kitchen sound like a San Juan nightclub.
Stories like this help explain how Bad Bunny has reached across language barriers to dominate pop domestically and abroad. Since uploading his first single in 2016, he’s broken U.S. sales records and claimed the title of the most streamed artist on Spotify in four separate years. His popularity, high standing with critics, and duration of success make him a peer—and sometimes a better-selling one—of such contemporary titans as Taylor Swift, Beyoncé, and Kendrick Lamar. Like them, he’s figured out that 21st-century-pop success is achieved by assembling excitingly hybrid sounds around an iron core of identity. In his case, that means performing almost exclusively in Spanish.
Many Latin American singers have enjoyed cross-over fame before, but none has done it in the way Bad Bunny has, or at the same scale. Before streaming, they couldn’t: Major-market radio DJs, record-label execs, and the media still decided what constituted the American mainstream, and conventional wisdom said that audiences preferred music whose lyrics they could understand. Ricky Martin, Enrique Iglesias, and Shakira cracked U.S. markets only after they started singing in English. Rare exceptions, such as “Macarena,” by Los del Río, didn’t even confer name recognition upon their creators.
But the internet has revealed popular desires that last century’s gatekeepers didn’t know how to exploit. Bad Bunny arose from a transnational scene—widely called música urbana—whose primary audience is Spanish speakers, including the 44 million who live in the United States. Streaming has also helped English-only audiences connect with his music, just as it has for K-pop and Afrobeat. This month, Bad Bunny will occupy a cultural stage once reserved for America’s classic-rock gods and pop goddesses: the Super Bowl halftime show.
Bad Bunny has touted his game-day gig as a triumph for Latino—particularly Puerto Rican—representation. And in plain ways, his ascendance contradicts Donald Trump’s decree, made last March, that English is the sole national language. MAGA voices attacked the “crazy” decision by the “woke” NFL to book someone who’s not “a unifying entertainer.” They cited Bad Bunny’s political stances (he doesn’t want ICE outside his concerts) and gender-bending fashion (his biceps look great in a minidress). But they also tend to express the view that he, though an American citizen, is somehow un-American. The conservative activist group Turning Point USA is planning an alternative halftime show; in a poll sent to its supporters about what they’d like to see, the first option was “anything in English.”
The truth is that Bad Bunny’s rise is plenty American, and not simply because it reinforces the pluralistic ideals that Trump’s movement seeks to diminish. Bad Bunny’s music has reached all corners of the planet because it is a state-of-the-art product; he is a victor in the ever more crowded race for the freshest and most broadly appealing sound. Language barriers have turned out to be yet another bit of old friction that the internet has sanded down to create a cosmopolitan, commercialized middle ground. Does what’s lost in translation matter?
[From the November 2022 issue: Jaquira Díaz on the case for Puerto Rican independence]
At the center of Bad Bunny’s sound is the rhythm that has ruled Latin American pop for decades: reggaeton, which marries dancehall and rap in crisp, minimalist fashion. Inspiring partying often with just a drum machine and a vocalist, reggaeton first flourished as the sound of working-class urban life in Puerto Rico. “This is where I was born, and so was reggaeton, just so you know,” Bad Bunny boasts in Spanish in one song.
He also grew up as a highly online Millennial at a time when American pop culture was ruled by Fall Out Boy’s pop punk, Lady Gaga’s synth pop, and Drake’s rap blues. All of those touchstones now inform his maximalist take on reggaeton. In any given Bad Bunny song, the melodies roll and sway between emo dejection and childlike glee, the electronic beats call to mind Nintendo games, and the low end churns as ominously as a lava pit. Bad Bunny’s vocal tone is unique: husky and flat, peppered with gasps and grunts, and shimmering with digital effects. He sounds like a ringmaster in a futuristic circus, and you don’t need to know Spanish to feel that a thrilling story is unfolding.
Indeed, Bad Bunny’s success with English-speaking audiences might seem to answer the perennial music-fan debate about how important lyrics really are. Any Rolling Stones listener oblivious to what Mick Jagger is yowling about knows that the art form’s pleasures don’t require intelligibility. And the ideals of enlightened music appreciation dictate that listening to music you don’t understand can be a mind-expanding exercise. As David Byrne once put it, “To restrict your listening to English-language pop is like deciding to eat the same meal for the rest of your life.”
Music, however, is also a form of communication. That’s especially the case in the tradition Bad Bunny builds on: hip-hop, in which narrative, persona, and wordplay are crucial. He raps with intoxicating fluidity, stringing syllables together in a steady murmur that encourages close listening. Translations get you only part of the way to comprehending this aspect of his appeal. His themes are largely the same as those of English-language pop rappers—success, partying, and girls. (Lots of girls: “Me gustan mucho las Gabriela, las Patricia, las Nicole, las Sofía,” goes his smash “Tití Me Preguntó,” a little black book in song form.) But as I read along, I can sense all the things I’m missing: puns, connotations, references.
Even some fluent Spanish speakers may feel similarly. He raps in a Caribbean dialect that is “full of so many skipped consonants, Spanglish, neologisms, and argot that it borders on Creole,” the Puerto Rican anthropology professor Yarimar Bonilla wrote in The New York Times. Bad Bunny’s success proves the cliché that music is a universal language, but it also highlights how universality can shear art from its social context—of which, in this artist’s case, there is a lot.
Bad Bunny has taken care to make his most important messages clear through not only lyrics but also videos, album art, and interviews. He’s more than a Puerto Rican Casanova with an ear for appealing musical pastiche. He’s also a protest artist, and part of what he’s protesting is the very process by which he has become so famous.
The title of his latest album, DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS (or “I Should Have Taken More Photos”), expresses a sense of loss about the culture he grew up in. The cover image is of two empty chairs against a backdrop of banana trees. The songs long for friends and neighbors who have emigrated. A short film released with the album portrays an old man visiting a San Juan coffee shop only to find that it has been gentrified beyond recognition—filled with tourists and digital nomads scarfing overpriced vegan quesitos. (The video also features a talking toad belonging to an endangered local species.)
Bad Bunny is articulating the surreal and sad feeling of seeing his homeland transformed by internet-supercharged globalization. The U.S. territory’s economy has long relied on tourism, but in recent years, a wave of laptop-toting mainlanders lured by the balmy climate and notoriously loose tax laws has driven rent increases and threatened to wash out the local identity. Bad Bunny’s new album, Bonilla wrote, is a “lament for a Puerto Rico slipping through our fingers: betrayed by its leaders; its neighborhoods displaced for luxury developments; its land sold to outsiders, subdivided by Airbnb and crypto schemes and repackaged as paradise for others.”
[Read: The Bad Bunny video that captures the cost of gentrification]
Bad Bunny seeks not just to point out the problem of displacement, but also to do something about it. He’s portrayed his refusal to sing in English as a proactive maneuver against the pressures of Anglo-assimilation. On his latest tour, he skipped the continental U.S. entirely, citing fears that ICE agents would target his concerts. Instead, he hosted a 31-show residency in San Juan, the title of which, No me quiero ir de aquí, means “I Don’t Want to Leave Here.” He has campaigned for the island’s independence and against its potential statehood. One song on the new album spotlights Hawaii—a tourist playground whose natives have been utterly marginalized—as an example of the fate that could befall Puerto Rico if its residents do not resist the influence from their north.
Yet, inevitably, Bad Bunny’s worldwide fame is bound up in the same cycle he bemoans. Though many tickets for his concert residency were set aside for locals, the gambit of course attracted outsiders to the island. Some made a pilgrimage to the supermarket where he once worked in his hometown of Vega Baja. One was shot and killed in La Perla, a poor San Juan neighborhood that began to attract tourists only after being featured in the video for Luis Fonsi and Daddy Yankee’s 2017 reggaeton smash, “Despacito.”
In this context, Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl booking represents an uneasy trade. He gets to perform on America’s most watched stage—expressing his vision on a grand scale in ways that could energize his fans and expand his audience. The NFL not only gets a popular performer to juice ratings; it gets to advertise itself to the Spanish-speaking world at a time when professional football is eyeing the global market share of soccer and other sports, eager to carve out a niche. Some might say that the NFL is a mainland-American institution with colonial ambitions, and that Bad Bunny is now part of that effort.
Exports, imports, migration, melding—the costs of these historical engines of change and progress are now the preoccupation of popular art and politics. In a strange way, MAGA and Bad Bunny are each responding to versions of the same 21st-century phenomenon: the decoupling of culture and geography, which has left so many people—wherever they were born—feeling strangely placeless and adrift. But the cruel absurdities and dark historical parallels of Trump’s nationalist agenda reflect how perverse, and ultimately futile, strident identity protectionism is in 2026. American country music has been catching on abroad; American listeners have KPop Demon Hunters fever. And the Super Bowl will be headlined by an artist who seems sure he can create something meaningful out of interconnectivity—something that’s his own, no matter how much it’s shared.
This article appears in the February 2026 print edition with the headline “How Bad Bunny Did It.”