If Your Teen Is Going To Be A Fan Of Anyone, Let It Be Bad Bunny

When Bad Bunny was announced as the headline act at the Super Bowl LX halftime show, backlash was as swift and loud as it was wrong because, for those in the know, there’s no better artist for fans to engage with right now than the Puerto Rican rapper.

According to a January national poll conducted by Emerson College Polling, 63% of voters under the age of 30 are excited about Bad Bunny’s upcoming Super Bowl halftime performance, attesting to the musician’s hold on Gen Z audiences. But what makes Bad Bunny so popular among Gen Z? And why should we encourage his popularity?

In 2016, after going viral on SoundCloud with his reggaetón music, Bad Bunny, whose real name is Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio, left his job as a supermarket bagger and rapidly became a household name in the Spanish-speaking market. By 2020, and ever since, he was the most listened to artist in the world.

From the jump, his disruption of hyper-masculinity with his painted nails and flamboyant style of dressing made young fans look twice. For a generation largely disinterested in traditional masculinity, Bad Bunny was a fresh face in the genre. But aesthetics aside, there’s a lot more for Gen Z to get behind.

Bad Bunny has always been political; that much is par for the course for Puerto Rican artists whose efforts to celebrate their identity are an act of resistance against the United States’ colonial efforts in the territory. In the early years of his fame, he filled his music and performances with protests against gender-based violence, government corruption, and anti-trans hate in his home country.

However, never has Bad Bunny’s voice been more powerful than it is amid our current period of peak anti-immigrant messaging from the US government, which disproportionately targets Latino communities.

In 2025, amid the reelection of Donald Trump, Bad Bunny released Debí Tirar Más Fotos, an album that unpacks many of the most urgent issues of our time, ones that young people see helplessly every day online, even if they (or their families) are not victims of them. Debí Tirar Más Fotos interrogates American imperialism and explores identity, belonging, and the forces that threaten these vital concepts.

The 31-year-old has made it clear that his target audience is young people, those who are itching for change while feeling like they don’t yet have the power to enact it. “I should do something where I can plant a seed,” he said of the album in a January 2025 interview with The New York Times. “Bro, that is the purpose — to give young people an opportunity to showcase the rhythms of Puerto Rico.”

Even for those who don’t understand his Spanish lyrics, Bad Bunny makes his message clear. At the 2026 Grammys, where Debí Tirar Más Fotos became the first Spanish-language album to win Album of the Year amid ICE’s violence across the US and the killing of two civilians by federal agents in Minnesota, Bad Bunny told the audience: “ICE out. We are not savages, we are not animals, we are not aliens; we are human.”

“If we are going to fight, we have to do it with love. Let’s not hate them, but let’s love our people, our family, our culture.”

Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl performance, despite what his detractors say, is a win for the values he promotes and, therefore, is a win for young people growing up in a world that seems increasingly disinterested in these values. At a time when young people are looking for something, anything that helps them make sense of and challenge the world around them, few artists offer that better than Bad Bunny.