IMAGN IMAGES/Reuters ConnectMusic filled with symbolism
Even Puerto Ricans who don’t share the singer’s background feel proud of how his music denounces our struggles while symbolising our culture and identity.
On Sunday, before tens of millions, he recreated and criticised our battered electrical grid while performing the song El Apagón.
He also used symbols like the “pava”, the traditional farmer’s hat, and the endangered Puerto Rican crested toad.
His songs, such as BOKeTE, blend romance with commentary on the island’s deteriorating roads or the historical persecution of the independence movement, like LA MuDANZA.
In the latter, he sings: “People were killed here for waving the flag, that’s why I carry it everywhere” – including the Super Bowl.
Puerto Rico has limited influence over US national policy: island residents cannot vote in presidential elections, and their congressional representative has no voting power.
Without sovereignty, bilateral relations, or participation in international bodies, culture remains our primary doorway to the world, and Bad Bunny has opened it wider than ever.
A cross-genre artist
With Bad Bunny, reggaeton has reached unimaginable places. Just last week he made Grammy history by winning Album of the Year with his entirely Spanish album Debí Tirar Más Fotos.
Though the genre has roots in Panama and New York, Puerto Rican artists globalised it.
For years, reggaeton was persecuted on the island. It was mostly young people of Afro-Caribbean descent living in poor communities who sang and listened to it in underground clubs that were often raided by the police.
Over time, artists like Daddy Yankee, Tego Calderón and Don Omar – who Martínez Ocasio honoured during the Super Bowl – helped turn reggaeton into a mainstream genre many of us grew up with.
As Prof Albert Laguna told BBC Mundo last year, Bad Bunny has also become an artist appreciated beyond the reggaeton audience.
His unexpected blends of reggaeton and trap with salsa, merengue, bomba, plena, and other Latin American genres create “an opportunity for conversation across generations”, Prof Laguna said.
Another one of his most significant contributions, and a triumph of reggaeton, is the affirmation of Puerto Rican Spanish.
While in the past Latin artists have sung in English to reach the English-speaking market, Bad Bunny has done so with our words and our way of speaking.
It’s the same Spanish we’ve fought to preserve for decades, even amid US efforts to impose English as the primary language.
I’ve heard more than once that my Spanish is unintelligible, the same criticism some people level at Bad Bunny’s songs.
In fact, US President Donald Trump wrote on Sunday on his Truth Social platform: “Nobody understands a word this guy is saying”.
Yet others, drawn by the beauty of the music, try to get closer to our Spanish, learning words like “pichear” (to ignore) or “janguear” (to hang out).
Producer MAG, a long-time Bad Bunny collaborator, said in the book P FKN R that the Grammy-winning album Debí Tirar Más Fotos sparked a “cultural movement”.
“It feels like the world is embracing us, and Puerto Rico, in such a beautiful way,” he was quoted as saying.
This Sunday, we saw that embrace live.
Disclaimer : This story is auto aggregated by a computer programme and has not been created or edited by DOWNTHENEWS. Publisher: BBC
