His lyrics discuss colonialism, neoliberalism, gentrification and issues facing migrants today
The last year has seen Puerto Rican musician Bad Bunny catapulted into the spotlight. He became the first artist to win album of the year for a record entirely in Spanish.
And last weekend he was the much debated and unsuccessfully boycotted performer at the Super Bowl halftime show.
Bad Bunny started in the early 2010s as a Latin, trap and reggaeton artist. For most of his career his music hasn’t been explicitly political.
Generally, Spanish-speaking artists are forced into two broad fields—hide their heritage, or commercialise it.
And for it to be relevant it had to be consumed and palatable to an audience in the United States.
But Bad Bunny’s latest two albums got progressively more political. His latest, Debí Tirar Más Fotos, was released in January 2025 and was objectively his most successful album.
But it was also his most political. I think that’s representative of a shift we’re seeing. We’re in times of struggle that are pushing the large numbers of people towards these ideas.
His lyrics discuss colonialism, neoliberalism, gentrification and the issues facing migrants today.
As well as the lyrics becoming more political, the rhythms that he used throughout the album are really interesting. The rhyme patterns and rhythms vary from merengue, to cumbia, to salsa and you see samba in there as well as his more original reggaeton-style music.
He’s always been an overtly Latin and Spanish-language musician. But as the lyrics became more political, the way in which he allows himself to express his Latin identity is also changing.
It doesn’t have to be commercialised, it doesn’t have to be Latin-trap or reggaeton in order to be palatable to Western audiences anymore. It can be truer to the variety of Spanish influenced and speaking music that he is inspired by.
You can see that in how he took a lot of samples from very classic songs from salsa, to samba.
You can understand two main things from the popularisation of his music in the context of Donald Trump’s United States.
Governments are pushing towards right wing and anti-immigration policies in order to give an intangible Other to blame that isn’t in the top 1 percent. But you are always going to have immigrants.
Whether or not Trump likes it, his music is evidence that Latin Americans are actually integral to the culture of America.
It also shows that there’s this inherent contradiction. They want immigrants out, but at the same time their economy and US society relies on them.
I think this was made all the more obvious with the symbolism used in the Super Bowl performance. At the start of it, Bad Bunny came out with sugarcane plantations and workers. This shows how a lot of the industry—the food industry for example—relies on undocumented immigration. They are the backbone of many US sectors.
For me, with the mainstream success of Latin Spanish-language music in Britain, it’s quite an exciting time. It’s an exciting way to be proud of my culture and engage with music that resonates with that and be able to share that with my friends in Britain. It’s a normalisation of non-Spanish speakers appreciating, even dancing and singing to Spanish music.
I think that especially as someone who was brought up with multiple heritages, as a Bulgarian-Mexican-British woman, it’s a very special occasion when I’m able to interact with more than one of those cultures at the same time without having to explain an aspect of that.
