Arts & Entertainment
As Bad Bunny Prepares for the Super Bowl, Puerto Ricans Celebrate His Music and Message
Global music icon Bad Bunny is set to take the stage this Sunday for a Super Bowl halftime performance.
The Boricua artist from Vega Baja, Puerto Rico, is already making history this week after his all-Spanish-language album, “Debí Tirar Más Fotos,” won Album of The Year at the Grammys. This marks the artist’s third Grammy award and makes him the third Latino to ever win Album of the Year.
Bad Bunny, born Benito Antonio Martinez Ocasio, has also reached the No. 1 spot in the world as the most-streamed artist on Spotify.
The cherry on top of his already historic week comes with his highly anticipated headlining performance at the Super Bowl, which he says he’s meeting with a mix of excitement, gratitude and perspective.
“To be honest, I don’t know how I’m feeling. There’s a lot. I’m still in the middle of my tour. I was just at the Grammys last week. All of that,” he said in English on Thursday at a news conference.
“I’m excited, but at the same time, I feel more excited about the people than even me — my family, my friends, the people who have always believed in me,” he said. “This moment, the culture — that’s what makes these shows special.”
Since his Super Bowl performance was announced, critics have pushed back and called for an English-language performer to headline football’s biggest event instead.
Conservative advocacy group Turning Point USA announced their own alternative Super Bowl halftime show.
But thousands of fans — including many Puerto Ricans — are looking forward to his performance and see the moment as a culturally important one.
Reactions Across the Puerto Rican Community
“It was just emotional, because if you know the history and you understand the historical significance of this — it’s huge,” said Veronica Ocasio, co-founder of the Chicago-based National Museum of Puerto Rican Arts and Culture. “He has a moral compass. He knows like with this elevation as an artist, ‘I have a responsibility to my people and to the Latinos to speak up and speak out on issues that matter to us’. And so, I’m just ecstatic and is our community.”
Ocasio believes Bad Bunny’s music has been able to bridge the gap between older and younger generations.
Much of his work relies on modern takes on older traditional Puerto Rican music.
“He went into the Puerto Rican archives of music and he brought light into the details of our ancestors and elders who’ve been playing this music for generations, and he brought them on stage,” Ocasio adds. “He closed the generational gap by brining young artists to be part of his whole platform for this album.”
For Ocasio, when Bad Bunny won, all members of the community won as well.
One of the artists that Bad Bunny collaborated with on his album was Julio “Julito” Gastón Ramos, a drummer from Loiza, Puerto Rico, a historically Black town on the Island.
Gastón Ramos, along with several other artists of African descent took center stage in Bad Bunny’s residency in Puerto Rico platforming Afro-Puerto Rican culture with one of the largest stages in the world.
For Brenda Torres Figueroa, founder of El Schomburg Art Gallery and an interdisciplinary artist, Puerto Rican Blackness played a pivotal role in Bad Bunny’s performances.
“We can circle it back to the rulé that is a rhythm of Bomba from the zona of Loíza from the— northeast side of the island of Puerto Rico, we see has a big influence, you know, African influence and traditions,” Torres Figueroa said. “So, we see some of the basis of drumming, even on the beats that is created in Bomba or in reggaeton that are very connected to those rhythms that are ancestral.”
Much of reggaeton can source its ancestry from beats created by Jamaicans in Panama, which then were brought by Black communities to Puerto Rico.
“It was very limited, the visibility of bomba and seeing it like that right now it is — I have no words to explain it — it is very remarkable,” Torres Figueroa added.
The ripples of Torres Figueroa’s excitement are being felt by all members of the Puerto Rican community.
In Los Angeles, Vanessa Diaz, professor at Loyola Marymount University and author of “P FKN R: How Bad Bunny Became The Global Voice of Puerto Rican Resistance,” said he is a once-in-a-lifetime artist.
“He is a musical genius — and the thing that people love about him is how consistent he has stayed since the beginning,” Diaz said. “Many people have come to know him with his most recent album, ‘Debi Tirar Mas Fotos,’ which is explicitly political, but the reality is that Bad Bunny has been speaking out against issues that matter the most to him about Puerto Rico, about LGBTQ+ rights, about racial inequality throughout his entire career.”
For Diaz, Bad Bunny’s activism and political engagement was intrinsic to his lived experience being Puerto Rican.
“I think what we’ve also seen from the beginning of Bad Bunny’s career is that his experience as a Puerto Rican, someone born into U.S. colonialism is actually central to who he is as an artist,” Diaz said. “So even if his lyrics weren’t as sort of like acutely political as they are now, he was always a political figure who’s been using his platform to address issues.”
Puerto Rico is a commonwealth of the United States legally, however Diaz argues that the term is simply, “what I consider a different name for colony, because it actually didn’t come with any new rights in the realm of sovereignty of being a sovereign nation.”
Around the time Bad Bunny began his music career, the U.S. developed La Promesa, an economic oversight board, to address the 2016 debt crisis. During that time, Puerto Rico could not file for bankruptcy due to its commonwealth status.
La Promesa’s economic guidelines implemented on the island resulted in mass closures of schools, pension cuts and cuts to basic life necessities for Puerto Ricans. This time of turbulence on the Island shaped Bad Bunny’s early career.
“Puerto Rican resistance is just a part of the very essence of who he is both as a person and an artist,” Diaz added.
The Associated Press contributed.
