Bad Bunny

#1In 2016, Benito Martínez was studying audiovisual communications in Puerto Rico and working at an Econo supermarket.

#2Then his phone started ringing.

#3A song he had uploaded to SoundCloud, “Diles,” was spreading fast. As the plays climbed toward a million in roughly two weeks, people from the music business began trying to reach him.

#4There was one problem.

#5Benito was still at work.

#6If he wanted a real conversation, he had to slip into the supermarket bathroom. Someone might ask him to record in a studio, and he had no idea what to charge. Someone else might ask him to perform at a graduation party, and he did not know what a performance fee should be.

#7Then he would hang up, open the door, and go back to work.

#8Ten years later, an album made by that supermarket employee would win the Grammy for Album of the Year.

#9Exactly one week later, he would headline the Super Bowl halftime show.

#10So what happened in between?

#11Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio grew up in Almirante Sur, a neighborhood in Vega Baja on Puerto Rico’s northern coast.

#12His father, Tito, drove trucks. His mother, Lysaurie, was a teacher. Benito was the oldest of three boys.

#13Music came from every direction at home.

#14His father played salsa and tropical music. His mother liked merengue and romantic ballads. His grandfather exposed him to bolero and bohemian music. With friends, he listened to reggaetón.

#15For years he also sang in a children’s choir at church.

#16And on certain mornings, there was Tego Calderón.

#17Benito loved “Pa’ Que Retozen,” which would come on around the time he had to leave for school. If he was still asleep, his mother would tell him to get up if he wanted to hear Tego.

#18He would rush to get ready and jump in the car.

#19Sometimes he was too late and caught only the end.

#20Years later, after Bad Bunny became one of reggaetón’s biggest stars, the video for “La Difícil” contained a strangely familiar image.

#21This time, a kid in a car was asking his mother to turn up Bad Bunny.

#22The boy who once hurried outside hoping not to miss somebody else on the radio had become the voice another kid was waiting for.

#23None of it, however, had been guaranteed.

#24As a university student, Benito made music in his room.

#25On Saturdays he might wake up in the afternoon, sit at his computer, build beats, and record.

#26He loved doing it. He did not know whether it could become a life.

#27Even putting songs on SoundCloud took some pushing.

#28His friend Ormani Pérez encouraged him to upload them. Benito saw other young artists using SoundCloud to put music into the world, and eventually he did the same.

#29Another friend, Janthony, took a more physical route.

#30He carried Benito’s songs on USB drives to DJs and asked them to play the tracks late at parties.

#31So “Diles” was not simply a song that appeared online and was magically found by an algorithm.

#32There were friends.

#33There were USB drives.

#34There were DJs.

#35And there was already a Puerto Rican urban-music network moving songs from one person to another.

#36“Diles” entered that network.

#37Connections followed with DJ Luian, Mambo Kingz and Hear This Music. Noah Assad and Rimas also became central as Benito’s career accelerated.

#38Soon Bad Bunny was recording with artists including Arcángel, Farruko and Ozuna.

#39Then “Soy Peor” exploded.

#40The days of hiding in an Econo bathroom to take music calls were ending.

#41Success, though, brought a new problem.

#42Bad Bunny became famous at startling speed.

#43In 2018, “I Like It,” with Cardi B and J Balvin, reached No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100.

#44Then came “MIA,” with Drake.

#45The collaboration reversed an old crossover story.

#46The Latin artist did not switch to English for the global superstar.

#47Drake sang in Spanish.

#48Bad Bunny was never saying he could not sing in English. When people asked when he would make music in English, his attitude was closer to: if he wants or needs to, he can.

#49But why was the obligation always placed on him?

#50Nobody kept asking Drake when he would make a Spanish album.

#51Meanwhile, something stranger was happening.

#52Bad Bunny had enormous singles, famous collaborators and international attention.

#53But he still did not have a debut album.

#54He later said he had long wanted to release one and had not been given the opportunity in his previous setup.

#55There is not enough evidence to invent Hear This Music’s business reasoning.

#56What is clear is that Bad Bunny left.

#57On Christmas Eve 2018, he finally released “X 100PRE.”

#58For him, the album was more than a collection of songs.

#59It was what happened when he finally had room to decide what a Bad Bunny album could be.

#60One of the most important people in that next phase was Tainy.

#61Tainy was not a young producer who came up behind Bad Bunny.

#62He had worked inside Puerto Rican reggaetón since his teens, contributing to major records from the genre’s 2000s expansion.

#63When he and Bad Bunny first sat down to work seriously, they did not immediately start making beats.

#64They spent time talking.

#65They compared what they loved, what they had grown up listening to, what sounds stayed in their heads.

#66Out of that relationship came songs like “Estamos Bien” and much of the world around “X 100PRE.”

#67Bad Bunny did not stay inside one narrow version of Latin trap or reggaetón.

#68Rock could enter.

#69Synth-pop could enter.

#70Older Latin sounds could enter.

#71The point of creative freedom was not that it allowed him to become more American.

#72It allowed the definition of Bad Bunny to keep getting bigger.

#73And Puerto Rico increasingly occupied more space inside it.

#74Puerto Rico was still living with the aftermath of Hurricane Maria.

#75Blackouts, economic pressure and distrust toward the government had not disappeared when, in 2019, hundreds of pages of private Telegram messages involving Governor Ricardo Rosselló and members of his circle became public.

#76The messages included misogynistic and homophobic remarks, insults and offensive discussions connected to a country already furious over corruption and the post-Maria crisis.

#77Bad Bunny was in Europe.

#78He returned to Puerto Rico.

#79With Residente and iLe, he helped make “Afilando Los Cuchillos” in the middle of the political crisis.

#80Then he went into the streets.

#81He appeared on trucks with demonstrators. Ricky Martin and other major Puerto Rican figures joined protests that grew into an enormous citizen movement.

#82Rosselló eventually resigned.

#83It would be wrong to turn that into a story in which Bad Bunny personally brought down a governor.

#84The movement was much larger than any celebrity.

#85But something had changed for Benito.

#86The platform he had built through music was now something he was willing to use outside the music industry too.

#87His commercial scale kept increasing.

#88Bad Bunny became Spotify’s most-streamed artist globally in 2020.

#89Then again in 2021.

#90Then again in 2022.

#91That year, “Un Verano Sin Ti” became a global phenomenon.

#92And inside that album was “El Apagón.”

#93“The Blackout.”

#94The song carried the feeling of Puerto Rico’s electricity crisis, but the video did something more unusual.

#95What looks like a music video eventually changes form.

#96The screen gives way to “Aquí Vive Gente,” a short documentary reported by Puerto Rican journalist Bianca Graulau.

#97Now the viewer is hearing about recurring blackouts, LUMA, tax incentives for outside investors, rising property costs and Puerto Rican residents being pushed out of places where they had lived for years.

#98One woman described being told to leave a building where she had lived for more than two decades.

#99Bad Bunny could have spent twenty minutes explaining Puerto Rico to the world himself.

#100Instead, he turned over the screen.

#101People who arrived for one of the planet’s biggest pop stars suddenly found themselves watching a Puerto Rican journalist and Puerto Rican residents describe what was happening around them.

#102The title was simple:

#103“People live here.”

#104This is where the story gets less clean.

#105If Bad Bunny is turned into a perfect political hero, his actual career stops making sense.

#106By 2023, fame had become a problem of its own.

#107In the Dominican Republic, a woman walked beside him while holding a phone close to his face.

#108Bad Bunny grabbed the phone and threw it away.

#109The clip spread everywhere.

#110He was heavily criticized.

#111His explanation was that somebody who approached him to say hello or have a conversation would receive respect, but putting a phone directly in his face was not, to him, a respectful interaction.

#112The irony was hard to miss.

#113Before fame, he had wanted strangers to discover the music coming out of his room.

#114Now strangers were documenting him constantly.

#115At times, it felt as though everyone had become a paparazzo.

#116His relationship with Kendall Jenner created another kind of tension. Some Latino and Puerto Rican fans treated his private life as a test of the identity he had represented so publicly.

#117Bad Bunny rejected the idea that supporting his culture meant surrendering his personal life to the public.

#118He also spent time in Los Angeles.

#119He acted in Hollywood films.

#120He entered fashion spaces and WWE.

#121And he resisted being treated as a model representative for every Latino or every Puerto Rican.

#122His 2023 album, “Nadie Sabe Lo Que Va a Pasar Mañana,” was not a steadily more political follow-up to “Un Verano Sin Ti.”

#123It was full of fame, wealth, defensiveness, scrutiny and a return to trap.

#124Success had changed him.

#125It made him angrier in some moments, more guarded in others.

#126That makes the title of his next album much stranger.

#127“DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS.”

#128I should have taken more photos.

#129Only a couple of years earlier, Bad Bunny had been at the center of a global argument about a fan’s phone.

#130Now he was thinking differently about pictures.

#131He had always believed he had a strong memory.

#132But what if one day the moments he thought he would remember forever became less clear?

#133A photograph could be annoying when someone forced a camera into his face.

#134It could also be proof that a moment had once existed.

#135That idea reached beyond photographs.

#136One day he was driving around Ocean Park in Puerto Rico.

#137He was deeply sad and crying.

#138Outside, tourists were having a beautiful day.

#139People were dancing.

#140Playing volleyball.

#141Taking selfies against the sunset.

#142Looking at them, he began thinking about the difference between visiting a place and living inside it.

#143A tourist could enjoy the beaches, weather and most beautiful parts of Puerto Rico, then leave without knowing the anxiety of people who lived there every day.

#144And somehow that thought became personal.

#145A person could enter his life the same way.

#146They could experience the beautiful parts, enjoy the best moments, then leave without fully knowing his fear, sadness or insecurity.

#147Out of that collision came “TURiSTA.”

#148A relationship and the politics of tourism could now exist inside the same metaphor.

#149On “DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS,” Bad Bunny did not smooth Puerto Rico into a generic backdrop.

#150He moved further in.

#151Salsa, plena and jíbaro traditions sat beside reggaetón and electronic production.

#152Longtime collaborators including La Paciencia and Tainy remained important.

#153Tainy worked in Puerto Rico, visited his mother’s home, drove routes tied to his childhood and thought about music that had surrounded him long before either became internationally famous.

#154Bad Bunny went into family history too.

#155“LA MuDANZA” reaches back to how his parents met.

#156“LO QUE LE PASÓ A HAWAii” looks the other way: toward a possible future in which Puerto Rico is increasingly reshaped for tourism and outside capital while people born there lose the ability to remain.

#157Bad Bunny later described the project as something he had begun with Puerto Rico and Puerto Ricans in mind.

#158That is what makes its global success so peculiar.

#159At the point when he had every incentive to make his music broader and less local, he made one of his most specifically Puerto Rican albums.

#160After releasing the album, Bad Bunny did not immediately carry it through a giant U.S. stadium tour.

#161He stayed in San Juan.

#162The residency was called “No Me Quiero Ir de Aquí.”

#163I don’t want to leave here.

#164It ultimately ran for 31 shows at the Coliseo de Puerto Rico.

#165The first nine dates were set aside so Puerto Rico residents could get access first.

#166Onstage was “La Casita,” a house that evoked everyday Puerto Rican life.

#167Then, once the residency opened more broadly, visitors began flying into the island for him.

#168Hotels felt the effect.

#169Businesses felt it.

#170There were competing estimates of the total economic impact, so reducing the residency to one spectacular dollar figure would be misleading.

#171But actual spending data showed a real shift: Visa spending in San Juan rose by roughly 20 percent over comparable periods as the residency unfolded.

#172The direction had reversed.

#173At the beginning, Benito needed SoundCloud, USB drives and DJs to get a song out of Puerto Rico.

#174Now the audience was coming into Puerto Rico to hear him.

#175His following world tour also left the U.S. mainland off the schedule.

#176Bad Bunny said that was not because he disliked the United States. He had already performed there repeatedly.

#177One concern he described was ICE.

#178He worried that people coming to his concerts could encounter immigration enforcement outside the venues.

#179By then, language, place and politics were not separate questions in his career.

#180They could shape where he performed at all.

#181There is a tempting version of this story in which Bad Bunny arrives and suddenly teaches the United States to listen to Spanish-language music.

#182That version is wrong.

#183Tego Calderón was already there.

#184Daddy Yankee and “Gasolina” had already carried Puerto Rican reggaetón around the world.

#185Calle 13 and Residente had already shown that Puerto Rican urban music could be political.

#186When Bad Bunny was beginning to break through, Luis Fonsi and Daddy Yankee had “Despacito,” while J Balvin had “Mi Gente.”

#187And the structure of the industry itself was changing.

#188SoundCloud, YouTube and Spotify weakened some old borders created by radio formats and physical distribution.

#189Bad Bunny did not invent that transition.

#190He arrived as it was accelerating.

#191But calling him merely lucky enough to ride the wave misses something too.

#192He repeatedly pushed Spanish-language releases into spaces that had once treated Spanish music as a separate market.

#193An all-Spanish album could lead the Billboard 200.

#194A Spanish-language artist could repeatedly become the most-streamed musician in the world.

#195He could keep moving into the center of U.S. pop culture without first producing the English-language reinvention once expected of Latin stars.

#196He did not create the road.

#197He kept expanding what seemed possible at the far end of it.

#198On February 1, 2026, “DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS” won the Grammy for Album of the Year.

#199It became the first Spanish-language album to win the award.

#200The striking part was not only the language.

#201It was which album had done it.

#202This was not a record that minimized Puerto Rico so an English-speaking audience would find it easier to understand.

#203It was filled with Puerto Rican musical traditions, family memory, migration, tourism, displacement and anxiety about the island’s future.

#204The boy who once hurried into the car hoping to catch Tego Calderón on the radio had made one of his most Puerto Rican records.

#205And it had won the biggest Grammy.

#206Exactly one week later came another stage.

#207February 8, 2026.

#208Super Bowl LX.

#209Bad Bunny’s halftime show did not open inside an anonymous futuristic spectacle.

#210It opened in a sugarcane field.

#211Around him were images of Puerto Rican everyday life.

#212Dominoes.

#213Street vendors.

#214People gathering.

#215“La Casita,” brought from the San Juan residency into the stadium.

#216And on the back of Bad Bunny’s jersey was not BAD BUNNY.

#217It was OCASIO.

#218His mother’s surname.

#219The same mother who once had to wake him if he wanted to hear Tego on the radio.

#220Now her name was on his back at one of the biggest entertainment events in the United States.

#221The performance was overwhelmingly in Spanish.

#222“El Apagón” was there.

#223Ricky Martin appeared for “LO QUE LE PASÓ A HAWAii.”

#224When Lady Gaga joined him, the stage did not need to become more conventionally English-language pop.

#225Her “Die With a Smile” was reshaped as salsa.

#226Near the end, Bad Bunny broadened the word “America” beyond the United States alone, naming countries across the Americas and the Caribbean.

#227Puerto Rico was there too.

#228The stadium displayed:

#229“Together, We Are America.”

#230Ten years earlier, the direction of travel had been entirely different.

#231Benito made songs in a room in Puerto Rico and pushed them onto SoundCloud.

#232A friend carried his music to DJs on USB drives.

#233When the industry finally called, he disappeared into an Econo bathroom so he could answer without getting in trouble at work.

#234Back then, his music had to find a way out.

#235Then Drake sang in Spanish.

#236Fans from around the world flew to San Juan.

#237Lady Gaga’s song became salsa.

#238A Super Bowl field briefly became a Puerto Rican house and sugarcane landscape.

#239Bad Bunny is not somebody who became globally famous without ever leaving Puerto Rico.

#240He left.

#241He lived elsewhere.

#242He entered Hollywood, high fashion and global celebrity culture.

#243Fame changed him, and sometimes it created ugly collisions with the people who loved him.

#244But he kept returning.

#245In language.

#246In music.

#247In family stories.

#248In politics.

#249And sometimes physically, when Puerto Rico itself was in crisis.

#250By one of the highest points of his career, none of that needed to be hidden for the world to watch.

#251The Benito who once took industry calls in a supermarket bathroom had needed to close the door.

#252Ten years later, Bad Bunny stood before more than a hundred million viewers.

#253This time there was no reason to hide the Spanish.

#254No reason to hide Ocasio.

#255No reason to hide Puerto Rico.

#256He was still here.

#257As a child, Benito rushed to the car hoping to catch Tego Calderón on the radio. Years later, even at the Super Bowl, Bad Bunny reached back toward the musical generation that had come before him. How did Tego Calderón bring Afro-Puerto Rican identity and social consciousness into reggaetón long before Bad Bunny became its biggest global star?