Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl Moment and Puerto Rico’s Story (Full Transcript)

[00:00:00] Speaker 1: Bad Bunny is one of the world's biggest stars.

[00:00:04] Speaker 2: Before I say, thanks to God, I'm going to say, eyes out. And he's also one of the most political. We're not savage, we're not animals, we're not aliens, we are humans and we are Americans.

[00:00:25] Speaker 1: Is he going to use the biggest stage in America this Sunday to take a stand against the Trump administration?

[00:00:32] Speaker 3: Why are so many MAGA supporters angry that the Spanish-language singer has been chosen to play the Super Bowl halftime show?

[00:00:40] Speaker 1: From the BBC, I'm Asma Khalid.

[00:00:42] Speaker 3: And I'm Tristan Redmond. And we're in Washington, D.C. And this is The Global Story.

[00:00:51] Speaker 4: My name is Karina. I'm a freelance writer and translator. And in 2020, I profiled Bad Bunny for the cover of New York Times Magazine's Culture Issue.

[00:01:02] Speaker 3: I mean, we're delighted to have you here today because even I, who's a bit of a cultural doofus, Bad Bunny is on my radar. But nonetheless, it's very important for me to understand this cultural phenomenon much better. He was the most streamed artist all across the planet. He just won the top prize at the Grammy Awards. He's about to play the Super Bowl halftime show. Almost everybody on planet Earth has heard of him. But they might not know a lot about him. So can you give us the primer on Bad Bunny, please?

[00:01:35] Speaker 4: I mean, you know, biographically speaking, he was born in 1994 and grew up in a kind of sleepy seaside town called Vegabaja, about 40 minutes from Puerto Rico's capital of San Juan. And from a very humble, typical family. That's how he's described it himself. His dad was a truck driver and his mom was a teacher. And he always loved music. Puerto Rico is a very musically sophisticated culture. That's been true for centuries. And so he grew up listening to classic salsa. He sang in his church choir. But he really came of age and he's part of a generation whose defining genre was reggaeton. And Puerto Rico really became the incubator for this genre of reggaeton. I would say that outside of Puerto Rico, probably some of the most famous artists are, you know, Daddy Yankee, Don Omar. This is party music, you know. It was cultivated in the housing projects of Puerto Rico and distributed often via mixtape. And Bad Bunny has always been really firm about situating reggaeton, which has been criticized in the same way hip-hop has been in the U.S., you know, for its sexual explicitness, for representing crime, poverty, you know, the struggles of working class Puerto Ricans. And he also benefited from the fact that he came of age when these kind of cheap at-home production software was becoming common. So he could make beats with his friends at home on a computer program called Fruity Loops. And he came up through SoundCloud. He was a SoundCloud rapper and specifically made his entry onto the scene through a genre, ascendant genre, called Latin trap, which is obviously connected musically, takes its inspiration from Black Atlanta, from the trap music that we know in the United States. So that was sort of his entry point into the musical world, that sort of DIY, internet-based, you know, once reggaeton had been mainstreamed and kind of anyone anywhere in the world could participate in the making of that genre.

[00:03:48] Speaker 3: OK, so he first starts to be heard of on SoundCloud. But how does he then transfer that success over to the charts?

[00:03:56] Speaker 4: Right. I think that probably the major breakout year for Bad Bunny for an international audience was 2018 with his feature on the Cardi B mega hit, I Like It. Alongside the Colombian reggaeton artist J Balvin. So I would say that's probably when people really started to get people outside of like a Puerto Rican diaspora community, Dominican and Latin diaspora community started to hear about Bunny and notice him. And you know, he it's not just he's a great rapper. He's funny. You know, he has a very distinctive sound to his voice. But it was also has always been about how he occupies space. Even before he started being really explicitly politically outspoken, you know, those he's had a huge impact on style. You recognize those little colored sunglasses, the painted nails, the kind of cheeky gender bending sartorial performance, I think really caught people's eye even before his music came on.

[00:04:58] Speaker 3: Well, Karina, you wrote a beautiful profile of him for The New York Times back in 2020, by which time, as you said, he was already having commercial success by then in the United States and you spent time with him. What was that like?

[00:05:13] Speaker 4: It's impossible to overstate how big Bad Bunny is in Puerto Rico. You can't walk a block without hearing his music. Even the airport was basically Bad Bunny themed. I feel so lucky that I got to speak with him at that moment, which I think was a really key turning point for his career. It was still high pandemic. At first, I met up with them and we went to lunch with a lot of his friends from high school, also his manager, his publicist, at a local Japanese restaurant that he really loves. It used to be an open mic for my friend's poetry series, actually, so I'd been to that space before. I would say the conversation was very playful, but at the same time, he was really willing to think out loud about what was at stake for his generation in Puerto Rico. They didn't really understand what it was, or in Latin America, he heard from Latin Americans saying, oh, you guys are some bootlickers, a kind of disrespect for Puerto Rico's subordinated status in relation to the U.S., and he started to ask himself, OK, why are things the way they are?

[00:06:22] Speaker 1: Karina, you mentioned that Puerto Rico's a territory of the United States, and I think we should just pause for a moment and clarify this to listeners, that Puerto Rico is neither a sovereign state, nor is it a U.S. state, it is a territory of the United States. And so that means that Puerto Ricans are U.S. citizens, but they don't have the right to vote in U.S. elections unless they are on the U.S. mainland.

[00:06:46] Speaker 4: You know, Puerto Rico has had an ambiguous status in relationship to the United States since 1898, when the U.S. acquired Puerto Rico in the midst of really what was a war to acquire a lot of the former colonies of the Spanish Empire. The U.S. has other territories, such as Guam, American Samoa, Puerto Rico isn't the only one, but it's the most populous, it's the nearest, and it's the most prominent. But yeah, I mean, I think that part of the reason people are so attached to Bad Bunny in Puerto Rico is because his career has directly paralleled this period of crisis, sometimes people call it la bella crisis, like the beautiful crisis, you know?

[00:07:34] Speaker 1: In your article in which you profiled him, you track key moments in Puerto Rico and how Bad Bunny responded to them. And one huge moment was when Hurricane Maria hit Puerto Rico. This was in 2017. It was a Category 5 hurricane. It was the strongest to hit the island in, I believe it was 90 some odd years. It killed more than 3,000 people. And at the time, President Trump was in the White House, this was his first term. And Bad Bunny criticized how Donald Trump handled that, didn't he? And I'm curious if you can help us understand what was going on in that moment and why he did indeed criticize President Trump.

[00:08:20] Speaker 4: Yeah, I think you're referring to his appearance on Jimmy Fallon in 2018, like near the end reversary of Maria, when he said, you know, over 3,000 people died. It's a year later, some people still don't have electricity and Trump is in denial. You know, Trump famously threw this roll of paper towels into a press conference after the hurricane.

[00:08:39] Speaker 1: I mean, we should add here that, you know, President Trump claimed at the time that the U.S. government had spent some $91 billion on disaster relief. My understanding is Congress has actually allocated only about half of that, $42.5 billion. And then reports show that only a fraction of that had actually reached the island even several years later. And you know, I went to Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria. I mean, the devastation was still widely apparent throughout the island. And I don't know how things are at this point. Yeah.

[00:09:10] Speaker 4: Yeah. It's still legible. I mean, there are still streetlights that don't work from the hurricane nearly 10 years ago. The island is permanently marked by that disaster and the bungling of the recovery. You know, there are infamous photographs of, you know, huge trucks full of bottles of water miles from where people had nothing potable to drink in the mountains. So, you know, Bad Bunny did name Trump's name, but he has also been really consistent in his criticism of the Puerto Rican government's handling of the storm. He was really, like, willing to think out loud about, like, what was at stake for his generation in Puerto Rico, kind of what the impact of the hurricane had been. In 2019, he'd gone to his first street protest ever, which was part of these massive protests of the summer of 2019 in Puerto Rico. One in three Puerto Ricans participated. That's crazy level of participation.

[00:10:06] Speaker 3: What were they protesting about?

[00:10:08] Speaker 4: They were protesting a chat that had leaked between the governor and some of his cronies that revealed him and some of his collaborators kind of disrespecting many, many sectors of Puerto Rican society, women, gay people, and especially the dead of Puerto Rico, the dead resulting from Hurricane Maria. And they were celebrating the notion of a Puerto Rico without Puerto Ricans and took also the kind of, like, the opportunity of disaster capitalism to privatize a lot of Puerto Rico's infrastructure, selling the electric grid to a Canadian company that's been an absolute disaster, constant blackouts. Bad Bunny even has an entire song called The Blackout, right, that comments on this kind of infrastructure failure, or he has a love song on the most recent album about potholes. So you know, part of the texture of Puerto Rican daily life is this neglect, you know, that has, you know, its root cause in the status of Puerto Rico not having autonomy over its own future. And so his music is a kind of archive of this really special, difficult and important period in Puerto Rican history.

[00:11:27] Speaker 3: Karina, we want to fast forward a little bit to 2025. So back in January of that year, Bad Bunny brought out his latest album, Debi Tirar Mas Fotos. I wish I'd taken more photos. Is that the correct translation? I should have taken more photos. And it's been seen as a love letter to Puerto Rico. Why is it called that? And what does he talk about on the album?

[00:11:55] Speaker 4: Yeah, I mean, I think it's really about what it means to live in the present and value where you are and who you are with. I think one of the most sort of telling viral moments in the wake of the album was seeing people in Gaza, the TikTok trend of posting photographs of Gaza prior to the Israeli bombardment of how the city looked when people were eating, going to the beach, gathering, dancing, laughing, spending time with family, people wishing they had taken more photos of the life that they had lost. And there was also another viral TikTok trend of Latin Americans posting family photographs like to the tune of Debi Tirar Mas Fotos. And these are people who maybe only have three or four photographs that people have preserved in their pocket through really difficult journeys of migration. And so I think it's about honoring and keeping alive some of those ties to our homeland and the people that we love. But it's also about what does it mean to use that material creatively? So when he is doing his own version of a folkloric Puerto Rican genre like plena, what does it mean for that to sound totally modern? You know, this isn't about honoring tradition in a super faithful, conservative way. It's about what we do with what we inherit and how we can make it work for the challenges of the present.

[00:13:35] Speaker 1: I used to work at NPR and he performed it at the Tiny Desk concert. I was there. It was amazing. I don't speak really a lick of Spanish. We were all jamming to it. And Karina, that is what strikes me about Bad Bunny's music, is that it is so widely resonant with an audience of people, certainly, as you say, in Spanish-speaking countries, but also amongst people here in the United States, Europe. You mentioned Gaza. Elsewhere, people who don't necessarily know Spanish. We just saw him win Album of the Year at the Grammys. So what is it, in your view, about the music that makes it resonate so widely?

[00:14:10] Speaker 4: I think when we're talking about this album in particular, we're talking about the magic of call-and-response.

[00:14:16] Speaker 1: Oh, yeah. That happened at the Tiny Desk, yes.

[00:14:19] Speaker 4: It happened at the Tiny Desk. It happened even with Trevor Noah, when Trevor Noah brought in the horns at the Grammy audience and you see SZA in the back being like, Déjame tirar mis fotos. Yeah. You know? And these are really old technologies, really, I would say, the oldest technology. This is what enslaved African people brought over. These are very, very old rhythms, and they're sticky for a reason. They've been effective carriers of culture for hundreds of years. And Puerto Rican music is Caribbean music, is Black music. And those drums, the call reaches you, and it reaches you in a really deep place. And in Puerto Rico, genres like plena and also the Afro-Puerto Rican genre of bomba is really, that's the fundamental unit. And it's something that's really hard to scale, you know? Déjame tirar mis fotos, the album was recorded live. It's the first of Bad Bunny's albums recorded live. And he assembled this amazing band of young Puerto Rican musicians from public music schools that he's been calling los sobrinos, the nieces and nephews. And you know, so you can hear him really invoking that very local practice of like, you know, you need to be in hearing distance of the singer in order to be able to sing it back. And his proposition with this tour, with the Super Bowl, is like, is it possible to take that magic that's based on like a really kind of intimate, vernacular form and to scale it globally? And I think there are some contradictions to that, but it's also a really exciting ambition.

[00:16:03] Speaker 3: Well, that's interesting. So it's specifically about performer and audience being in quite close contact. Because he started this world tour, didn't he, with a 31-date residency in San Juan in Puerto Rico. How impactful and how big of a deal was that in Puerto Rico?

[00:16:21] Speaker 4: There are different ways to calculate it. Some economists have estimated that the residency brought over $176 million to Puerto Rico, which obviously is nothing to sneeze at. And Bad Bunny has been very deliberate about partnering with indie makers, musicians, you know, whether it's costumes or set designers, or, you know, the plena musicians he's been collaborating with, Los Pleneros de la Cresta, and he's really urged people to shop local when they were visiting for the concert, all of that. But still, at the end of the day, this is a visitor economy. This is a version of tourism, right? Which is not, economists all agree that tourism is not a sustainable basis for an economy. Puerto Rico became like Bad Bunny land for all of that summer. It was, you know, the corporate tie-ins were crazy. You could go to a church's chicken was done up like a little, you know, roadside rural Puerto Rican shack. Like, some of it I found to be, like, quite cringe, right? But there was also a kind of euphoria to all participating in this album that does, as I said, invite participation and that sort of tries to hand itself back over to the Puerto Rican people. I did go to the residency in September once it had opened up to non-residents of Puerto Rico. My mother's family is Puerto Rican, but I grew up in the U.S. and I thought, you know, I'm going to be good and do what he says and go during the period that's open to non-residents of the archipelago. It was an amazing show. But at the same time, you know, a stadium concert, no matter how wonderful, is never going to have the same kind of frisson and spark as a, like, 75-person, you know, street party or family party. So I do think that, you know, the most magical part of Puerto Rican music, as he says in one of his songs, you know, the best of us nobody saw.

[00:18:29] Speaker 1: Bad Bunny has been singing. You mentioned his residency there in Puerto Rico, but crucially, he has not been playing any dates, any concerts here in the United States. He said in an interview back in September that he was worried about ICE agents being outside his concerts if he held them here in the U.S. mainland. But then also, you know, it was announced that he would be the Super Bowl halftime artist and he will be performing in California on Sunday to a huge audience, not just to people in the stadium, right, but huge audiences around the world expected to tune in. And I want to understand from you why he decided to take that opportunity.

[00:19:15] Speaker 4: Yeah, I mean, I think that quote about ICE, I've always kind of taken that with a grain of salt because ICE is also very active in Puerto Rico, where there are also migrants, especially from the Dominican Republic. So it was also true that ICE could be present there. ICE has been very active in San Juan, San Torce. I think there are other reasons he decided not to perform in the U.S. and that it was more perhaps symbolic than actually an issue of safety. I think he was really interested in cultivating a kind of pan-Latin American, re-centering the Americas away from the United States. And in Latin America, he did so many beautiful, symbolic things on the tour, you know. And you know, in Colombia, he gave a speech about how much Puerto Ricans admire Colombia's sovereignty and how it's inspiring, you know, for Puerto Ricans and their journey to sovereignty. In the Dominican Republic, he celebrated the brotherhood between Puerto Rico and DR that has been ongoing for his whole lifetime. So I think it's a lot more about cultivating Latin American solidarity than it is about the U.S. With that in mind, were you surprised that he decided to take on the chance to perform at the Super Bowl halftime show?

[00:20:30] Speaker 1: I mean, football, American football, is an American sport with not a huge, you know, necessarily following amongst people who play the sport elsewhere.

[00:20:39] Speaker 4: Puerto Rico is all about baseball and basketball, so definitely football isn't the main thing. I mean, this man has always wanted to be famous. You don't get to be this big, you know, without wanting to be that big. You know, Bad Bunny is playing the game of stardom, saying yes to the NFL. He's appearing on SNL. You know, this is not someone who's conducting a boycott of the U.S. entertainment system. So it's not surprising at all to me that he would seize on this opportunity.

[00:21:08] Speaker 3: Well, Karina, the NFL's choice of putting Bad Bunny in the Super Bowl halftime show has definitely angered some people in MAGA world. So much so that Turning Point USA, which is the late Charlie Kirk's organization, has organized an alternative halftime show for people who didn't want to watch what they thought was too politically tinged a performance maybe from Bad Bunny, because that's what some of the critics have said. Is having a Spanish-speaking halftime artist at the Super Bowl, I mean, there are two ways of looking at it. Is it something that might bring Americans together at a particular moment of social division in the country? Or is it a choice that risks deepening divisions in the U.S. by alienating some people?

[00:21:59] Speaker 4: You know, Bad Bunny is not the first halftime performer that conservatives have been angry about. They were angry about Beyonce. They were angry about Rihanna. They were angry about Kendrick Lamar. So that's not new. I would also say that, you know, these are huge artists and, you know, Bad Bunny, as you said, is the biggest artist in the world. So I think also the people doing the programming are thinking about, OK, maybe we've got the conservatives on lock to tune into the game. Maybe the halftime show is an opportunity to bring in the rest of the audience that isn't interested in football. And that's an economic consideration and an entertainment consideration as much as it is artistic or political. So I do think, of course, it's political in the way that it will be received. But, you know, Latinos have been here, which is not to say that we all need to identify as Americans, but Latinidad, Caribbean people, people from Central and South America have been part of the American mix always.

[00:22:58] Speaker 1: I hear what you're saying. And yet it strikes me that this is happening in this cultural context in this time in which we saw President Trump last year put forth an executive order designating English as the official language. Now, some would say that that was a symbolic move, but it's the context and the cultural context in which we're living in. And so that makes me wonder, what might we expect from Bad Bunny on Sunday?

[00:23:21] Speaker 4: Yeah, I mean, we can 100 percent expect 100 percent Spanish language songs because that's the music that he makes, right? And standing in that identity, as you've said, is political and a choice he's made throughout his career. I think we've also saw we saw at the Grammys him say explicitly ice out. I know that he'll say something or do something that kind of amplifies the dignity of migrants and of people from Latin America, for sure. I think what I'm most curious about is will he use it as a stage to promote Puerto Rican sovereignty because that's something that has he has articulated explicitly on the lyrics of this most recent album, saying he wants to be buried with the light blue independence flag, you know. So the question is, that's a message that's hard to assimilate to the American dream. Freedom for Puerto Rico and self-determination for Puerto Rico. That's something that really will confront Americans in a place that's hard to reconcile with the pageantry of the Super Bowl.

[00:24:25] Speaker 1: Well, Karina, thank you so much. Thanks for bringing your reporting, your insights, having actually spent time with Bad Bunny. We really appreciate it.

[00:24:32] Speaker 3: Thank you so much, Karina. It was a real pleasure.

[00:24:34] Speaker 4: Thank you so much for having me. Likewise.

[00:24:37] Speaker 1: If you appreciated today's show, The Global Story is also a podcast, and you can find us each weekday on BBC.com or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts.