Scribble

David Rind

00:00:00

This is One Thing, I'm David Rind, and don't feel bad if you don't know much about Bad Bunny, because you're about to.

Vanessa Díaz

00:00:07

We have to kind of grapple with the fact that Latin music, which is performed in Spanish, is mainstream.

David Rind

00:00:15

Why, the star is getting heat for a Super Bowl halftime show that hasn't even happened yet. That's after this, stick around.

Paola Ortiz

00:00:24

I remember, I think it was last year, talking to someone about this. I was like, oh my God, wouldn't it be cool if Bad Bunny would be the halftime at the Super Bowl? But I was, like, nah, that's not gonna happen. That's actually crazy. So when I heard about the announcement, it was just like, oh, we're actually getting in. I'm already planning a little Super Bowl watch party.

David Rind

00:00:47

The announcement from the NFL that Puerto Rican superstar Bad Bunny would headline the Super Bowl next February was a big deal for music fans, but especially for Puerto Ricans, including our own producer, Paolo Ortiz, who was born there and whose family and friends still live there.

Paola Ortiz

00:01:03

It's definitely a very proud moment.

David Rind

00:01:06

And Bad Bunny is really having a moment of his own. He was already one of the most streamed artists on Spotify, but over the weekend, he was on Saturday Night Live for the fifth time. He appeared in two big movies over the summer, including Happy Gilmore 2. He's about to launch a massive world tour. So I wanted to talk to Paolo to better understand why this guy is such a huge star and why he means so much to the people of Puerto Rico. Explain who Bad Bunny is.

Paola Ortiz

00:01:36

Okay, where do I even start? So Bad Bunny is Benito, Benito Antonio Martinez Ocasio. That's, you know, his full name. And he is just like very interesting phenomenon of Puerto Rican music. He's just like so unique compared to other reggaeton artists that we've had before in the sense that he isn't afraid to play with different genres. He isn't a afraid to... Appeal and advocate for the LGBTQ community and stand up for what he believes in and educate himself about the history of Puerto Rico and using that and his music to convey this message, not just to Puerto Rico and not just the Puerto Ricans, but to the whole world.

Isabel Rosales

00:02:23

Puerto Rican superstar Bad Bunny has closed out his sold out residency. A run unlike anything his home island has ever seen.

David Rind

00:02:33

This summer, Bad Bunny played a huge run of concerts in Puerto Rico, 31 in all.

Isabel Rosales

00:02:38

Tourism agency Discover Puerto Rico says around 600,000 visitors have flocked to the island in just two months and more than $200 million pumped into the local economy.

David Rind

00:02:49

The first nine of those shows were exclusively open to island residents, no outsiders allowed.

Paola Ortiz

00:02:59

And it was genuinely such like a magical experience and very emotional as a former resident of Puerto Rico and someone that had to leave without wanting to leave and without knowing that I wasn't gonna go back. Like I cried, I felt very emotional. It was a very proud moment for me to be able to express this pride that I have for my island and to know, you know, like I'm doing this work here and I'm outside of my island, but that doesn't stop me from representing it.

David Rind

00:03:45

'So I have to admit, I grew up listening to a lot of emo and more aggressive music. I listened to a a lot of country-tinged indie rock these days because I'm above 30 and I just have to be a stereotype. I just haven't listened to a lot Bad Bunny's music or artists like him. So what should I know about the music itself?

'Bad Bunny - EoO

00:04:03

Ella viene por ahí y nunca llega sola. Ella nunca llega sola...(She's coming around and she never shows up alone...)

Paola Ortiz

00:04:07

I mean, if you like anything you can dance to, I think you're gonna like Bad Bunny. It's a mix of trap. It's mix of bomba plena salsa. Like there's literally any Latin Caribbean genre you can think about is gonna be in there.

'Bad Bunny - LA MuDANZA

00:04:30

De aquí nadie me saca, De aquí yo no me muevo. (No one'll kick me out of here, I'm not going anywhere. Tell them this is my home...)

Paola Ortiz

00:04:35

So for example, there's this one song on his most recent album, Debí Tirar Más Fotos called La Mudanza. And it's a salsa song and it kind of starts off with some spoken word type of poetry of Bad Bunny going back in his family tree and talking about how his parents met and they met through, you know, someone asking his dad to help him with a move.

'Bad Bunny - LA MuDANZA

00:05:02

Un día Tonito lo invitó pa hacer una mudanza. Pa buscarse alguito, par de pesos, pa algo alcanza. Gracias a Dios que ese día no estaba busy. Porque en la mudanza fue donde conoció a Lysy. (One day, Tonito invited him to help with a move. To earn a little something, a few bucks to get by. Thank God he wasn't busy that day. 'Cause during that move, he met Lysy)

Paola Ortiz

00:05:12

And right before the song starts, there's like this collage of like motorbikes and four tracks like revving up their engines. And then he says, un aplauso pa' mami y papi porque me la rompieron. And it basically translates to a round of applause for mom and dad because they really did that. So it's a song that's really about pride and, you know, just being from Puerto Rico.

'Bad Bunny - LA MuDANZA

00:05:43

Que fun sueno que yo.

Paola Ortiz

00:05:46

There's another song called Lo Que Le Paso Hawaii. It translates to What Happened to Hawaii. And it's a song that really, it's some reflection of how much Puerto Rico has suffered at the hands of gentrification, colonialism.

'Bad Bunny - LO QUE LE PASÓ HAWAii

00:06:06

Quieren quitarme el río y también la playa. Quieren al barrio mío y que abuelita se vaya.No, no suelte' la bandera. (They want to take the river away from me and the beach too They want my neighborhood and for grandma to go. No, don't let go of the flag...)

Paola Ortiz

00:06:18

And how that happened to Hawaii and now Hawaii has become this huge like tourism escapade and the locals are really struggling to really hold on to their culture.

David Rind

00:06:34

Paula says his political messages are a key part of his popularity and those have only increased in recent years.

Tony Hinchliffe

00:06:41

There's a lot going on. Like, I don't know if you guys know this, but there's literally a floating island of garbage in the middle of the ocean right now. Yeah, I think it's called Puerto Rico.

David Rind

00:06:52

After the comedian Tony Hinchcliffe made that offensive joke at a rally for President Donald Trump last October, Bad Bunny signaled his support for Kamala Harris and later told the New York Times he wasn't quite sure what to make of the fact that some Latino voters moved to the right in the election.

Bad Bunny

00:07:08

I just know that there's always be people that gonna protect and defend our country and our culture and that's the people that I wanna have around me.

David Rind

00:07:27

Well, now with Trump back in office, he hasn't stopped speaking out and some of Trump's supporters are taking notice.

Vanessa Díaz

00:07:34

I think what we see is really just a lot of the repetition of this idea of Latinos as foreigners, regardless of their citizenship status.

David Rind

00:07:45

When we come back, I'm gonna call up someone who studies Bad Bunny for a living.

Vanessa Díaz

00:07:55

I think a lot of us thought 2022, 2023 was like the Bad Bunny era and then he just proved us wrong because 2025 is, if this is not the year of Bad Bunny, I just like cannot imagine what is.

David Rind

00:08:12

'This is Vanessa Diaz. She's an Associate Professor of Chicano Chicana Latina Latino Studies at Loyola Marymount University, where she teaches a whole class on Bad Bunny. She also co-founded a website called the Bad Bunny Syllabus that other educators can use.

Vanessa Díaz

00:08:28

'And I also am the co-author of the forthcoming book P F***ing Erre, How Bad Bunny Became the Global Voice of Puerto Rican Resistance.

David Rind

00:08:36

So fair to say you know a lot about Bad Bunny.

Vanessa Díaz

00:08:40

I think I'm very well acquainted with the study of Benito Martinez Ocasio.

David Rind

00:08:53

So it's been a few days since the NFL made this announcement that he was going to be playing the halftime show at the Super Bowl. Can you just describe some of the backlash that we've heard to that?

Vanessa Díaz

00:09:04

So a lot of the backlash that we're seeing is people who are outraged over the fact that this is a Spanish language artist, Bad Bunny's music, while it has inflections of English words and Puerto Rican Spanish that has a lot English incorporated into it. He is a spanish language artist. That is his primary language. And so people are upset that the Super Bowl halftime will be in Spanish.

Abby Phillip

00:09:32

'Conservative podcaster Benny Johnson complained that Bad Bunny doesn't have any songs in English. And right-wing commentator Jack Posovic suggested that Obama is somehow to blame.

Vanessa Díaz

00:09:43

They perceive this person to not be American, which is just a huge misconception. Bad Bunny's an American citizen. He is from the territory of Puerto Rico, which is owned by the U.S. He was born an American citizens.

Megyn Kelly

00:09:56

'You tell me whether this is an active middle finger to all of MAGA and the right-wing by putting this guy who likes to dress in women's dresses and who hates the United States so much he won't come here because he's worried about ICE raiding his concert.

Vanessa Díaz

00:10:14

And so I think what we see is really just a lot of the repetition of this idea of Latinos as foreigners regardless of their citizenship status. We're in a really heightened moment where Latinos are being targeted, the Spanish language is being targeted. Things like the Supreme Court ruling make it so that profiling someone as an undocumented person based solely on speaking Spanish is part of what is being used to target our communities. And so I think that. It's striking the chord for a lot of conservatives who just don't see him as American despite the fact that he's an American citizen and his music is massively popular, not just all over the globe, but really in the U.S. Too.

David Rind

00:10:58

'Right, but he has been very critical of the Trump administration and its immigration policy. He told ID Magazine that he was skipping the mainland U.S. On his upcoming tour in part because he was afraid ICE would target his concerts. He called them effing ICE in his words. And just the other day, I saw the Department of Homeland Security advisor Corey Lewandowski telling right-wing podcaster Benny Johnson that the Super Bowl would not be a safe haven.

Corey Lewandowski

00:11:24

Look, if there are illegal aliens, I don't care if it's a concert for Johnny Smith or Bad Bunny or anybody else, we're going to do enforcement everywhere because we are going to make Americans safe. That is a directive from the president. Now we just say.

David Rind

00:11:35

Now we just say DHS always has a presence at the Super Bowl. We've asked them if it'll be any larger than normal this year, but it does seem clear that Trump is hanging all over this.

Vanessa Díaz

00:11:45

Yeah, he's been a vocal critic of Donald Trump since his first administration. And that had much to do with the horrifying response or lack of response to Hurricane Maria that ravaged Puerto Rico. And so he was rightfully, I think, critiquing the negligence that happened during that time in his homeland. And in terms of the ICE commentary, yeah, I that. A lot of folks are outraged over what has been happening in our Latino communities. And so for him to say that can be confusing, right? Because he did 31 shows in Puerto Rico, which is a US territory. But even though Puerto Rico has had some ICE raids, historically it has been targeted a lot less than other. Major US cities. And so I think it was a very deliberate decision to say, I'm gonna have this residency here and then I'm going to try to minimize having other folks exposed to the potential dangers of this time.

David Rind

00:12:45

'When it comes to the NFL part of this, it's worth remembering that Jay-Z and his production company, Rock Nation, are actually in charge of producing the halftime show. And that arrangement itself was born out of controversy when Colin Kaepernick, the San Francisco 49ers quarterback, he kneeled during the national anthem to protest police brutality. He was released. He never found another job. There were calls for a boycott. So the NFL brought in Jay-z to kind of be a social justice ambassador in that way. But still, the NFL could have seen this backlash coming, because Bad Bunny has been really upfront about his politics and his feeling towards the Trump administration. So why in your mind was this a risk worth taking for the league?

Vanessa Díaz

00:13:29

'Well, if I could speak to some of the earlier things you said, I think absolutely right. We know that the NFL has silenced protest and discouraged protest. And so lots of different folks at different moments have said, we're not sure that we want to be involved in this kind of institutional space. Certainly bringing in Jay-Z led to things like Kendrick's really political performance. And there was controversy around Kendrick performance. Years prior, there was controversy around Beyonce's performance that was also overly political. Of course, Bad Bunny's a public figure. There are no secrets here. It was a bold choice. It was controversial choice, but it's also a choice that makes sense when you're an organization that is looking for profit. Bad Bunny is massive. He has contracts with several massive brands. So they're thinking about ads. They're thinking global audiences watching around the world and they know that he's gonna bring that in.

David Rind

00:14:26

And the NFL is trying to expand its audience, right? It's playing games in all of these foreign countries like Brazil, Germany, Ireland, and Bad Bunny has a huge international following, right.

Vanessa Díaz

00:14:41

Absolutely. I mean, Bad Bunny has become massively popular in Brazil too. He sold out every single show in Europe. The reach is so striking. And again, what we understand to be mainstream has always been centered around a white English sort of suburban dominant audience. And that's really not realistic. And so I think we have to kind of grapple with the fact that Latin music, which is performed in Spanish, is mainstream. And so the things that other artists have had to overcome, right, like the Latin boom of the late 90s, early 2000s, or people like Shakira and Mark Anthony, and all these folks had to cross over into the mainstream in English. That is not the case anymore.

David Rind

00:15:34

So that's part of why the reaction has been so extreme because he is someone who is doing it in an authentic kind of way.

Vanessa Díaz

00:15:42

Absolutely. I mean, I think that even his performance at the 2023 Grammys, where he was nominated for album of the year, first time in history, a fully Spanish language album was nominated for album the year. And the network couldn't even get the captioning right for his songs or his speeches, right.

David Rind

00:15:59

'Yeah, this is the meme I've seen online. Yeah, speaking in non-English. Yeah, speaking in non-English,

Vanessa Díaz

00:16:04

singing in non English, right. It is the epitome of the perception that it's either English or it's nothing. It's either mainstream white American culture or it is nothing. And that's just not real.

David Rind

00:16:19

Well, and we've seen plenty of artists work political messages into their songs. Sometimes it doesn't play super well, but he seems to be only getting more popular as he becomes more political. Why do you think that is?

Vanessa Díaz

00:16:31

I think that one of the things about that is part of his popularity is around his perceived authenticity, right. That like, we really get the like real bad bunny. And so I think there's like an awareness that feels really authentic that resonates with people so that when he's speaking out about a particular cause, it feels very genuine. And he builds on this super long history of specifically Puerto Rican music as resistance. And that's really what our book is about as well is looking at his music as resistance.

David Rind

00:17:04

Right, but if you'll allow me to be cynical for just a second, you talk about the resistance in his songs, but we're talking about the NFL and Apple music here. You know, he does Hollywood movies. He has sponsorship deals. Like he's playing the game of American capitalism, right. He's very much operating inside the system. I know he gives a lot back to Puerto Rico, but there's still money at the heart of this.

Vanessa Díaz

00:17:30

Well, I will say that Apple music as a company, yeah, corporations, you know, they're about making money, but Apple music has been such an important platform in terms of elevating Latin music from the beginning. So they were a huge part of the growth of Bad Bunny's career. Corporations are corporations, but corporations also have power. No one person can do everything, and Bad Bunny's certainly not gonna get everything right every time, but he has done a lot and none of the things that he's done go away. And I think given what we know about him as an artist, that he will find a way to get his messaging into the Super Bowl show one way or another. And I'm really excited to see what happens.

David Rind

00:18:16

Well, Vanessa, thanks very much for the time. I appreciate it.

Vanessa Díaz

00:18:19

Thanks, David.

David Rind

00:18:23

That's all for us today. Thank you for listening. If it's your first time here, welcome. Make sure you follow the show so it pops in your feed every Wednesday and Sunday and leave a rating and a review wherever you're listening. It takes about 30 seconds and helps other people find the show. We'll be back on Wednesday. I'll talk to you then.

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