How Bad Bunny Did It

The Super Bowl headliner doesnt care if you understand his lyrics.

- By Spencer Kornhaber

A few years ago, I visited my childhood home and heard a surprising sound: the bright and bouncy music of the Puerto Rican rapper Bad Bunny. My parents are white Baby Boomers who speak no Spanish and have never shown a taste for hip-hop, but they'd somehow gotten into Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio, whose sex-and-rum-drenched lyrics they couldn't begin to decipher. The vector of transmission appeared to be the streaming service hooked to their smart speakers. When in need of a pick-me-up, Mom would shout, “Alexa, play Bad Bunny,” and make her Southern California kitchen sound like a San Juan nightclub.

Stories like this help explain how Bad Bunny has reached across language barriers to dominate pop domestically and abroad. Since uploading his first single in 2016, he’s broken U.S. sales records and claimed the title of the most streamed artist on Spotify in four separate years. His popularity, high standing with critics, and duration of success make him a peer—and sometimes a better-selling one—of such contemporary titans as Taylor Swift, Beyoncé, and Kendrick Lamar. Like them, he’s figured out that 21st-century-pop success is achieved by assembling excitingly hybrid sounds around an iron core of identity. In his case, that means performing almost exclusively in Spanish.

Many Latin American singers have enjoyed crossover fame before, but none has done it in the way Bad Bunny has, or at the same scale. Before streaming, they couldn’t: Major-market radio DJs, record-label execs, and the media still decided what constituted the American mainstream, and conventional wisdom said that audiences preferred music whose lyrics they could understand. Ricky Martin, Enrique Iglesias, and Shakira cracked U.S. markets only after they started singing in English. Rare exceptions, such as “Macarena,” by Los del Río, didn’t even confer name recognition upon their creators.