Chapter 1: What recent achievements has Bad Bunny celebrated?
It's been a huge week for Bad Bunny. Last Sunday, he made history by winning Album of the Year, a first for a Spanish-language album.
I want to dedicate this award to all the people that had to leave their homeland, their country to follow their dreams.
This Sunday, he'll be performing at the Super Bowl halftime show.
It might be your first chance to see Bad Bunny perform this album.
That is, unless you were one of the lucky few who got to see him perform in Puerto Rico last summer. He spent the summer doing a 30-show residency celebrating the island and Puerto Rican identity and history. So to help you prepare for this weekend's show, we wanted to bring back an episode from last summer, How Bad Bunny Made Puerto Rico the Center of the Universe.
Coming up on Today Explained from Vox.
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Están escuchando a Hoy Explicado. You're listening to Today Explained. My name is Andrea Gonzalez Ramirez. I'm a senior writer at The Cut, and I grew up in Puerto Rico. I would say it's like one of the biggest cultural events that we've seen, I think, in the island.
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Chapter 2: How did Bad Bunny's concert residency celebrate Puerto Rican culture?
In the main stage, he kind of recreated rural Puerto Rico. And then the second stage is a pink casita that resembles a lot of homes in Puerto Rico. And that's where, like, the really filthy perreo happens. Like, that area is reserved for the songs that you would probably not play to your parents because they're so, so filthy. Yeah. I was pretty high up.
I was in the last, literally the very last row of the top section. Closer to God than Bad Bunny, but you can see everything. And yeah, like it's really incredible because like a lot of people are wearing traditional clothing like pavas or jibara dresses. I was wearing a Roberto Clemente jersey and then
When the music starts, like, basically you get a musical arrangement of his newest song, Alambre Púa. That sounds a lot like bomba and plena, which are two traditional Oregon music genres. And then he comes in with a bunch of like dancers in traditional garbs. And it just, you know, everyone went a little bit crazy when he was on stage. But it really looks like you are dancing.
transported back in time to a Puerto Rico from 100 years ago, but also kind of like what a school performance would look if you celebrated Puerto Rican week, like La Semana de la Puerto Ricanida at school, right? It was insane. I cried, I danced, I laughed. I was very sweaty by the end of it, you know. It was so much fun.
He plays over 30-something songs from his nearly decade-long catalog over three hours. You know, he kind of divided the show in four acts, I would call it. You have that first couple of songs where he's kind of marrying his modern music with some of these traditional musical arrangements. And then you have like a second section, which is almost like an acoustic set.
And that was kind of like the sad bunny came out where he's just like singing a bunch of his most popular songs about heartbreak.
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Chapter 3: What unique experiences did concert-goers have during the residency?
After that, usually like you have a VIP guest or someone from the audience say one of the phrases from one of his new songs, And you have someone saying like, Puerto Rico is something else. And in that section, that's usually you have like the musical guests. And then the last section is kind of like his salsa portion of the evening.
He's dressed very much like Hector Lavoe in the 1970s and has like a live band of like 20 people up there. And it's like incredibly fun. His last two songs are the lead song of the album, and then La Mudanza. And during DTMF, like he's talking about like, oh, I don't want my people to move. And it's like a really, it's like a really moving song.
You had like people hugging over and like, you know, singing with their families. Like there was so much joy. I could not stop crying. Because I think that as someone who left Puerto Rico, it just felt like a level of grief that we carry a lot if you're in the diaspora. And then being there, feeling so at home, I was just like, this is the best thing. And also, I'm so incredibly sad right now.
And I cried throughout the entire song. He wraps up with La Mudanza, and I was still crying throughout. He is saying, like, no one's going to take me out of here. Like, it's a very, it's like a, it's a very fun song. But it's also, I think, as the closer in the album and the closer in the show, There's like a level of defiance and like pride that comes with that song. And it's very emotional.
And I think that once my husband and I walked out, we're coming down the nosebleeds. You had like people chanting, I'm Puerto Rican, just so you know it. It just felt very lovely and empowering to be surrounded by so many of us. And I don't know, I think there was like this sense of community that was like very beautiful and also very fun.
And it kind of like healed me, whatever like trigger I had had two songs prior. Like definitely when we walked out, I was like, oh, I kind of love this a lot.
What does it mean to have one of the biggest artists in the world do an exclusive residency on an island? What's the population of Puerto Rico? I don't even know. Is it like fewer than 5 million people?
Yeah, it's like 3 million people at this point. Like there's 5 million Puerto Ricans living in the U.S., like stateside. It's like a smaller population than many, many states.
Right. What does that mean for the island?
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Chapter 4: How did Bad Bunny incorporate Puerto Rican history into his music?
It's an incredible economic influx. But I think it's also like a political statement in a way. We are an American colony. He very intentionally said that he was not going to tour in the U.S., and instead he was going to do a global tour elsewhere after the residency, right?
So I think it's just like demonstrating his love for Puerto Rico and reminding us that it doesn't matter if we're a tiny island of 3.5 million people or so, that you can do like really impressive art in there too. The concert itself is a love letter to Puerto Rico.
I think it's also a love letter to our generation of Boricuas, people like me are millennials or Gen Z and who grew up in like a very different island from our parents. A lot of experts call us the crisis generation. We've lived through political changes, financial crisis, climate disasters. A lot of us, like me, have left.
So yeah, I think that the show itself was a celebration of who we are and also a way to give people hope that you don't need to leave the island to pursue your dreams or to work for a better Puerto Rico.
Andrea Gonzalez Ramirez's piece in the cut that inspired us is called Letting Go of My Diaspora Grief at the Bad Bunny Residency. You can read and support her work at nymag.com. We're going to hear what exactly Bad Bunny's trying to do in Puerto Rico from a guy who helped him do it when we return on Today Explained.
Over the last several years, AI companies of all shapes and sizes have been desperately trying to get their hands on every bit of available data to make their models better. This week on The Verge Cast, we have the story of how Anthropic destroyed hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of books, and fed them all to Claude.
Plus, we have information on who in tech is in the Epstein files, what's going on with Netflix, whether it's woke, whether it's gonna buy Warner Brothers, and whether Peloton is gonna successfully sell you a treadmill ever again. All that on The Verge Cast, wherever you get podcasts.
My name is Benito.
And I'm very excited to be here on... Today explains Sean Rama's firm here with Jorel Melendez-Badillo, author of Puerto Rico and National History. And he's a Bad Bunny collaborator. Last December, I was on vacation with my family in Portugal.
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Chapter 5: What political messages are embedded in Bad Bunny's songs?
Yes.
Yes.
Tell us about this history. Yeah, absolutely.
So Benito wanted for me to write about the general history of Puerto Rico, but he was also very adamant that there were certain things that he wanted to include, like, for example, the history of surveillance and repression in Puerto Rico throughout the 20th century, the history of colonial governance in Puerto Rico, the history of La Plena and Bomba, which are two Afro-Caribbean rhythms and how it influenced reggaeton.
In addition to the visualizer videos, I also collaborated with Benito in the residency in Puerto Rico. The team wanted me to write about 40 historical texts of Puerto Rican history and Puerto Rican culture itself. So it was an opportunity for me to highlight certain things that don't usually get mentioned in Puerto Rican history, punk bands. Tito Trinidad, our boxer.
And the record for Felix Tito Trinidad, well known to most boxing followers. our basketball team and how they beat the U.S. Dream Team in Athens in 2004.
They were called the Dream Team, but now some people are calling them the Cream Team. Which Benito talks about in one of his songs.
So for me, it was also mind-blowing to see my work not only in Benito's visualizers, but also to be part of the residency in Puerto Rico, which is a historic residency. When this album came out, I remember streaming it all weekend, that first weekend, and feeling like, oh, wow, this is this incredible, comprehensive survey of the history of Puerto Rican music.
You can just tell that from all the genres that are incorporated into the album, but I know nothing, zero, about the history of Puerto Rican music. How did it feel to someone like you, who's dedicated... their life to this. You know, I became an academic and a scholar, the first in my family, because I wanted to take these knowledges out of the ivory tower of academia.
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Chapter 6: How does Bad Bunny's music resonate with the younger generation in Puerto Rico?
What do you think he wanted the world to learn about Puerto Rico by putting out this album? So in a sense, I think that Bad Bunny wanted his listeners to understand the colonial reality of Puerto Rico. You know, when we think about Puerto Rico, it's always joy, it's beaches, it's tropical paradise. But there's other realities, right?
And Benito is, I think, using his platform to highlight the colonial dimension of Puerto Rico to the United States. Puerto Rico has been undergoing a fiscal and political crisis since 2006, and it has exacerbated throughout the last two decades, particularly after 2015, when the U.S.
federal government, in a bipartisan bill, it was a bill created by Republicans and signed by President Obama, created a fiscal oversight board. of unelected members that have more power than the executive and legislative branches in Puerto Rico.
And President Trump fired five of the members of this board, which, you know, triggers a conversation about the colonial relationship of Puerto Rico, that first we cannot elect the president of the United States. And second, that we cannot elect the people in this highly unpopular fiscal oversight board.
And so in a sense, I think that Benito's record, you know, songs like La Mudanza or Lo Que Le Pasó a Hawaii are songs that are talking about the colonial reality that Puerto Ricans are living through. But if we look also at La Mudanza, the music video, Benito's also highlighting the resistance to that colonial situation, right? How Puerto Ricans have never stood to the side.
Puerto Ricans have never been docile, but Puerto Ricans have always dared to imagine themselves as something beyond their colonial identity. And I think that that is very clear in the record, and it's part of the conversations that have been triggered by the residency, by the record, and also by the aesthetic project that these two bring together.
Do people in Puerto Rico look to Bad Bunny to actually affect change, or are they happy enough with what he's done, which is put them on the map in a way that they weren't on it before, or constantly bringing himself and his music and his message back to the island? Absolutely. I think that everyone in Puerto Rico is in love with Bad Bunny at the moment.
Even my grandmother, he used to say that he was mal hablado. He was always swearing and she disliked him. Now she sings his songs. And I think that people are happy. But I think that more importantly, there is a generation that has been coined as the crisis generation, which Benito is part of. You know, that generation that...
The only thing that they know is crisis, that those kids that were born in the late 90s, early 2000s, you know, they went through the fiscal crisis that began in 2006, austerity measures, the implementation of an undemocratic fiscal oversight board by the U.S. government in 2015, school closings, Hurricane Maria, we had an earthquake swarm, you
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Chapter 7: What impact does Bad Bunny have on the perception of Puerto Rican identity?
Benito, you know, you dated a gender. We still love you. When we go to that residency or when we've been in the residency, we're not only celebrating Benito, but it feels as we're celebrating ourselves. And so that's why we are so happy to see him succeed. And so, yeah, I think it's a term of endearment. Benito.
Jarell Melendez-Badillo is an associate professor of Latin American and Caribbean history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Abishai Artsy produced today's show. Amin Al-Assadi edited. Laura Bullard checked the facts. And Patrick Boyd was on the ones and twos. We didn't today, but we typically use music by Breakmaster Cylinder. Today Explained is distributed by WNYC.
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