<\/p>\n
A musical deep dive into colonial legacy, an epic concert residency, an oeuvre of smash albums with remarkable range: no one is doing it quite like Bad Bunny.<\/p>\n
And on Sunday, the Puerto Rican phenom made history, winning the coveted Grammy for Album of the Year — and becoming the first artist who performs in Spanish to ever claim the prize.<\/p>\n
And he came out swinging at President Donald Trump’s sweeping immigration crackdown, earning cheers when he told the Grammys audience: “ICE out.”<\/p>\n
“I want to dedicate this award to all the people who had to leave their homeland, their country to follow their dreams,” Bad Bunny said as he accepted his groundbreaking gramophone.<\/p>\n
He won two other prizes on the night — for best global music performance and best musica urbana album.<\/p>\n
The Grammys were an appropriate exclamation point on an extraordinary year that has cemented the 31-year-old’s reign over global music.<\/p>\n
Benito Antonio Martinez Ocasio’s career is barely a decade old, but it’s marked by historic milestones that have broken barriers for Latin and Spanish-language music.<\/p>\n
In just one week, he’ll helm the world’s most visible stage at the Super Bowl halftime show, the first Spanish-language artist ever to do so.<\/p>\n
Bad Bunny was the first — and remains the only — Spanish-language artist to ever receive an Album of the Year Grammy nod.<\/p>\n
He’s earned it twice, for Sunday’s winner “Debi Tirar Mas Fotos” and in 2022, for “Un Verano Sin Ti.”<\/p>\n
He also was the first Spanish-language artist to ever headline Coachella, delivering a two-hour performance in 2023 that included documentary footage and traditional dance.<\/p>\n
That set foreshadowed the history lesson in Puerto Rican music Bad Bunny would soon give with “Debi Tirar Mas Fotos,” which he promoted with a hometown concert residency.<\/p>\n
The first nine shows were only open to residents of the Caribbean island that has been under US rule since 1898.<\/p>\n
He then launched a world tour in support of the album — but with no scheduled stops on the US mainland, out of fear that federal immigration agents would target concertgoers.<\/p>\n
Bad Bunny has been Spotify’s most-streamed artist four separate times, including in 2025, beating out the likes of titans like Taylor Swift and Drake.<\/p>\n
He is wildly popular both stateside and abroad, a commercial golden goose who is critically acclaimed and commands legions of ardent fans.<\/p>\n
– ‘Deeply political’ –<\/p>\n
The son of a truck driver and a teacher, Bad Bunny was born on March 10, 1994 and grew up in Vega Baja, a small municipality near Puerto Rico’s capital San Juan.<\/p>\n
He honed his vocal skills in the children’s choir at church, before growing into a pre-teen who loved spending hours developing beats on his computer, as he also began delving into everything from bachata to the Bee Gees.<\/p>\n
He was working at a supermarket bagging groceries when he got a call from a label over his viral plays on the DIY platform SoundCloud.<\/p>\n
Thus began the reggaeton star’s rapid explosion to the top of global music.<\/p>\n
With his enormous fame came pressure to meet the varying expectations of loyal fans, including those who wanted\u00a0him to take stronger political stances.<\/p>\n
Earlier in his career, he wavered on taking up a role as a de facto spokesperson.<\/p>\n
But more recently, he has joined Puerto Rican protests and spoken out against US President Donald Trump’s policies. His statement on the Grammys stage was perhaps his most direct yet.<\/p>\n
“Debi Tirar Mas Fotos” was a full-throated, identity-affirming exploration of Puerto Ricanness in the context of persistent colonialism, set to folkloric sounds, infectious salsa and reggaeton rhythms.<\/p>\n
It was a love letter to his home, for his home — and it brought positive visibility to a place often viewed through a lens of suffering.<\/p>\n
The artist’s commitment to singing in Spanish in a music industry that has historically marginalized Latino voices makes his mammoth success even more extraordinary.<\/p>\n
Historian Jorell Melendez-Badillo told AFP the artist’s mere presence at major cultural events like the Grammys or the Super Bowl is “deeply political.”<\/p>\n
And all those sociopolitical layers come packaged in eminently danceable form: it’s hard to attend a Bad Bunny show and resist the urge to twerk.<\/p>\n
mdo\/sst<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
\u2018 The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n \u2018 Some details of this article were extracted from the following source sg.news.yahoo.com \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" A musical deep dive into colonial legacy, an epic concert residency, an oeuvre of smash albums with remarkable range: no one is doing it quite like Bad Bunny. And on Sunday, the Puerto Rican phenom made history, winning the coveted Grammy for Album of the Year — and becoming the first artist who performs in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2262465,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[25172],"tags":[438249,30802,344195,406502,438248,309938,326110,387868,46381,398669],"class_list":["post-2262464","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-entertainment","tag-album-of-the-year-grammy","tag-bad-bunny","tag-benito-antonio-martinez-ocasio","tag-debi-tirar-mas-fotos","tag-global-music","tag-president-donald-trump","tag-puerto-rican","tag-puerto-rican-music","tag-puerto-rico","tag-spanish-language-music"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/02\/Bad-Bunny-the-Puerto-Rican-phenom-on-top-of-the.jpeg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2262464","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2262464"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2262464\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2262466,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2262464\/revisions\/2262466"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2262465"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2262464"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2262464"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2262464"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}