A few years in the past, I visited my childhood dwelling and heard a shocking sound: the intense and bouncy music of the Puerto Rican rapper Dangerous Bunny. My mother and father are white Child Boomers who converse no Spanish and have by no means proven a style for hip-hop, however they’d someway gotten into Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio, whose sex-and-rum-drenched lyrics they couldn’t start to decipher. The vector of transmission gave the impression to be the streaming service hooked to their good audio system. When in want of a pick-me-up, Mother would shout, “Alexa, play Dangerous Bunny,” and make her Southern California kitchen sound like a San Juan nightclub.
Tales like this assist clarify how Dangerous Bunny has reached throughout language boundaries to dominate pop domestically and overseas. Since importing his first single in 2016, he’s damaged U.S. gross sales data and claimed the title of essentially the most streamed artist on Spotify in 4 separate years. His reputation, excessive standing with critics, and length of success make him a peer—and typically a better-selling one—of such up to date titans as Taylor Swift, Beyoncé, and Kendrick Lamar. Like them, he’s discovered that Twenty first-century-pop success is achieved by assembling excitingly hybrid sounds round an iron core of id. In his case, which means performing virtually solely in Spanish.
Many Latin American singers have loved cross-over fame earlier than, however none has finished it in the way in which Dangerous Bunny has, or on the identical scale. Earlier than streaming, they couldn’t: Main-market radio DJs, record-label execs, and the media nonetheless determined what constituted the American mainstream, and standard knowledge stated that audiences most well-liked music whose lyrics they may perceive. Ricky Martin, Enrique Iglesias, and Shakira cracked U.S. markets solely after they began singing in English. Uncommon exceptions, similar to “Macarena,” by Los del Río, didn’t even confer title recognition upon their creators.
However the web has revealed in style wishes that final century’s gatekeepers didn’t know methods to exploit. Dangerous Bunny arose from a transnational scene—broadly known as música urbana—whose major viewers is Spanish audio system, together with the 44 million who stay in america. Streaming has additionally helped English-only audiences join along with his music, simply because it has for Ok-pop and Afrobeat. This month, Dangerous Bunny will occupy a cultural stage as soon as reserved for America’s classic-rock gods and pop goddesses: the Tremendous Bowl halftime present.
Dangerous Bunny has touted his game-day gig as a triumph for Latino—notably Puerto Rican—illustration. And in plain methods, his ascendance contradicts Donald Trump’s decree, made final March, that English is the only real nationwide language. MAGA voices attacked the “loopy” choice by the “woke” NFL to e book somebody who’s not “a unifying entertainer.” They cited Dangerous Bunny’s political stances (he doesn’t need ICE exterior his concert events) and gender-bending vogue (his biceps look nice in a minidress). However additionally they have a tendency to specific the view that he, although an American citizen, is someway un-American. The conservative activist group Turning Level USA is planning an alternate halftime present; in a ballot despatched to its supporters about what they’d wish to see, the primary choice was “something in English.”
The reality is that Dangerous Bunny’s rise is a lot American, and never just because it reinforces the pluralistic beliefs that Trump’s motion seeks to decrease. Dangerous Bunny’s music has reached all corners of the planet as a result of it’s a state-of-the-art product; he’s a victor within the ever extra crowded race for the freshest and most broadly interesting sound. Language boundaries have turned out to be yet one more little bit of outdated friction that the web has sanded right down to create a cosmopolitan, commercialized center floor. Does what’s misplaced in translation matter?
On the middle of Dangerous Bunny’s sound is the rhythm that has dominated Latin American pop for many years: reggaeton, which marries dancehall and rap in crisp, minimalist vogue. Inspiring partying typically with only a drum machine and a vocalist, reggaeton first flourished because the sound of working-class city life in Puerto Rico. “That is the place I used to be born, and so was reggaeton, simply so ,” Dangerous Bunny boasts in Spanish in a single music.
He additionally grew up as a extremely on-line Millennial at a time when American popular culture was dominated by Fall Out Boy’s pop punk, Woman Gaga’s synth pop, and Drake’s rap blues. All of these touchstones now inform his maximalist tackle reggaeton. In any given Dangerous Bunny music, the melodies roll and sway between emo dejection and childlike glee, the digital beats bring to mind Nintendo video games, and the low finish churns as ominously as a lava pit. Dangerous Bunny’s vocal tone is exclusive: husky and flat, peppered with gasps and grunts, and shimmering with digital results. He feels like a ringmaster in a futuristic circus, and also you don’t must know Spanish to really feel {that a} thrilling story is unfolding.
Certainly, Dangerous Bunny’s success with English-speaking audiences may appear to reply the perennial music-fan debate about how essential lyrics actually are. Any Rolling Stones listener oblivious to what Mick Jagger is yowling about is aware of that the artwork kind’s pleasures don’t require intelligibility. And the beliefs of enlightened music appreciation dictate that listening to music you don’t perceive generally is a mind-expanding train. As David Byrne as soon as put it, “To limit your listening to English-language pop is like deciding to eat the identical meal for the remainder of your life.”
Music, nevertheless, can also be a type of communication. That’s particularly the case within the custom Dangerous Bunny builds on: hip-hop, through which narrative, persona, and wordplay are essential. He raps with intoxicating fluidity, stringing syllables collectively in a gentle murmur that encourages shut listening. Translations get you solely a part of the way in which to comprehending this facet of his attraction. His themes are largely the identical as these of English-language pop rappers—success, partying, and ladies. (A lot of ladies: “Me gustan mucho las Gabriela, las Patricia, las Nicole, las Sofía,” goes his smash “Tití Me Preguntó,” just a little black e book in music kind.) However as I learn alongside, I can sense all of the issues I’m lacking: puns, connotations, references.
Even some fluent Spanish audio system could really feel equally. He raps in a Caribbean dialect that’s “filled with so many skipped consonants, Spanglish, neologisms, and argot that it borders on Creole,” the Puerto Rican anthropology professor Yarimar Bonilla wrote in The New York Occasions. Dangerous Bunny’s success proves the cliché that music is a common language, however it additionally highlights how universality can shear artwork from its social context—of which, on this artist’s case, there’s a lot.
Dangerous Bunny has taken care to make his most essential messages clear by not solely lyrics but additionally movies, album artwork, and interviews. He’s greater than a Puerto Rican Casanova with an ear for interesting musical pastiche. He’s additionally a protest artist, and a part of what he’s protesting is the very course of by which he has develop into so well-known.
The title of his newest album, DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS (or “I Ought to Have Taken Extra Images”), expresses a way of loss concerning the tradition he grew up in. The quilt picture is of two empty chairs in opposition to a backdrop of banana timber. The songs lengthy for buddies and neighbors who’ve emigrated. A brief movie launched with the album portrays an outdated man visiting a San Juan espresso store solely to seek out that it has been gentrified past recognition—crammed with vacationers and digital nomads scarfing overpriced vegan quesitos. (The video additionally incorporates a speaking toad belonging to an endangered native species.)
Dangerous Bunny is articulating the surreal and unhappy feeling of seeing his homeland reworked by internet-supercharged globalization. The U.S. territory’s financial system has lengthy relied on tourism, however lately, a wave of laptop-toting mainlanders lured by the balmy local weather and notoriously free tax legal guidelines has pushed hire will increase and threatened to scrub out the native id. Dangerous Bunny’s new album, Bonilla wrote, is a “lament for a Puerto Rico slipping by our fingers: betrayed by its leaders; its neighborhoods displaced for luxurious developments; its land bought to outsiders, subdivided by Airbnb and crypto schemes and repackaged as paradise for others.”
Dangerous Bunny seeks not simply to level out the issue of displacement, but additionally to do one thing about it. He’s portrayed his refusal to sing in English as a proactive maneuver in opposition to the pressures of Anglo-assimilation. On his newest tour, he skipped the continental U.S. completely, citing fears that ICE brokers would goal his concert events. As an alternative, he hosted a 31-show residency in San Juan, the title of which, No me quiero ir de aquí, means “I Don’t Need to Go away Right here.” He has campaigned for the island’s independence and in opposition to its potential statehood. One music on the brand new album spotlights Hawaii—a vacationer playground whose natives have been totally marginalized—for example of the destiny that might befall Puerto Rico if its residents don’t resist the affect from their north.
But, inevitably, Dangerous Bunny’s worldwide fame is certain up in the identical cycle he bemoans. Although many tickets for his live performance residency have been put aside for locals, the gambit in fact attracted outsiders to the island. Some made a pilgrimage to the grocery store the place he as soon as labored in his hometown of Vega Baja. One was shot and killed in La Perla, a poor San Juan neighborhood that started to draw vacationers solely after being featured within the video for Luis Fonsi and Daddy Yankee’s 2017 reggaeton smash, “Despacito.”
On this context, Dangerous Bunny’s Tremendous Bowl reserving represents an uneasy commerce. He will get to carry out on America’s most watched stage—expressing his imaginative and prescient on a grand scale in ways in which might energize his followers and develop his viewers. The NFL not solely will get a preferred performer to juice scores; it will get to promote itself to the Spanish-speaking world at a time when skilled soccer is eyeing the worldwide market share of soccer and different sports activities, wanting to carve out a distinct segment. Some may say that the NFL is a mainland-American establishment with colonial ambitions, and that Dangerous Bunny is now a part of that effort.
Exports, imports, migration, melding—the prices of those historic engines of change and progress at the moment are the preoccupation of in style artwork and politics. In a wierd method, MAGA and Dangerous Bunny are every responding to variations of the identical Twenty first-century phenomenon: the decoupling of tradition and geography, which has left so many individuals—wherever they have been born—feeling surprisingly placeless and adrift. However the merciless absurdities and darkish historic parallels of Trump’s nationalist agenda mirror how perverse, and in the end futile, strident id protectionism is in 2026. American nation music has been catching on overseas; American listeners have KPop Demon Hunters fever. And the Tremendous Bowl shall be headlined by an artist who appears positive he can create one thing significant out of interconnectivity—one thing that’s his personal, regardless of how a lot it’s shared.
This text seems within the February 2026 print version with the headline “How Dangerous Bunny Did It.”
