Bad Bunny, the Puerto Rican who made the world come to him in Spanish

Bad Bunny

Photo: Toglenn / CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	March 10, 1994 Bayamón, Puerto Rico
Occupation	Rapper, singer
Known for	Bullet Train, Toy Story 5, F9
Awards	6 Grammy · Emmy · MTV Video Music Award

Bad Bunny never made the album the music industry kept waiting for. There was no English-language crossover record and no move to Los Angeles to sand the Caribbean out of his vowels. He stayed in Spanish, the clipped, slang-dense Spanish of Puerto Rico, and let the rest of the world do the adjusting. When Debí Tirar Más Fotos was named Album of the Year at the Grammys, it became the first Spanish-language record ever to take the top prize, and he used the moment to tell his island that it was “much bigger than 100 by 35,” the local shorthand for its size in miles. The question his career keeps asking is how far an artist can go without translating himself. Nobody has found the limit.

Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio was born in Bayamón on March 10, 1994, and grew up in Almirante Sur, a rural barrio of Vega Baja on the island’s north coast. His father drove trucks and his mother taught school. He sang in the church choir until he was 13 and was writing his own songs a year later. After high school he enrolled in audiovisual communication at the University of Puerto Rico at Arecibo, hoping to work in radio, and bagged groceries at an Econo supermarket while uploading tracks to SoundCloud. One of them, “Diles,” reached the producer DJ Luian, who signed him to Hear This Music in 2016. The degree was left unfinished.

His first hits were Latin trap, the slower, darker cousin of reggaeton, and “Soy Peor” made him one of its faces by the end of that year. Then the guest spots arrived. “I Like It,” with Cardi B and J Balvin, went to number one on the Billboard Hot 100 in 2018, and “Mía,” with Drake, reached number five a few months later. His debut album, X 100pre, released on Christmas Eve 2018 through Rimas Entertainment, drifted from pop-punk guitars to dembow and refused to settle on a genre. That restlessness became his method.

What followed rewrote the commercial rules for Spanish-language music in the United States. After Oasis, a joint album with J Balvin, YHLQMDLG debuted at number two on the Billboard 200 in February 2020, the highest position an all-Spanish album had reached. Nine months later El Último Tour del Mundo went one place higher, the first all-Spanish album to top the chart. Spotify named him the most-streamed artist in the world that year, the first act singing in a language other than English to lead its annual ranking, and he kept the title in 2021 and 2022, then took it back in 2025. Un Verano Sin Ti, a beach record built from reggaeton and Caribbean pop, spent 13 weeks at number one, finished 2022 as the best-performing album on the planet by IFPI’s count and earned the first Album of the Year nomination ever given to a Spanish-language record. The World’s Hottest Tour that supported it grossed $232.5 million, then a record for a Latin artist.

The persona around the numbers unsettled reggaeton’s old machismo. He painted his nails and wore skirts on stage. On The Tonight Show he appeared in a T-shirt reading “They killed Alexa, not a man in a skirt,” a reference to Alexa Negrón Luciano, a trans woman murdered in Puerto Rico, and the video for “Yo Perreo Sola” put him in drag. GLAAD gave him its Vanguard Award. He took the same showmanship into a WWE ring at WrestleMania 37 and into film, with roles in Narcos: Mexico, Bullet Train, Cassandro, Caught Stealing and Happy Gilmore 2.

The artist celebrated for turning the perreo floor over to women has also spent years in court over one woman’s voice. Carliz De La Cruz Hernández, his former girlfriend, says the “Bad Bunny, baby” tag heard across his catalog is her own voice, recorded at his request in 2015 and reused for years without her permission or payment; she is seeking at least $40 million. In July 2026 the Supreme Court of Puerto Rico threw out the claims tied to the 2016 song “Pa Ti” as time-barred but allowed her copyright and identity claims over “Dos Mil 16,” from Un Verano Sin Ti, to go back to a trial court in San Juan. A second suit, filed in January 2026 by Tainaly Serrano Rivera, seeks $16 million over the alleged use of her voice on “Solo de Mí” and “Eoo.” Neither case has been decided.

Debí Tirar Más Fotos, released on January 5, 2025, turned the lens back on the island. Recorded with a young Puerto Rican band he named Los Sobrinos, it folds salsa, plena and bomba into reggaeton, and its songs about displacement and memory, among them “Lo Que Le Pasó a Hawaii” and “NUEVAYoL,” gave it the feel of a family archive. Instead of going straight on the road, he stayed home for a summer-long residency, No Me Quiero Ir de Aquí, at San Juan’s José Miguel Agrelot Coliseum, with the first nine nights reserved for island residents. The world tour that began in November 2025 carried a replica of a Puerto Rican house, La Casita, through Latin America, Europe, Australia and Japan. It skipped the mainland United States, which he said was because he feared immigration agents could be waiting outside his concerts. It still finished as the highest-grossing tour ever by a male Latin artist: 59 shows, 3.1 million tickets and $467.5 million.

The Grammy night on February 1, 2026, brought three awards, including Best Música Urbana Album and Best Global Music Performance for “Eoo,” and took his total to six. A week later he headlined the Super Bowl LX halftime show at Levi’s Stadium, the first performed mostly in Spanish, before an average audience of 128.2 million. When critics demanded an English-language show, he hosted Saturday Night Live and told viewers they had “four months to learn.” In September the performance won seven Creative Arts Emmys, including Outstanding Variety Special (Live), the most ever for a halftime show. The tour ended where the album began, with two nights at Hiram Bithorn Stadium in San Juan on August 22 and 23. “I couldn’t do a world tour without including my favorite place in the whole world,” he told the crowd.

No new album has been announced. The next confirmed project is his first leading film role, in Porto Rico, the directing debut of the rapper René Pérez Joglar, better known as Residente. Announced in February 2026 as a Caribbean western and historical drama inspired by true events, it casts him opposite Javier Bardem, Viggo Mortensen and Edward Norton, with Alejandro G. Iñárritu as executive producer. The film is in pre-production with no release date. For an artist who built a global career by refusing to leave home in his songs, playing Puerto Rico’s history on screen looks like the logical next move, and the riskiest one, because this time the script is someone else’s.

Selected Discography

X 100PRE (2018)
OASIS (2019)
YHLQMDLG (2020)
LAS QUE NO IBAN A SALIR (2020)
EL ÚLTIMO TOUR DEL MUNDO (2020)
Un verano sin ti (2022)
nadie sabe lo que va a pasar mañana (2023)
DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS (2025)

Tags: singers, Reggaeton, Bad Bunny, Cardi B, J Balvin, Debí Tirar Más Fotos

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