All of Bad Bunny in one song: to be the king of pop doing reggaeton and dembow (and salsa)

BarcelonaBad Bunny can be explained with a single song. It's all there in Nuevayol, the track that opens Debí tirar más fotos (2025), the album that led the Puerto Rican artist to perform at the Super Bowl and to do the tour that passes through Friday and Saturday at the Estadi Olímpic Lluís Companys in Barcelona, the start of the European part of the tour. There is the vindication of Puerto Rican identity, the eternal conflict with the United States, the dialogue with the island's rich musical tradition, cultural (and sexual) self-esteem, a warning message about the consumption of certain drugs, and the self-affirmation of an artistic pride that boasts with irony: "¿Cómo Bad Bunny va a ser rey del pop, ey / con reggaetón y dembow?" Well, he is. And with Nuevayol you can dance reggaeton, dembow, and salsa at the same time without changing your shoes.

Bad Bunny is a star who masters many expressive tools and carries the flow with great personality and metric rigor, but he is not a good singer in the conventional sense, nor has he demonstrated that he can put his voice at the service of rhythmic traditions such as plena, bomba, son, or even salsa brava. He cannot be compared to the very long line of great singers who have marked the musical history of Puerto Rico, such as the immense Cheo Feliciano, the sonero mayor Ismael Rivera, the singer of singers Héctor Lavoe, or the marvelous Ismael Miranda, the pretty boy of salsa. Superlatives are not superfluous when talking about these vocalists. However, Bad Bunny is intelligent enough not to renounce dialogue with this tradition. He does so vicariously with a sample from the song Un verano en Nueva York, by Gran Combo de Puerto Rico, one of the emblematic groups of Puerto Rican popular music. The voice heard at the beginning of Nuevayol is that of Andy Montañez, vocalist for Gran Combo until 1977.

It is not the first time that Bad Bunny has connected with the island's musical past, but until the album Debí tomar más fotos he had not done so with such intention of linking himself to a tradition; one of the most relevant precedents, but not the only one, was the communion between the reggaeton of Puerto Rican Tego Calderón (a reference for Bad Bunny) and the salsa of Venezuelan Óscar D'León in 2006, and later collaborations such as Maluma's with Marc Anthony. Bad Bunny has done so precisely when urban music had long needed a shake-up and when musicians from other traditions were beginning to look at reggaeton with less reluctance.

The trombone and baseball

The choice of A Summer in New YorkWillie Colón, who died in February of this yearWillie Colón, who died in February of this year, represents several important things for Bad Bunny. As César Miguel Rondón explains in the essential El libro de la salsa. Crónica de la música del Caribe urbano (1978), New York salsa was neighborhood music and Colón, despite the imperfections of the early records, made when he was just a teenager, allowed for genuine identification of "young people like him who had not been raised in the placidity of good manners and well-made music"}well madeBad Bunny and music as an act of resistance (Cúpula Books, 2026), by Vanessa Díaz and Petra R. Rivera-Rideau.

Willie Colón, "Bad Bunny y la música como acto de resistencia (Libros Cúpula, 2026), by Vanessa Díaz and Petra R. Rivera-Rideau.

Willie Colón, "the bad guy", as Bad Bunny recalls in Nuevayol, also represents the young hustler fascinated by the delinquent fetishism that in the late sixties and early seventies gave urban salsa its own aesthetic, in parallel to what African-American artists were doing in the United States, for example with blaxploitation cinema, and Jamaicans in the Caribbean with ska and reggae. Bad Bunny flirts with this bad boy image, but far from the streetwise cunning of salseros, the gang fatalism of Jamaicans, and the swaggering belligerence of other reggaeton totems. He is a bad boy who flows and who, instead of crossing the street with his fist clenched in his coat, strolls through the VIP area of the Coachella Festival.

There is still another detail in Nuevayol that connects past and present cultures: baseball, the most popular sport among the Latino community of New York and the Caribbean. Bad Bunny mentions Juan Soto, the Dominican player for the New York Mets (and formerly the Yankees), in the same way that the Panamanian Rubén Blades featured a baseball bat in Decisiones, from the album Buscando América (1984). By the way, it is surely an unconscious and inconsequential coincidence, but both in Decisiones and in Nuevayol James Bond appears, an icon that transcends generations.

Puerto Rico and Pan-Americanism

Rubén Blades was one of the benchmarks that Bad Bunny paid tribute to during his memorable performance at the Super Bowl with the parade of flags from American countries, a nod to the pan-American and anti-racist call that the Panamanian musician made at the end of the song Plástico, from the album Siembra (1978), with Willie Colón. However, despite what he did at the Super Bowl and despite being the Latin American hero who triumphs in North America singing in Spanish, he prioritizes the vindication of Puerto Rican identity, almost always in a conflictive relationship with the United States, more than the pan-Latin American vindication that Blades and the Puerto Rican artist Residente do advocate for (for example, in the song This is not America).

Bad Bunny's fight is more local, but it is not difficult for it to be shared by people from other countries, despite the nuances derived from being from an island that is a free associated state of the United States (neither a state of the United States, nor a fully sovereign state), where, despite having U.S. citizenship, residents cannot vote in presidential elections. He talks about the grievances, neglect, and predation that the island suffers, both from the local government and from Washington. He talks about it mainly in Lo que le pasó a Hawaii. Bad Bunny also reflects the complexity of being a U.S. citizen of Puerto Rican origin. As such, he does not have the problems that migrants from other countries have to face, but, aware of the anti-immigration raids launched by Donald Trump, he has excluded the United States from the tour, precisely to avoid the detention of migrants who might attend the concerts.

Linguistically, it makes a claim for a hegemonic language in most of the American continent, the political and administrative use of which has contributed to the decline or disappearance of indigenous languages, but which at the same time is a language that suffers various dismissals in the United States, and racist attacks even from President Donald Trump (following the Super Bowl performance). Bad Bunny represents the generations of Puerto Ricans who have not abandoned Spanish, as previous generations did, especially the children of immigrants born in the United States. "There are many Latinos who don't speak their language because they didn't learn it when they were little, and it's a shame," recalled José Feliciano a few years ago, a Puerto Rican raised in New York.José Feliciano, a Puerto Rican raised in New York. Bad Bunny is not defending a language in danger, it is evident, but in the context of the US music market, the decision to continue singing in Spanish has broken a dynamic. It is enough to remember that artists like Shakira released albums in Spanish and English versions to try to conquer the English-speaking market. Bad Bunny, like Rosalía, has not needed to. On another scale, because it is a minority language, it would be like artists who have not renounced Catalan to be able to perform outside of Catalan-speaking countries.

The dembow territory

In Nuevayol, the sample from Un verano en Nueva York, with the rhythmic key of salsa and the push of brass, coexists with electronic drums that announce rhythmic patterns of 21st-century urban music, specifically dembow, of Dominican origin like Marcos Borrero, producer of a large part of the album Debí tirar más fotos (the rapper El Lápiz Conciente, whose name appears in the lyrics of Nuevayol, is also Dominican). It is here, in the dembow territory, where the song unfolds like a genuinely badbunniesque artifact. The lyrics also change. From the rhyme "primor / York" with well-marked Rs, it moves to the liquid consonants characteristic of the Puerto Rican accent that Bad Bunny reinforces, and each stanza finds a different sonority. It's not exactly like the structure of salsa, because it doesn't follow the introduction-theme-montuno-mambo-ending circle, but it does have a hint of it. Just as soneros take advantage of the montuno to say their piece, Bad Bunny takes advantage of the central verses to explain himself, but with a voracity more typical of hip-hop.In the first stanza, he boasts of being a star: years go by and he continues to sell records like "Frida Kahlo paintings" (always Latin American references). As Héctor Lavoe did, he suddenly goes from vanity to humility to introduce a warning message about drugs, first ambiguous (purely descriptive) and then more direct, or so it seems: "El perico es blanco, sí, sí / El tusi rosita, eh, eh / No te confunda', no, no / Mejor evita, ey

". If he's going to get drunk, he says, it's better to feel closer to Puerto Rico by having a little glass of rum "at Toñita's place", the Brooklyn bar Caribbean Social Club that also played a prominent role in the Super Bowl. The symbolism of can Toñita is powerful enough: it was one of the places Zohran Mamdani visited shortly after winning the New York mayoral election, a visit that also included Brooklyn's hipster clubs.The second stanza is revenge. Bad Bunny rubbing in the faces of detractors that you can indeed be the king of pop while being from Puerto Rico and making reggaeton and dembow (and popular Puerto Rican music, of course), a status that New York salsa reference artists did not achieve. An uncomfortable question remains: would he have the same recognition from the North American music and media industry if, in addition to being Puerto Rican, he were Black?

Finally, Nuevayol closes by recovering the heart of the Gran Combo before delving into a coda that seems disconnected from the song, but which makes sense within the fragmentary dynamic of urban music and functions as the final paragraph of a love letter to New York, specifically to the Nuyorican city, that of the Puerto Ricans. "You're hot, I'm hot too", he sings. It's Bad Bunny and self-confidence, not necessarily sexual, but that interpretation could be accepted. In any case, it's a final proclamation of pride in who he is while also conveying it with empathy, arguably one of the keys to Bad Bunny's success. The king of pop making reggaeton and dembow (and salsa).