Grammys 2023: Bad Bunny's Latin pop moment harks back to '90s Latin explosion

Bad Bunny's last album 'Un Verano Ti Sin' is the first Spanish-language album to be nominated in the Best Album category at the 65th Grammy Awards, a feat not achieved by generations of global Latin stars before him. (Photo: Twitter)

When Bad Bunny walks on to the stage to perform at the 65th Grammy Awards in Los Angeles on February 5 (telecast on Monday in India), he will do so knowing that he has already made history, regardless of how many awards he wins. His last album Un Verano Sin Ti is the first Spanish-language album to be nominated in the Best Album category, a feat not achieved by generations of global Latin stars before him. If he wins — although the smart money seems to be on Beyoncé — it would be a historic win not just for the artist, but for the expansive Latin pop and trap scenes that have slowly been taking over the world this past half-decade.

It’s a little surprising that this moment hasn’t come already. This current Latin-pop moment has its roots in the “Latin explosion” of the 1990s, when artists like Shakira and Ricky Martin broke into the American and global mainstream with mostly English-language albums.

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In 2000, Carlos Santana became the first Latin American artist to win the best album Grammy with star-packed, English-and-Spanish album Supernatural. But apart from that, the Latin explosion went largely unheralded at the Grammys, relegated to genre or language-specific awards, and occasionally snubbed outright, as happened in 2002 to Shakira’s smash commercial breakthrough Laundry Service.

So Daddy Yankee’s 2004 summer hit Gasolina — #50 on Rolling Stone’s 2021 list of the “500 Greatest Songs Ever Made—only received a Record of the Year nod at the Latin Grammys, but not at the main event. It wasn’t till Luis Fonsi and Daddy Yankee’s Despacito in 2017, a record that was absolutely everywhere through the summer and winter, that a Spanish language track won nominations for Song and Record of the Year, losing out to Bruno Mars in both categories.

Despacito cracked the Grammys glass ceiling for Latin artists, and now Bad Bunny is set to smash it into pieces. He's been helped by the continuing debate around Anglocentrism and racism in the Grammys and the Recording Academy over the last few years, led by artists of colour sick of being snubbed in favour of less groundbreaking white artists. These debates have led to the Recording Academy abolishing the secret nomination committees for major awards and reorganising its categories to be more inclusive of diversity. So, the Eurocentric World Music Album award was renamed Global Music Album, while a new music urbana award was introduced for Latin music that wasn’t straight pop (and Bad Bunny won it last year).

The Academy also put great efforts into diversifying its voting pool, which has helped Bad Bunny and other Latin artists get more votes and be considered for top honours. Despite these reforms though, it needed a generational talent — an artist who could redefine not just reggaeton or Latin pop but also the face of the global pop industry — to break into the hallowed halls of the Big Four Grammys. And Bad Bunny is just that sort of artist.

Ever since he first got noticed on SoundCloud in 2016, Bad Bunny has been breaking both records and stereotypes. His debut album — 2018’s X 100pre — blended Latin trap with reggaeton, hip-hop, even a little pop-punk, and was preceded by chart-topping collaborative singles with the likes of Cardi B, Daddy Yankee and Drake. 2020’s YHLQMDLG debuted at #2 on the Billboard 200, becoming the highest charting all-Spanish album of all time, a record he would go on to break with the same year’s critical and commercial hit El Último Tour Del Mundo.

He built on that success last year to become the face of global pop. Un Verano Sin Ti spent 13 weeks atop the US Billboard Top 200, helping make Bad Bunny the most listened to artist on Spotify in 2022. His two tours over the year pulled in a gross of $434.9 million (around ₹3,560 crore), the highest ever for an artist in a calendar year since Billboard launched its Boxscore charts in the late 1980s. Along the way, the artist broke over a dozen local ticket sales records in some of the world’s biggest touring markets.

The numbers, staggering as they are, fail to capture the full extent of his charm and impact. In 2019, when Puerto Ricans were out on the streets protesting the US administration’s tepid aid in the wake of Hurricane Maria, he was one of the few major artists to join the protesters. In both his music and his off-stage life, he’s been vocal on political issues facing Puerto Ricans, an American territory stuck in the no-man’s land between proper state and colonial possession. He’s also challenged misogyny, homophobia and transphobia within reggaeton and Latin music, centering women in his songs and — somewhat controversially within the Latin-pop milieu — kissing both male and female dancers during his set at last year’s Video Music Awards.

And he’s done all this while crafting immensely catchy, incredibly popular music that speaks to centuries of shared tradition and history across the Americas, from cumbia to bachata, from Afro-Cuban rhythm to Atlanta-derived trap. He has become a global juggernaut without making any compromises — on language, on production, on the issues he addresses in his music — and remaining authentic to his roots in the tiny municipality of Almirante Sur.

Bad Bunny has already set many new precedents in American and global music. He’s proven that you don’t need to perform in English to dominate the world. He’s proven that you can be a global icon without playing by the industry’s increasingly outdated rules. He — along with a strong cast of collaborators and pioneers, whose contributions he’s always happy to highlight — has redefined what Latin music looks like, and what it can achieve.

So, even if he loses to Beyoncé on the night, it won’t feel like a loss. Because Bad Bunny has already changed the trajectory of global pop. Win or lose, he will strut on that stage with pride and the confidence of someone who absolutely deserves to be there — one of the world’s few truly global, continent-spanning stars. It would be nice if he did win it though, wouldn’t it?