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Go beyond the music to explore how Bad Bunny became a global voice for Puerto Rico and a cultural phenomenon.
Bad Bunny headlines the Apple Music Halftime Show during the NFL Super Bowl 60 on February 8, 2026. Bad Bunny has captured our collective imagination and attention with his music and the larger than life personality.
Fresh from winningof our time. The music of Bad Bunny, whose real name is Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio, includes a long lineage of the rhythms of reggaeton and its evolution through the Caribbean, Latin America and the U.S. He also represents a cultural force that reckons with racial politics, LGBTQ rights and the dynamic and complex realities of Puerto Rico.
In partnership with Cognoscenti, WBUR’s essay and ideas team, join us for an evening exploring Bad Bunny’s cultural impact, featuring music and video highlights throughout the conversation. Jazmin Aguilera, host and senior audio producer for the Boston Globe, moderates.
Copies of Rivera-Rideau’s “P FKN R: How Bad Bunny Became the Global Voice of Puerto Rican Resistance” and Marshall’s “Reggaeton” will be available to purchase from our bookstore partnerBU Faculty/Staff: $15.00 WBUR’s Legacy Circle, Murrow Society, Sustainers and Members save $5.00 on tickets to this event. To apply the discount to your ticket purchase online, you’ll need to enter a promo code. You can get your code by emailing membership@wbur.org.
Global superstar Bad Bunny, born Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio, like many other Puerto Ricans, has lived a life marked by public crises — blackouts, hurricanes, political corruption and oppression, among others — that have exposed the ongoing impacts of colonialism in Puerto Rico. Offering a portrait of the past and future of Puerto Rican resistance through one of its loudest and proudest voices, “P FKN R” draws on interviews with musicians, politicians and journalists as well as ethnographic research to set Bad Bunny and Puerto Rican resistance in a historical, political and cultural context.
Authors Vanessa Díaz and Petra Rivera-Rideau — creators of the “Bad Bunny Syllabus” — demonstrate Bad Bunny’s place in a long tradition of infusing both joy and protest into music and honor the many evolving forms of daily resistance to oppression and colonialism that are part of Puerto Rican life. A hybrid of reggae and rap, reggaeton is a music with Spanish-language lyrics and Caribbean aesthetics that has taken Latin America, the United States and the world by storm.
Superstars — including Daddy Yankee, Don Omar and Ivy Queen — garner international attention, while aspiring performers use digital technologies to create and circulate their own tracks.
“Reggaeton” brings together critical assessments of this wildly popular genre. Journalists, scholars and artists delve into reggaeton’s local roots and its transnational dissemination; they parse the genre’s aesthetics, particularly in relation to those of hip-hop; and they explore the debates about race, nation, gender and sexuality generated by the music and its associated cultural practices, from dance to fashion.
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