Bad Bunny conquered the world, but he wants to save Puerto Rico

Bad Bunny may have won album of the year at the Grammy Awards on Sunday, but he was already the biggest star in the world. In the early pages of “P FKN R: How Bad Bunny Became the Global Voice of Puerto Rican Resistance,” authors Vanessa Díaz and Petra R. Rivera-Rideau introduce the facts: He’s had more songs on the Billboard Hot 100 than the chart has slots, his 2022 album, “Un Verano Sin Ti,” became the most streamed album in Spotify’s history, and he’s the first artist ever to stage two $100 million-grossing tours in less than a year. All of this is unprecedented, and it’s all the more impressive coming from a Spanish-language artist.

But Bad Bunny’s biggest achievement — the thing that makes his work more important than that of the reggaetoneros of yore — is what “P FKN R” spends the next 300 pages outlining. The book argues that the native Puerto Rican, always unabashed in his love and support for the island, has engaged in “politics of resistance” by coupling celebration with activism, bringing the archipelago’s issues to the forefront of popular culture and consistently advocating for Puerto Rican independence.

For many listeners coming across Bad Bunny’s work — especially those who don’t speak Spanish or know Puerto Rican history — the nuances of his activism go unrecognized. Most die-hards outside the Caribbean know that his first television appearance came almost exactly one year after Hurricane Maria devastated the island, but few are aware of his direct participation in El Verano Boricua (the name given to the large-scale protests on the island in the summer of 2019, which succeeded in ousting then-Gov. Ricardo Rosselló) or the political billboards he purchased in the lead-up to Puerto Rico’s 2024 gubernatorial election. “P FKN R” examines these cases, and many more, to demonstrate that Bad Bunny doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Instead, the authors posit that the artist born Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio — who often simply goes by Benito — is a product of the U.S. government’s inhumane and dismissive treatment of Puerto Rico and the ongoing colonial project it perpetrates there.

“Growing up over the past three decades, this generation has experienced a rapid and dramatic decrease in their quality of life and in the opportunities available to them,” Díaz and Rivera-Rideau write of contemporary Puerto Rico early in the book. For Benito, born and raised on the north side of the island, U.S. governmental impositions such as the Fiscal Oversight and Management Board, the authors write, have “made it impossible to ignore the connections between the everyday struggles of Puerto Ricans and the long history of U.S. colonialism in the archipelago. This is the sociopolitical context that shaped Bad Bunny’s formative years.”

It’s heavy stuff for an artist who also sings about hedonistic pursuits. But “P FKN R” celebrates that duality, frequently noting that moralist panics about the content of reggaeton music have historically suppressed the island’s most radical voices. Even the book’s title, which comes from a track on “YHLQMDLG,” has dual meaning. Díaz and Rivera-Rideau argue that the winkingly profane implication of the phrase “P FKN R” is both a lament about the island’s problems — frequent blackouts, government corruption, extreme poverty brought on by the realities of being a colony — and, more overtly, a cocky expression of pride.

The book spans the entirety of Bad Bunny’s career, from his beginnings working at a grocery store in Vega Baja to the recent release of his record “Debi Tirar Más Fotos.” But “P FKN R” is not a biography. Díaz and Rivera-Rideau often open chapters zoomed in, looking at a specific song, video or moment in reggaeton before zooming out to consider the greater scope of Puerto Rican politics at that time.

Here, even small gestures are recontextualized. The authors discuss the track “Te Boté,” on which Bad Bunny is featured, as a breakup song but also an anthem of Puerto Rican defiance in the wake of Hurricane Maria. Bad Bunny’s decision to paint his nails in the video for “Caro” is framed as revolutionary within Latin trap, since, the authors note, “hypermasculinity is central to the ethos of the genre.” One chapter near the end is organized around Bad Bunny’s headlining performance at Coachella in 2023 (the first by a Spanish-language Latino artist), for which both authors were present and which Rivera-Rideau helped craft.

Díaz and Rivera-Rideau are college professors, and their shared claim to fame is the “Bad Bunny Syllabus,” an online repository meant to help “contextualize Bad Bunny’s work.” Both have developed and taught courses on Bad Bunny at their respective colleges, and “P FKN R” is essentially a consolidation of everything on that website, effectively a written record of their lectures.

Some academic books skew pedantic, but Díaz and Rivera-Rideau mostly steer clear of condescension or airy distance by including on-the-ground anecdotal reporting that adds a refreshing first-person point of view. In a particularly humorous section, Díaz recounts riding around with a paparazzo trying to get shots of Benito with his then-girlfriend, Kendall Jenner. They then use that experience as a jumping-off point to discuss the racial hierarchies of the entertainment industry in which the artist is entrenched.

The authors also boldly challenge common critiques of Bad Bunny. The book spends a whole chapter dismantling allegations of queerbaiting, for example, by demonstrating his long-standing commitment to supporting the LGBTQ+ community. It also reinterprets his much-derided comments in Time magazine regarding colorism in reggaeton.

Pop artists tend to court a fan base with a globalist approach, appealing to as many people as possible and changing themselves where necessary if it helps them reach new markets. Much has been written about American music’s “Latin boom” in the 1990s and the resulting anglicization of Spanish-language artists so they could reach a mainstream audience. Think of the two versions of Ricky Martin’s “Livin’ la Vida Loca,” or Luis Fonsi teaming up with Justin Bieber to remix “Despacito.” Throughout his career, Bad Bunny has made a concentrated effort to reject this path to celebrity, trading globalism for a dedicated hyper-localism.

Pop music criticism often requires a suspension of disbelief. Critics and scholars too often project their own erudition onto artifacts of popular culture that don’t deserve it. But Díaz and Rivera-Rideau are right that Bad Bunny intends to shock the system; his work, which reaches millions of Latinos, is deliberately trying to move and radicalize listeners. He wants to motivate his people to make their lives better.

The work that Díaz and Rivera-Rideau have put into understanding Benito feels increasingly necessary, especially as his celebrity and political sway continue to balloon. It’s been a year since the release of the massively successful “Debi Tirar Más Fotos,” which propelled Bad Bunny to the Super Bowl LX halftime show. Yet as the book highlights, his celebrity and musical success are not despite his heritage but because of it. “P FKN R” emphasizes listening to Bad Bunny as a radical act, connecting us with the centuries-long struggle and ongoing resistance of the Puerto Rican people.