An Opinion About Bad Bunny That Will Please No One

Bad Bunny.

Art is art, and subjective, and I get that, and bold choices shouldn’t be chastised because they could very well lead to remarkable places, because true creatives don’t exist within boundaries that confine the rest of us.

Let’s talk about Bad Bunny.

You might love it, and you might love his music. I’m ambivalent towards it. I find it listenable, and maybe even cool on certain days of the week where my mood is light. On my most charitable day, I’d probably say its good stuff. I think the catchy/contagiousness of particular songs is indisputable in how frequently its attached to tiktoks or youtube videos. I didn’t even realize I was listening to him and I liked it. That’s basically passing the Pepsi challenge. He’s good.

So why is he a political football this year?

Is his momentum organic? Is it self-earned. The Grammys, the Super Bowl appearance, all of it. What’s driving it?

Some of it is, for sure. But the very nature of his foray into politics makes it all so murky. It’s gross.

The skeptical viewer in me thinks the timing is all too perfect. Everything aligned too perfectly. Almost like a movie. Here, with all of the pushback and social tensions with regards to ICE deporting people, and here comes this guy who’s going to speak strictly Spanish at a sporting event where, lets be real, English is the primary language.

Now, about the show.

It was like being given a tour of the most colorful, fun and extravagant sights that Latin culture has to offer.

It wasn’t a tour I’d signed up for, but if it weren’t so politically charged, we (I’m speaking for almost all Americans) would’ve gone along without fuss. If he’d have sang, we’d all have stood behind him and cheered him on. If he were more comfortable in Spanish, that’d have been fine. We’re a pretty charitable nation… until you bring in the politics. And damnit, this was political.

I was impressed by a lot of the talent on display. I’d thought that the BAD BUNNY sang more, but he mostly stuck to rapping. Spanish rapping.

He didn’t really sing at all, so maybe I am confused because I thought he was a singer? It was more of a visual spectacle. Maybe he’s more of a showman, an actor — I actually saw him first as an actor, and that’s when I first liked him. He’s really got charisma, it lends itself to acting. He’s a multi-talented artist who (I think) has his greatest strengths in his presence. But I felt like he was leering at me through the screen. I felt like he was saying things to me in Spanish that were accusatory. The whole thing felt very confrontational. It felt hostile, especially near the end, and I didn’t care for that. It felt like there was a world-view being given to me as an ultimatum. And when the Latin folks stormed the stadium with their giant flags, it felt like the statement was that this was to be the last word on the subject.

And while the sour notes of the stare down at the end sank in, it occurred to me that I didn’t care for any of it.

I also didn’t care to watch Kid Rock, or whatever shit the right side of the aisle was promoting as an alternative to watching Bad Bunny. I don’t love reactionary shit even MORE than I don’t like the initial stupid shit that causes the other side to do their little thing. I don’t like any of it. Because its overtly political. Kid Rock isn’t the best the right has to offer either, he’s just the most outspoken, and the one who’s willing to take an ideological stand. It’s making him rich. Alternatively, Bad Bunny is in an easier position because the left dominates entertainment, and it’s not a difficult task to find an entertainer to defend the left. He just happened to be the perfect fit for the agenda this year. Kid Rock, Bad Bunny. We get it, the left has all of the artist.

It’s all manufactured. It’s all “if you like this than you must think this.” It’s brazen, and it’s effective otherwise he wouldn’t have done it, out of fear of alienating people. Both sides would probably argue “well, of course we think this because its the right way to think and if you don’t, you’re a piece of shit”.

I’d like to appreciate him as an artist, I really would, but when hysteria surrounds the artist, it’s hard to view it in isolation. It’s like when the Walking Dead premiered at the height of the zombie-craze. I couldn’t watch it. My view of it was tainted by the current climate of braindead fandom. The show turned out to be one of my favorites when I watched it fifteen years later, removed from noise.

I don’t think the performance hurt his reputation at all, but it does push us closer to the question at the center of all of this — for how long do conventional, thoughtful, and reasonable people pretend to love musicians or others simply because their values align? We keep doing this. Americans are the nicest people on the planet, or the most polite anyways, when it comes to building people up because they like their values. It’s why the car salesman tries to tell you about his family before he makes the pitch. Once they nest their eggs in your emotions, its over.

Be honest with yourself. Strip away the fucking politics. Wouldn’t you just like to hear some real music at the Super Bowl? Some real, normal type-shit that wasn’t about black excellence, or latin excellence, or gays or trans, or whatever the fucking group of the day is. Just give me a group of real, talented musicians. They might all be black, or white or gay or jewish or whatever, I don’t care. I just want them to be phenomenal musicians. Remember Toto? A bunch of ugly Dad-looking dudes with phenomenal musical talent and no one cared about their story.

Just play “Hold The Line”! Talent transcends it all.

I’m sick of the art as a lecture. So are most of us. That’s why Top Gun Maverick was huge. That’s why Tom Cruise shut the fuck up about Scientology and started talking exclusively about how much he loves movies. I don’t want to hear talented musicians lecture me, and I damn sure don’t want to hear bad ones. I want to stand, hand-in-hand with my friends and fellow art-lovers and ditch the exhausting conversations that lead nowhere and start talking about our shared experiences.

Music we’ve heard, movies we’ve seen.

Things we create together. Things made to bring us together and to make us bob our heads and maybe turn off our brains? I don’t want to stand up and cheer before the shit is over because I already know the artist is on my political team. I don’t want to cheer because they’re feeding me a message. I won’t. I refuse to participate in that.

I’ll end on this: do we (or whoever curates and forces musicians and actors into the public eye) actually promote people based on talent, or is it something else? I know it used to be talent, at least 40% of the time. We had a decent spread of talented artists.

Or maybe that’s just the passage of time speaking. Maybe twenty years from now the smoke will clear, and the art will be left, and the kids of that era will be left to scour the bones that remain for useful little bits to put together their own ideas. I just hope they march to the beat of their own drum.