How Bad Bunny took Puerto Rican independence mainstream

This message comes from NPR sponsor FX's Love Story, John F Kennedy Junior and Carolyn Bissett. It explores the iconic couple whose fairy tale romance would become a national obsession. Premieres tonight on FX, Hulu, and Hulu on Disney plus for bundle subscribers. The National Football League welcomes you to the Apple Music Super Bowl sixty halftime show. Benito Antonio Martinez Ocasio, who you know as Bad Bunny. He's a Spanish speaking artist from a colony, and he's performing at the Super Bowl at a time when the Spanish language is being criminalized. The Trump administration can continue indiscriminate immigration stops targeting Latinos and Spanish speakers. We want to be with patriotic Americans, people who have great music, songs you've actually heard. I think it's deeply political. God bless America. What he did was show the world what Latinos have. And when he called out all of the countries it was so special, and I got super emotional. United States, Canada, Puerto Rico. Is it revolutionary? I don't think so. But it's political. You know, the NFL also wants to reach a broader international audience, and then he does the biggest artist in the world. The biggest artist in the world performed mostly in Spanish at Super Bowl sixty in Santa Clara, which, yes, cost some fanfare. But the Puerto Rican singer and rapper who's dominated global charts for the past eight years isn't a stranger to politics. He refused to perform his most recent album in the Continental US, saying he's worried that Ice will come after his fans. An idea he doubled down on after he won the Grammy for the album of the year and best Musica Urbana album. Before I say thanks to God, I'm gonna say eyes out. When he took the stage at the Super Bowl, he made a statement and a compromise. He didn't speak out directly against Ice, but he did use the global stage to do what his music has always done, make the world look at Puerto Rico, a US commonwealth whose people are US citizens, but who live in what some critics call the world's oldest colony. He's always said that he is producing music primarily for Puerto Rico, but he knows that the world's listening. And in that way, his music is An archive, of the current moment that we're living in, and we can use it to to sort of understand this moment. As a musician myself, I love this idea of thinking about music as both an archive and a historical record or soundtrack to history. And so for today's episode of THROUGHLINE, all about Bad Bunny, we're gonna leave the politics surrounding the Super Bowl behind. And instead, we're going to lean into that idea and look at what Bad Bunny's music tells us about Puerto Rico's history and vice versa. And we'll explore both sides of his meteoric success, how Bad Bunny has become a voice of a generation in crisis and what it …