Bad Bunny Redefines Global Fame, With Career Built On Risk And Puerto Rican Identity
From grocery clerk in Puerto Rico to global Latin music phenomenon, Bad Bunny has turned refusal, joy, and stubborn authenticity into a career blueprint, Vogue reports, reshaping how a Puerto Rican artist navigates fame, politics, and pop culture.
From Vega Baja To The Center Of The World
He slips into a conference room at the Fontainebleau hotel in Las Vegas almost anonymously, hood up, cap low, wraparound shades in place. Only when the sunglasses come off, and the coffee hits the table, three shots, oat milk, sugar, does Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio, 31, fully appear. The day after this interview with Vogue, the Puerto Rican star will collect five of his 12 Latin Grammy nominations, including Album of the Year, for his sixth studio project, Debí Tirar Más Fotos, released in January 2025. But even before the trophies, he is already in that unmistakable zone: buzzing but grounded, amused but focused.
He jokes with Vogue that he has just come from a 'historic fitting,' but what sticks is not the clothes; it is the way he talks about the process. Comparing the search for the perfect look to writing a song, he reveals his patience and dedication, encouraging readers to respect his authenticity and creative discipline.
Debí Tirar Más Fotos is, as Vogue notes, a carefully built concept album about Puerto Rico and puertorriqueñidad, drawing on jíbaro traditions associated with figures like Chuíto el de Bayamón, 1970s salsa clásica forged by Puerto Rican and other Latinx migrants in New York City, and contemporary reggaeton. Scholars writing in the Latin American Music Review and the Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies have argued that reggaeton functions as both dance floor and archive, preserving barrio memory amid globalization. Benito leans into that role: the album sounds like a party and reads like a study of an island that has survived empire, debt crises, and hurricanes.
A Career Built On Risk, Range, And Refusal
Long before Latin Grammy stages and Super Bowl announcements, there was a young man in Vega Baja, stacking shelves at an Econo grocery store and uploading songs to SoundCloud. Around 22, he was already circulating tracks that caught the attention of his high school acquaintance Janthony Oliveras, who tells Vogue he immediately sensed there was "a big difference" in Benito's music. Janthony became manager, promoter, and even DJ, despite knowing little about the craft, hustling parties, and making sure they got paid. The infrastructure was minimal, but the vision was not.
Those early years were not glamorous. As Janthony recalls, money was tight; there were jeans, a few memorable sneakers, and a bandanna knotted like Tupac. Yet even then, Benito insisted on looking and sounding like himself. That resistance to being molded would become a defining trait. "I don't like it when I don't feel like I've dressed myself," he tells Vogue, a line that reads less like a comment on clothes than a manifesto about control over his image and work.
The speed of his ascent is now legend. By the time X100Pre arrived on December 24, 2018, he had already been crowned a kind of King of Latin Trap, stacked over a dozen songs on the Billboard Latin charts, joined Cardi B on the chart-topping "I Like It," and taken a world tour across the United States, Latin America, and Europe. "Everything started growing so fast," Janthony remembers to Vogue. Scholars in Popular Music and Society have described this period as the moment when Spanish-language urban music stopped orbiting U.S. pop and began pulling it into its own gravity. Benito was one of the main engines of that shift.
Since 2020's El Último Tour del Mundo, every album has hit number one on both the American and Latin Billboard charts. He became Spotify's most-streamed artist multiple times, including 2021, when he did not release a new record at all, and 2022's Un Verano Sin Ti became the first album by a Latin artist to surpass 10 billion streams. Economists writing in the Journal of Cultural Economics point to this moment as proof that language barriers in global pop have eroded; the algorithm now speaks Spanish with a Caribbean accent.
But his ambition is not limited to music charts. Benito has walked into other industries with the same refusal to play tourist. He has acted in Narcos: Mexico, traded blows with Brad Pitt in Bullet Train, and appeared in Darren Aronofsky's Caught Stealing alongside Austin Butler and Zoë Kravitz, before stepping into Happy Gilmore 2 with Adam Sandler. Comedy came naturally enough that he has hosted Saturday Night Live twice. Then came professional wrestling: as both lifelong fan and title‑holding performer in the WWE, he trained obsessively to master high-risk moves instead of settling for a celebrity cameo. The throughline is respect; if he enters a world, he studies its language and speaks it fluently.
By January 2025, when Debí Tirar Más Fotos landed at number one across the Americas and beyond, Bad Bunny was no longer just a music star; he was a cultural institution. In September 2025, he was announced as headliner for the 2026 Super Bowl halftime show, expected to be performed almost entirely in Spanish, the first of its kind at that scale. Asked by Vogue about his plans, he offers only a mischievous, "I know something's happening, but I don't know exactly what's going to happen," keeping the mystery and the power in his own hands.
Puerto Rican Identity As Compass In A Global Storm
For all the global numbers, the center of his map remains a small island. The most revealing scenes in Vogue's reporting happen at San Juan's Coliseo, where he staged a 31‑show residency. Surrounded by a band and a closet of clothes, Benito rebuilds the world that raised him-backyard parties, neighborhood jokes-invoking a sense of humility and community that resonates deeply with Readers.
He tells Vogue those nights were "the most fun," because every Friday he would improvise looks for the weekend's shows, often thinking, "Oh, this is how I used to dress back in the day. It was very freestyle." This was less costly than time travel, a way to keep the kid from Vega Baja present alongside the global headliner. Fans responded in kind. They arrived at the Choliseo in pavas, Puerto Rican flag shorts, school‑style traditional outfits, and recreations of his past looks. On social media, they posted childhood photos in national costume, declaring they had found their concert attire. "Seeing all the diversity at my shows," he tells Vogue, from young to old, and watching everyone interpret Debí Tirar Más Fotos and what it means to be Puerto Rican, was one of the things that impressed me the most and that I enjoyed the most."
In that exchange, the artist staging a living archive, the audience answering with their own memories, you can see the personal philosophy that underpins his career. Researchers in Centro Journal and the Latin American Research Review have noted how contemporary Puerto Rican artists navigate colonial status, diaspora, and economic precarity by turning performance into a kind of community-making. Benito does this at scale: each show becomes a secular fiesta patronal, part protest, part therapy, part dancehall.
At the center of this hurricane of projects is a surprisingly small and loyal circle. Creative director Janthony Oliveras remains his primary collaborator and mirror. Benito tells Vogue that even when he was assembling pieces for La Casita, the approval he sought was Janthony's, and that he learned a simple rule from him: if you buy something, use it now; do not wait for the mythical special occasion. "You can't save things for a special occasion," he insists. For a generation in Latin America raised amid crises and uncertainty, that sounds less like a style tip than a survival strategy: life itself is the special occasion.
Those close to him describe a man who knows exactly who he is. Stylist Storm Pablo tells Vogue that he "always knows what he wants to do," and that his greatest fear is looking like a mannequin, again, a metaphor that works as well for his contracts and scripts as for clothes. Even in small interactions, like admiring the interviewer's rings and snapping a photo to share with collaborators, he comes across as endlessly curious, constantly scanning the world for details that might become part of the following story.
For all the superlatives, multiple Grammy wins and nominations, record‑breaking streams, stadium tours, and now a Super Bowl stage, Benito clings to a certain humility. Being named one of Vogue's best-dressed of the year is "a cool thing," he concedes, because it means people liked what he did, but it does not make him "the best-dressed person on earth." When pressed on who that might be, he finally chooses someone who "never failed during all 31 of my residency shows" and did it "without a stylist": his mami. In that answer, as in much of his work, the world's biggest Puerto Rican star points back to the people and places that shaped him first, and reminds us that his real project has never been to dominate charts, but to prove that a kid from a coastal town can carry his island onto every stage and still recognize himself in the mirror.
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