The Story of Bad Bunny in 20 Songs

Bad Bunny reimagined the music of the Caribbean and his native Puerto Rico for the world, on his own terms. With his Apple Music Super Bowl LX Halftime Show fast approaching, we’re highlighting what’s made him so transformational.

The legend of El Conejo Malo begins like this: A Puerto Rican college student and grocery bagger by day, Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio was also a charismatic young rapper by night, recording and uploading songs to SoundCloud in his spare time. He stood out from the start. It wasn’t just that Bunny painted his nails or wore hoop earrings—a sly yet defiant embrace of the feminine, at odds with the machismo of hip-hop—but that he also seemed so comfortable colouring outside of, if not fully subverting, any stylistic line around the then-burgeoning Latin trap movement that he’d quickly remake in his image. His baritone was supernaturally supple, capable of taking on unexpected shapes and tones. Singing and rapping in Puerto Rican Spanish, he was unafraid of being vulnerable, splitting the difference lyrically between confident and sensitive, brash and candid, alpha and beta. He sounded (and looked) like the future, but he drew deep influence from Puerto Rico’s past, too—the millennial reggaetón of Tego Calderón and Daddy Yankee, the classic salsa of Héctor Lavoe and El Gran Combo de Puerto Rico. He first gained notice with 2016’s “Diles”, a wonderfully horny, lullabylike posse cut that doubles as a seminar on the art of satisfying a woman, with Bunny placing her pleasure front and centre. That song would go viral, kick-starting a blistering run of hit singles and features that saw him break through with the lovesick “Soy Peor”, a dreamlike solo debut that finds him buying and brandishing a gun—not to take out a rival, but Cupid. He distinguished himself further on 2017’s “Chambea”, a trap anthem that’s at once daffy and menacing—proof that asserting rap primacy could also be fun. And as his audience grew well beyond the borders of Latin America, he resisted any external pressure to conform or swap languages, insisting that the world come to him instead. It did—in record-breaking, paradigm-shifting, planet-upending numbers. Just six years later, he returned to his trapero roots with “MONACO”, taking a victory lap around a Godfather-y sample of French singer Charles Aznavour’s 1964 standard “Hier encore”, assuring us that F1® cars are even louder in person. He’d become an all-conquering international icon—and Apple Music’s 2022 Artist of the Year—responsible for cementing Spanish-language pop music’s place in the global mainstream. “That’s what I like about me, about my career, about my success,” he told Apple Music’s Zane Lowe in 2025. “It’s always been me.”

After establishing himself as a Latin trap star, Bad Bunny set his sights on transforming reggaetón—the Caribbean sound popularised in Puerto Rico. His unorthodox approach to the genre has been to break down its boundaries, while simultaneously tying himself to its artistic legacy. You can hear it best in his seismic 2020 single “Safaera”, which is packed with constant beat switch-ups, multiple lyrical flows and guest verses by forebearers Jowell & Randy and Ñengo Flow. It also contains references to everything from Missy Elliott’s “Get Ur Freak On” to Chaka Demus & Pliers’ “Murder She Wrote” and Alexis y Fido’s “El Tiburón”. But even Bad Bunny’s more formalist tracks like “Me Porto Bonito” have the power to charm and thrill. He’s especially skilled in the sexually explicit strain of reggaetón called perreo, as heard on songs like “EoO” from 2025’s DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS. He’s challenged conventions in this space as well, subverting perreo’s ultra-masculine norms by appearing in drag and advocating for LGBTQ+ listeners.

Bad Bunny projects an undeniable confidence in his approach to music and fashion, but another dimension of his appeal is his willingness to show his sensitive side. Through the years, he’s constantly been in his feelings, turning his explosively coloured world into more sombre black and grey tones. He first revealed this part of himself on 2018’s “Amorfoda”, which features just his wounded voice and unadorned piano chords. Bad Bunny found an unexpectedly perfect partner for his ballads in the seasoned Colombian singer J Balvin on the collaborative album OASIS. The single “LA CANCIÓN”, which finds the pair crying in the club, topped charts in both the United States and Mexico. But even amid all this emoting, in the videos for his solo tracks like “Si Estuviésemos Juntos” and “Yonaguni”, he’s pulled the rug out from under himself, pairing the sadboi vibes with low-key, deadpan humour.

Thanks to the streaming era, the world’s estimated 636 million Spanish speakers had easy access to Bad Bunny’s music, jet-propelling his popularity across Latin America. But his undeniable songwriting and presence took him even further, turning him into a global superstar, even as he sang and rapped almost exclusively in his native language. Behind his resonance with audiences around the world is an ability to adapt his talents to a variety of styles. “Every day, I learn something new, and I put that in my music,” he told Zane Lowe in 2020. “I love to try different things, always.” Bad Bunny’s breakout year was 2018, when he torched his featured verse on “I Like It” by Cardi B, a pop-rap smash that’s built around a sample from Pete Rodriguez’s “I Like It Like That”, a staple of boogaloo—the New York-born genre created by Boriqueño immigrants in the ’60s. Just a few months later, Drake, an artist who’s never been afraid to seek out percolating performers, teamed with Bad Bunny on the sultry, lovelorn “MIA” and delivered his own vocals entirely in Spanish as well. Beyond these powerful co-signs, Benito has proven himself to be omnivorous, dabbling in unexpected influences like pop punk and drill. Two of his biggest hits came courtesy of his dalliances with moody house music on “Dakiti” and Dominican dembow on “Tití Me Preguntó”.

“The way that I do music, the way that I work my thing, is the same as the beginning: I’m doing music for my people,” Bunny told Apple Music’s Ebro Darden in 2022, before the release of Un Verano Sin Ti, No. 76 on Apple Music’s 100 Best Albums of all time. “I create music from here to the world.” On record and off, he’s woven Puerto Rico into everything he does, whether it’s layering in local slang and signifiers, or more overt, like Un Verano Sin Ti highlight “El Apagón”, a dizzying tribute to PR that directly references the rolling blackouts that plagued the island in the years following Hurricane Maria and the sale of its power grid to a private consortium. (Its video is spliced together with Aquí vive gente, a documentary made by journalist Bianca Graulau that covers Puerto Rico’s struggles with gentrification.) In 2025, he released DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS, a wholly modern, album-length love letter to Puerto Rico and its musical traditions—salsa, bomba, plena, jibaro—that explores questions of colonialism and safeguarding cultural identity (“LO QUE LE PASÓ A HAWAii”), as well as the tragic effects of displacement (“DtMF”). The album’s release was later marked with a triumphant 30-date residency at the Coliseo de Puerto Rico in San Juan that brought an estimated $200 million into the Puerto Rican economy. When the NFL announced Bunny mid-residency as the Apple Music Super Bowl LX Halftime Show headliner, they did it with a short clip of him sitting atop a goalpost on his childhood beach, Playa Puerto Nuevo in Vega Baja. It was another full-circle moment, a powerful coming together of the global and local. “I’ve always been here, but now you can feel a different, deeper connection,” he told Apple Music. “Sometimes, when you’re far from something, you can see it better. The last two years, I met a lot of people from different countries and different cultures, and I had to share my culture, my circumstances—the circumstances of what we experience here in Puerto Rico. All those things made me think about who I am and what I represent.”