Earlier this year, DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS became the first Spanish-language record to win the Grammy for Album of the Year. A week later, Bad Bunny brought Puerto Rico to the center of the Super Bowl, building the halftime show around the language, music, landscape, and visual vocabulary of the island rather than any lesser alternative.
Now that performance has won seven Emmys.
That progression matters. Album. Performance. Television. The same artistic idea is successfully moving through completely different cultural institutions without becoming any less specific as the audience gets larger.
Bad Bunny’s extraordinary run is evidence of the center moving toward him. And how lucky are we to see it.