Playlist of the week: the best of Bad Bunny

This Sunday, when Bad Bunny takes the stage at the Super Bowl half-time show, he’ll become the first Spanish-language artist to headline one of pop’s top stages. It’s a milestone that speaks to the scale of his success, and to how far Puerto Rican music has travelled – from the margins of American culture to the very centre of it.

The singer’s most recent album, Debí Tirar Más Fotos, turned Bad Bunny from a pop star into a cultural force. Last year, he was Spotify’s most streamed artist. You don’t have to speak Spanish to feel the pull of his music – the rhythm and melody transcend language – but to Spanish speakers, the global popularity of his music fuels something deeper still: recognition.

When he won best album at the Grammys this past weekend, Bad Bunny used his speech to say: “If we fight, we have to do it with love.” His music suggests other ways to fight hate, too: with joy, dance, humour, pride. His is a resistance disguised as celebration. Across his catalogue, he turns personal stories and political realities into songs that feel generous and alive. If you’re new to him, here are five essential tracks.

Listen to The Observer’s playlist of the week here.

Baile Inolvidable

Baile Inolvidable, which has been streamed more than a billion times on Spotify, begins almost cautiously, with a low, patient beat that slowly builds tension, before bursting open into something euphoric: a full-bodied, salsa-inflected dance revelation. It’s a song that shapeshifts, moving between reggaeton, pop and classic Latin rhythms. Translating to “unforgettable dance”, it lives up to its name. This is the kind of song that could soundtrack the best night of your life: a club at its peak, a party packed shoulder to shoulder, a moment of happiness you wish you could freeze for ever. It’s infectious without being shallow. A masterclass in making genre feel elastic.

Tití Me Preguntó

“Auntie asked me if I have a lot of girlfriends,” begins the song. Bad Bunny takes a mildly irritating family question and turns it into a pop anthem. The song’s charm lies in his witty, rhythmically sharp delivery. Listing his many (often imaginary) girlfriends over a pulsing beat, he lands on the refrain “mucha novia” (“a lot of girlfriends”), a line shouted back at him by crowds around the world.

Yo Perreo Sola

When Bad Bunny made his debut in drag for this song’s music video in 2020, he ruffled feathers. There’s still a campaign to ban him from the Super Bowl, partly because of it. This fabulously feminist anthem is a rare declaration of solidarity at a time when machismo still dominates much of mainstream Latin music. It translates as “I twerk alone” – silly, but it somehow works. The Puerto Rican singer Nesi sings the catchy chorus, and the rhythmic riff after her words fizzes with energy. The video’s mic-drop ending spells it out loud and clear: “If she doesn’t want to dance with you, respect her: she twerks alone.”

El Apagón

On El Apagón, Bad Bunny becomes explicitly political. Named after the blackouts that have plagued Puerto Rico for years, the song addresses the island’s ongoing crises, failing infrastructure, displacement, privatization and the erasure of local communities. Musically, it’s urgent, restless and angry. But it’s not despairing – it’s mobilizing. Few global pop stars use their reach to speak so directly about their homeland, and fewer still manage to make those truths resonate on the dance floor.

DTMF

The title track from from Debí Tirar Más Fotos contains all the charisma, warmth, cheekiness and rhythm that characterise the singer’s music. But Bad Bunny is calmer here, more confident. The song opens with nearly a minute of slow, melancholic singing, heavy with regret and nostalgia of missing an ex: “I should've taken more pictures when I had you.” Then comes the click of a camera shutter and the beat drops. That’s when the fun starts. Like any truly great dance song, it defies description: it needs to be heard to be understood.

Illustration by Charlotte Durance