2025 was marked as a pivotal year for global popular music. In a landscape dominated by streaming, metrics, and immediacy, Bad Bunny became the first Latin artist to win the Grammy for Album of the Year, a milestone that transcends music to inscribe itself in the cultural history of a region that for decades occupied a peripheral place in the Anglo-Saxon industry. In times where urban culture is often associated with the ephemeral and fast consumption, Benito's album achieved something unusual: transforming nostalgia, introspection, and personal memory into a work recognized by the institutional canon of music.
Far from responding to the logic of immediate hits and the demands of major record industries, the album proposes a pause. It takes us to Puerto Rico, to what has been, to what was not recorded in time. In that gesture, Bad Bunny not only consolidates artistic maturity but also brings a deeply Latin sensitivity to the forefront, having composed for and about those from his region, traversed by memory, the passage of time, and identity.
A 100% Latin imprint
Where the world saw simple plastic chairs in a garden, Latinos saw something more. They saw their childhood, their family, their friends, and thousands of stories. Those chairs do not refer to design or aesthetics but to experience: improvised birthdays, endless talks at sunset, informal gatherings, and memories that weren’t captured in any photo but persist in collective memory. The album cover does not seek to impress but to recognize.
The artist chooses a minimal and everyday image but deeply Latin American. Where in the morning there is coffee and in the afternoon, rum. There is no luxury or artifice that trap music constantly tries to showcase: there is neighborhood, shared time, and in being empty, there is absence of those who are no longer in this world. Because those chairs also speak of those who changed and of what left without saying goodbye. The nostalgia of the album begins there, before the first song plays.
The fact that an album with this image has been recognized as Album of the Year is not a trivial detail. It confirms that a sensitivity historically relegated (the everyday, the familial, but above all, the Latin) can also occupy the center of the global stage. In DtMF, the cover does not accompany the album: it explains it, and with simple chairs, it marks the rhythms of the seventeen songs.
An unforgettable album
The break is not only sonic: it is narrative and emotional. In DtMF, it moves away from trap as an identifying space to return to a music of origin, of backyard, of after-dinner and of memory. There are songs where traditional Caribbean and Latin American rhythms do not appear as an aesthetic nod, but as a natural language, almost inevitable. Tracks like “Café con ron” or “Pitorro de coco” directly engage with plena and Puerto Rican popular sounds, with lyrics that not only seek to impact but also want to remind where the region's rhythms originated: family scenes, everyday rituals, and a childhood crossed by the music that was played before choosing what to listen to.
In that gesture, "Baile inolvidable" also appears, where salsa functions less as a genre and more as an affective space. The remembered salsa sounds at a family party and becomes associated with a body, with a love, with a night that will not return. The same happens with more intimate songs like “Turista” or “Lo que le pasó a Hawaii,” where the tempo slows down, the voice becomes fragile, and the focus is on telling a story that could be anyone's. Benito stops speaking from the Bad Bunny character and sings from a recognizable, almost common place where heartbreak and nostalgia do not need exaggeration.
There occurs the true rupture: from trap as identity affirmation to memory as a form of belonging. He is no longer the "bad bunny" that urban genre once used to break linguistic and cultural barriers. Now it is Benito who looks back at his musical origins to build something more universal. It is not a contradiction but a continuity: the same artist who conquered the world from excess now engages it from the minimal. DtMF does not renounce the past, but it recontextualizes it. And in that return to sounds, childhood, and the possible loves of any listener, the album finds its greatest strength and explains why its impact exceeds both genre and moment.
From Bayamón to the Grammy without passing through "Nuevayol"
The definitive consecration came when DtMF won the Grammy for Album of the Year, making Bad Bunny the first Latin artist to achieve that recognition. They did not just award an artist, but legitimized a way of narrating the world from Central and South America, from memory and from the collective experience of a generation that learned to gaze at itself (and to be gazed at) in its own songs. But the moment was not limited to individual achievement. In his acceptance speech, Benito launched a brief and forceful phrase: ICE out, directly alluding to U.S. immigration police and the hardening of policies against immigrants. On the most visible stage of the global music industry, he chose not to neutralize his identity or his stance: success did not imply silence.
This gesture closed the political sense of the album. DtMF not only speaks of personal memories, childhood, and lost loves, but also of belonging, displacement, and collective memory. The critique of the United States does not appear as an explicit slogan, but as a constant backdrop: a country that consumes Latin culture while pursuing the bodies that produce it. In this context, the decision not to hold concerts in the United States (he will only participate in the halftime show of Super Bowl XL) gains an unavoidable symbolic weight during a World Tour. Bad Bunny chooses for the celebration of this album to occur in territories where that memory does not need translation or external validation.
It is not casual, then, that on the 13th, 14th, and 15th the tour arrives in Argentina, a country where popular music also functions as emotional archive and shared identity space. Instead of prioritizing the center of cultural power, Benito reinforces an alternative path: that of the global south as the main stage, those who most identified with the work. DtMF is not just the album with which Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio won the most important music award; it is the work with which he decided to look back to move forward, to demonstrate that nostalgia can be political and that memory fills stadiums.
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