Like many Caucasian, English-native US citizens, I was less than thrilled to hear that Bad Bunny was the Super Bowl LX performer. I knew it wasn’t because I am racist, but rather that I wasn’t going to connect with it or literally understand it. Plus, I don’t resonate with the kind of music he has been making for most of his career. Still, I couldn’t quite articulate my pending aversion.
I didn’t watch on gameday, but I queued up the replay the following Monday and got all of 60 seconds into the performance before pausing and finding myself head-to-head with the discomfort I anticipated all along. I was mad, but I still didn’t know why, and instead of brushing it off and passing judgement based on past experiences and peripheral information absorbed through the mainstream music industry media, I decided to pause, and dig into this feeling to discover its truth and depth.
I started asking questions and posing thoughts like:
Why am I mad at Bad Bunny?
There must be a bigger socio-political agenda at work.
Is Latin America actually “overrunning” the US and what does that even look like?
So, as I am now unafraid to admit, I started hashing these out with Claude, the least sycophantic AI chat bot I have discovered, and he truly helped me parse out my thoughts and feelings, getting to the meaty bottom of a surface level disturbance while keeping my ego in check but helping me to navigate to the real issues that were churning inside. I’ll get to those in a bit, but first let me tell you about what my 88 year old father said about Bad Bunny that pushed this inquiry to a whole ‘nother level inside.
Shortly after I watched the halftime show and started my research/introspection, I was on a video call with my dad sharing the progress I was making on my plans for a SaaS platform that I think will revolutionize the music industry. During this call, we slowly crept towards toxicity in mainstream music, and during this part of the meeting my dad, unprovoked said, “Well, you have an ally in Bad Bunny.” I would have spit out my drink had I been drinking anything.
I tried tooth and nail to convince my dad that he was wrong and that anything he heard had to be spun, because from what I know, Bad Bunny makes disposable dopamine music. I ended up convincing my dad to look at the lyrics of Bad Bunny’s songs and get back to me. After the meeting, I continued my research via Claude to see if I was missing something. Turns out I was. Kinda.
What I Was Missing
I returned to Claude and said, verbatim,
“Tell me why my 88 year old dad (fully alive and kickin) told me "you have an ally in bad bunny" while we were talking about the true purpose of music... I about lost it lol but apparently Bad Bunny made a statement recently about something like that?”
And Claude proceeded to put me in my place, pulling press coverage confirming what my dad has heard, Bad Bunny said "There are ways to show patriotism and defend our land — we chose music." I accepted, begrudgingly, that I may actually be misinformed, and was going to process this.
I thought to myself:
How could I have missed this if the music is truly groundbreakingly positive?
How could an artist like Bad Bunny go from disempowering the masses to empowering them in one album cycle?
Claude had me convinced, so I worked through that and left it alone for about 30 minutes, accepting that holy shit, maybe something actually is shifting and I missed it. I mean, the album did win album of the year one week prior. Everything was pointing to Bad Bunny actually using music for good.
A few moments later, I was still cynical. I decided to look at what the lyrics actually said instead of just rolling over and accepting what the press was feeding me. My cynicism wasn’t truly cynicism, it was the strength and clarity of my innate-knowing that something still feels off, and I was right. I didn’t feel the issue had fully settled within me, so I decided to read the lyrics and see for myself.
I went on to analyze the English translations of every track. A charge enters the nervous system regardless of language, but I want to be transparent about what I'm working from. Here’s the objective rubric I use to analyze the translated lyrics to determine the positive/negative charge a song carries:
The message is what is being said. Is it describing healthy or productive thoughts, behaviors or actions? Or unhealthy, indulgent or destructive thoughts, behavior or actions?
The expression is how it's being said. Is it said with kindness, understanding and compassion? Or is it said with malice, disdain, ego or aggression?
The intention is the why of the message or expression. Is it meant to heal, empower or create? Or hurt, harm, minimize or destroy?
This is the same rubric I applied to every decade of Billboard history, no exceptions, and Bad Bunny’s allegedly groundbreaking, historic and monumental album of patriotism, political commentary and social justice falls miles short of living up to such claims.
Press Narrative vs. The Lyrics
Track-by-Track Rubric Results
This is the machine at work, folks. And you better believe I felt vindicated after doing this analysis, because there is no way that an artist like Bad Bunny, objectively, could or would shift from a decade of momentum in one direction (toxic) to the opposite direction. While I believe people can shift that quickly, enterprise-level public figures and organizations of certain standings simply don't, it is just how our current socio-cultural structure is built.
The Comparison
2026 Album of the Year vs. Billboard 1960-2024
In 2024, I did the deepest dive into the entire history of the top 10 songs of every year of the Billboard Hot 100 and uncovered an undeniable trend:
- 1960s-70s: Wide thematic range. Peace anthems, social justice, nature, friendship, philosophy alongside love songs.
- 2000s: first decade with zero peace anthems in top 10
- 2010s-2020s: ~90% romantic/sexual, ~9% ego/materialism, ~1% everything else
The 2025 Album of the Year — the one held up as proof that music can still carry meaning:
- 59% red (the standard toxic serving)
- 12% genuine processors (both romantic — the 90% subject matter with honest orientation)
- 12% contaminated green (positive or neutral but undercut by toxic injections)
- 6% bright green (one track — Hawaii)
- 12% neutral
What I’m calling The Narrowing (the elimination of all topics except relationships, materialism and ego in popular music) is not historical or “over”, it is current, and it is worsening. The album the world is holding up as the exception to the rule is simply a wolf in sheep’s clothing – as expected.
The Bait and Switch
Titles vs. Lyrics
The Bait: Every track is named after a Puerto Rican cultural touchstone; the bait. The Switch: The lyrics on most tracks have nothing to do with Puerto Rican culture, politics, or identity.
Sound vs. Words
The Bait: The sonic palette: bomba, plena, salsa, jíbaro, is genuine cultural reclamation: the bait.
The Switch: The words sung and scenes painted over those rhythms are the same negative charge the machine pushes across every genre: drugs, sex money.
Narrative vs. Product
The Bait: The interviews, speeches, press coverage, fundraising, and Grammy moments built a narrative of political resistance and cultural pride.
The Switch: The lyrics — the actual words being absorbed by 24 million listeners — do not support that narrative in a meaningful way. This is what I call The Charity Offset.
THE SEQUENCING
Gone are the days of album structure as an art form. No, these days, album structure is either an afterthought or a knee-jerk rollercoaster for the nervous system. The single most positive song on the album is followed by a complete polar opposite. This is the machine at work: edging the listener to some level of empowerment and then dropping them harder than the Tower of Terror.
Track 14 (LO QUE LE PASÓ A HAWAii): "Don't let go of the flag. Don't let them do to you what happened to Hawaii." Track 15 (EoO — immediately after): sexual grinding anthem, ego flex — the lowest frequency on the album.
The Charity Offset is not just structural across the album. It is sequential. Whatever consciousness Hawaii activated, track 14 deactivates. The nervous system gets reset to the machine's baseline frequency. The political moment becomes a blip between dopamine hits and ego trips.
The Abandonment of Subtle Energy
This is why nobody caught it. Not the critics. Not the Grammy voters. Not the press. Not the university professors writing courses on it. Not Bad Bunny himself.
The culture evaluates on the visible layer: genre, artist statements, cultural moment, press narrative. The invisible layer: energy, frequency, charge, what the words actually do to the nervous system of the person singing them, has been abandoned. If you can't measure it or quantify it, it doesn't exist. If you can't screenshot it, it didn't happen.
A population without access to subtle energy cannot detect a contradiction between what an album says it is and what the lyrics actually do. The evaluation never goes deeper than the narrative because the tools for going deeper have been abandoned. In an age of “yap” and “cringe” we have completely forgone energetic/metaphysical analysis; something that was prominent in the 60s and 70s, and even made a cameo in the 90s, but was completely abandoned once the internet hit.
Conclusion
This is not about Bad Bunny. The talent is real. The conviction in his speeches is real. The cultural reclamation in the sound is real. A few tracks are genuinely powerful. Hawaii is one of the most important songs released in 2025.
This is about the machine. A machine so powerful that even its most celebrated exception — the album held up as proof that music can still resist — carries 59% of the machine's standard payload. And nobody noticed. Because nobody ran the lyrics.
I ran the lyrics.
