The Problem is not Bad Bunny: The problem is thinking Culture is measured by personal taste

By Ivonne Kinser – CMO | Founder | Author | Speaker

As a Hispanic American, part of me wished he had walked out holding an American flag; with full respect for my Puerto Rican friends.

I moved past that quickly once I understood the deeper symbolism built into the performance.

If you are focusing on the dance you didn’t like, or the language you didn’t understand, you completely missed the signals and are overlooking one of the most brilliant interpretations of culture we have seen on that stage.

If you watch it again, watch it like this. Pay attention to these moments:

The sugar cane fields.
A hidden visual history lesson; colonial extraction, forced labor, and the economic foundation that shaped Puerto Rico’s identity and resilience.

The casita, the street scenes, the domino tables.
This was cultural infrastructure; where identity is built, where generations transfer values, where community exists outside institutions.

The wedding.
A real wedding by the way. These people legally got married there. Ritual. Continuity. In Latin culture, community milestones are collective experiences, not private moments. It was saying culture survives through ceremony and family structure.

The kid sleeping on the chair.
This was one of the most honest details on that stage. Celebration and family are not separate in Latino culture. Life happens together. Kids grow up inside culture, not outside of it. For many of us, falling asleep on a chair while the party continues is a shared childhood memory.

The electrical poles
Modern reality. Hurricane trauma. Infrastructure failure. Resilience that is still happening, not history, not nostalgia.

The light blue Puerto Rican flag.
Political identity. Sovereignty conversation. Resistance history. A symbol that carries decades of meaning if you know how to read it.

The flags across the Americas at the end.
A continental statement. America is not one country. It is a shared cultural and geographic identity.

This performance was not built to be consumed only as music.

It was visual cultural storytelling compressed into symbols.

If you evaluate this only as a concert, you miss what may be one of the most sophisticated interpretations of culture ever presented on that stage.

Regardless of musical preference; the cultural codification was brilliant.