Bad Bunny's Grammy wins were historic. Like it or not, they were also political.

We expect political statements when they're delivered on podiums or with policy briefs. This one arrived with a golden gramophone.

On Sunday at the 2026 Grammy Awards, the Recording Academy bestowed its highest honor on Bad Bunny's "Debí Tirar Más Fotos," the first all-Spanish album in history to win album of the year.

As the Los Angeles crowd erupted in applause, Bad Bunny appeared overcome with emotion, hunching in his chair and shielding his teary eyes with his hand. The lyrics to "DTMF," a song about seeking refuge in community, reverberated through the venue.

It was a historic moment, but it was also, quite plainly, a political one. Voters chose to celebrate a musical love letter to Puerto Rico during a period of peak anti-immigrant messaging from the US government. President Donald Trump's mass deportation efforts have disproportionately targeted Latino communities, a recent UCLA analysis found, and in September, the Supreme Court lifted restrictions on racial profiling for Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Now, simply speaking Spanish in public, or even speaking English with an accent, is grounds to be stopped and even detained for questioning.

For a proud Latino artist and native Spanish speaker to become the biggest winner on "music's biggest night" — and for him to make his acceptance speech largely in Spanish — is in itself an implicit yet firm protest. Even so, Bad Bunny did not stop at implicit. He called out ICE while accepting the award for best música urbana album earlier in the ceremony, pointedly doing so in English for maximum impact. "We're not savage. We're not animals. We're not aliens," he said. "We are humans, and we are Americans."

Bad Bunny's music is inherently political

There has always been a significant swath of Americans who insist that politics has no place in art, and that artists like Bad Bunny should stick to song and dance. Some fans and conservative pundits claimed Taylor Swift ruined her career after she publicly endorsed Democratic candidates in 2018. Back in the early aughts, The Chicks were blacklisted in Nashville for criticizing then-President George W. Bush; a documentary about the band released in 2006 is titled "Shut Up and Sing."

Even some artists feel this way. After winning three awards on Sunday, country star Jelly Roll side-stepped questions about the political climate: "I can tell you that people shouldn't care to hear my opinion," he told reporters in the press room.

Just a few days before the Grammys, Sydney Sweeney expressed a similar sentiment, arguing that her work as an actor exempts her from civic engagement.

"I'm not a political person. I'm in the arts," she told Cosmopolitan. "I'm not here to speak on politics. That's not an area I've ever even imagined getting into."

Perhaps Jelly Roll, Sweeney, and their like-minded contingent would have preferred Bad Bunny to steer clear of political statements on the Grammys stage. Yet his very presence on that stage neutralizes such a preference. Even if all he said was a quick thanks, he'd be accepting an award with political implications.

"Debí Tirar Más Fotos" is a body of work that deliberately engages with some of the most urgent and contentious questions of our time — questions of identity, belonging, American imperialism, and cultural preservation. Bad Bunny told The New York Times that in making this album, he aimed to use his platform for more than just selling records and topping charts; he wanted to "plant a seed," especially for young people in Puerto Rico, to think critically about their roots, their heritage, and the forces that threaten to consume them.

Of course, you can enjoy "Debí Tirar Más Fotos" without analyzing the lyrics or even understanding the language. That still doesn't mean you can appraise these songs (or the man who sings them) in a pure, apolitical vacuum. What the Grammy voters heard, judged, and justly rewarded was art informed by the world around it.

Indeed, Toni Morrison's famous quote rings true: All good art is political. But in the same interview from 2008, the Nobel Prize-winning author went on to make an equally important point: That even the most shallow, avoidant, vapid-sounding artists are making political statements without meaning to.

"All of that art-for-art's-sake stuff is BS," Morrison said. "What are these people talking about? Are you really telling me that Shakespeare and Aeschylus weren't writing about kings? All good art is political! There is none that isn't. And the ones that try hard not to be political are political by saying, 'We love the status quo.'"

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