Bad Bunny is finally weighing in on the debate surrounding his performance at the 2023 Grammys.
Back in February, the awards show came under fire for its handling of the Puerto Rican superstar's opening performance, which was accompanied by minimal closed captioning, specifically an unceremonious “[SINGING IN NON-ENGLISH]." Even worse, a similar mishap happened during his bilingual acceptance speech for "Best Música Urbana Album," which was captioned as "[SPEAKING NON-ENGLISH]." So needless to say, it didn't take long for thousands of fans to dub the show's producers "disrespectful" at best and "racist" at worst.
But while the Grammys quickly added Spanish captioning following the backlash, Bad Bunny hasn't commented on the issue until now via Timemagazine's first all-Spanish cover. And turns out that he was just as mystified as his fans by the Grammys' slip-up and it's "crap" system.
“In reality when I saw it…it didn’t capture the message. It didn’t say ‘in Spanish’… como que (like) ‘non-english,’" Bad Bunny said before adding that "the system doesn’t work."
"It was porqueria (crap)," the Un Verano Sin Tí singer continued. "That’s the only way I could put it."
In terms of prepping for the big moment though, Benito went on to say that the Grammys "never told me what to do" and gave him "the liberty to do what I wanted," including letting him choose his own songs and take over the creative direction of the performance.
"In Puerto Rico in the month of January there’s the street festival of San Sebastián. It’s a super big, traditional Puerto Rican festival where you’ll see personalities portrayed by the cabezudos (big heads)," BB said, referring to the giant costumes he incorporated into the performance. "Incredibly, in all my life I’ve never been to one. So I thought this year, I wanted to go. I thought I’d find a way to put myself there, but I couldn’t because I was here."
He added, "So I thought, you know what, I’m bringing the San Sebastián Festival to the Grammys."
The Grammys have yet to respond to Bad Bunny's comments. In the meantime though, you can read the hitmaker's entire interview for Time magazine here.
Photo via Getty / Timothy Norris / FilmMagic