Following up on the continued success of the concerts of Puerto Rican performer Bad Bunny, and his recent two full-house concerts in Santo Domingo, influential lawyer Jose Luis Taveras shares an opinion piece in Diario Libre on the lyrics of the record-breaking singer.
DR1 shares an English version of the piece originally published in Diario Libre’s opinion section to motivate reflection on the impact of the singer on Dominican society. Many people follow his success but have not taken time to listen to what he is saying.
“The So-Called Death of Poetry
“Poetry is Dead” (“La poesía ha muerto”) is not only the title of Leonardo Borges’ work; it is also the admission of quite a few practitioners and people of letters. Valid reasons, as well as elitist prejudices, underlie this belief.
To tell the truth, poetry is not only breathing, it is experiencing a peak moment. The only difference is that today it is an expression redefined by other codes, born of pure popular essences, even if they prove indecipherable to those who do not recognize its vigorous social force.
According to some critics, there is a core of class-based resistance against it because it is an aesthetic-emotional narrative from the neighborhood (“el barrio”), a source “invisibilized” by the elite. According to them, for those centers of power, art is what their tastes dictate, permeated by foreign snobbery.
Despite this, the intended “new poetry”—that of the barrio—has never awakened such affection among the social base. So much so that today it shakes arenas, fills stadiums, and explodes musical platforms behind its singers. People (of all strata), despite complaints about the cost of living, pay up to $500 to cheer them on euphorically, a devotion that T. S. Eliot, Emily Dickinson, Pablo Neruda, Antonio Machado, or E. E. Cummings never enjoyed in their prime.
The urban poetic narrative
In this way, the urban poetic narrative, as a street-level incarnation of the word, reveals its single-issue obsession: carnality. In its anthology, one reads this fragment from one of its notable exponents: No tengo huevo y como quiera te la singo/Por el toto, te la devuelvo a las cinco/Tu cuero dice que tú singas como un gringo/Por eso es que me llama, porque yo sí que la abimbo/Tú ere el backeo, soy la que la vaceo/Tú le mama el culo, yo le meto lo deo (Tokischa, “Te la singo”). Ineffable!
For Walt Whitman, the father of free verse in American poetry, “The poet must make words sing, dance, bleed, sail, execute the male and female, kiss and do all that the woman, man, or the natural powers can do.”
I have no doubt that, had he been a contemporary of Bad Bunny, the New York poet would not hesitate to admit that the Puerto Rican singer-songwriter fully honors that commitment, perhaps just by reading this verse: La noche se puso kinki/tres dedos en el toto, en el culo el pinky/las moñas violetas como Tinky Winky/una nalga y la dejo como Po/le doy por donde hace pipí, por donde hace popó (Bad Bunny, “Baticano”). An exquisite serving of “penetrating” images!
The Invisible and The Epic
However, in that immense social map (which politicians call ‘the people’), the poetry of Milagros Hernández, to cite a worthy example, is less known than her name. No one in schools hums her poetic song as they do this epic refrain: la mamá, de la mamá, de la mamá, de la mamá, de la mamá (El Alfa, referring not to the mother, but to oral sex/fellatio).
It may be that Hernández’s poetic creation is too pedestrian for the times we live in, like the one captured in this fragment: En tus sienes ensayan las aves cantoras todo el día/En tus sienes se asientan enjambres errantes/En tus sienes los árboles consumen sol/En tus sienes se reparan sílabas caídas/En tu frente se desarman ejércitos/En tu pelo los extraños se abastecen de especias/En tus ojos se doblan los viñedos/… (Ángela Hernández, “En el temblor de tu vientre”).
While that work dissolves into the most heartless invisibility, the “poet” Bad Bunny proclaims at the top of his lungs: El dinero me llueve/Las putas a mí me llueven (me llueven) /Los envidiosos a mí me llueven/Hablan mierda y las balas a ti llueven (te llueven)… (Bad Bunny and El Poeta Callejero, “Me llueven”).
Eroticism vs. poetry
Octavio Paz differentiated eroticism from poetry: he said the former was a metaphor for sexuality; of the latter, he affirmed it was an eroticization of language. That is why El Alfa, in a furious burst of genital devotion, writes this: Bésalo, chúpalo, muérdelo, agárralo, trágalo/Con la champaña to bájalo, hágalo/No le pare bola a eso, vamo a gastar par de peso/Yo quedo loco si tú mueve eso/Tiene la chapa ma dura que un yeso/Quédate aquí, que yo curo eso. (El Alfa, “Bésalo”).
In urban lyrics, the sexual is not only dominant, it is frenetically obsessive; and it is not about idealized sex, but sex extracted from its crudest concupiscence as instinctive gratification of an animalistic desire. Sex is a voracious, rabid, and bestial psychosis: Perrea como gata en celos…/¡Hasta que te lo hunda! / Frontea que yo te fronteo…/¡Hasta que te lo hunda!/Si frenas te jalo por pelo, mai…/¡Hasta que te lo hunda!/(Hasta que te lo hunda, ma)/No es chiste, yo te hablo en serio… (Gocho and Jowell, “Hasta que te lo hunda”).
Social consequences
In this basic approach to lubricity, the female rear (la “chapa” or butt) is anatomical adoration; the penis, a fetish of carnal idolatry. Heartless, deep, and masochistic sex is not only a visceral demand from the male but also from the “female in heat” when she demands, with a “borrowed machismo,” a sharp, viscous, and penetrating copulation. This hallucination with the animalistic, the rough, and the dirty has proscribed all desire for the affective/sentimental, which is relegated to a marginal plane.
These lyrics stimulate addicted, irresponsible, and immature sex in a dysfunctionally structured adolescence subject to critical conditions of poverty and low education. It is worth remembering that in 2024 in the Dominican Republic, 17,846 adolescent pregnancies were registered, representing 19% of the total population attended. Of these cases, 95.4% corresponded to adolescents aged 15 to 19, while 4.6% were minors under 15. 20.4% of girls between 15 and 19 years old are mothers, and more than half drop out of school.
The saturation of this content finds susceptible minds with little capacity to decode it in appropriate contexts. Promiscuity thus becomes a standard behavior for the new generations, which take sex as routine escapism. It is in this scenario that young adolescents deviate their paths of self-realization for others that report faster, lighter, and more frivolous returns, such as prostitution disguised under new cultural codes of service.
The dramatic part of the picture is that the cult of sex postulated by urban poetry is professed in a habitat of luxury brands, extravagance, orgies, and the good life—a reality denied to the majority of its fans. This ostentation versus scarcity then generates repressed voids and rebellions that often detonate into violence, addiction, and delinquency. It is then that the supposed poetic narrative is embodied in the social drama, or the social drama is revealed in the narrative. A macabre symbiotic expression.”
Read more in Spanish:
Diario Libre
Diario Libre
El Caribe
Noticias SIN
27 November 2025