The closed captioning failure during Bad Bunny’s Grammys performance speaks to how bias is encoded into our media technologies. There is what is English and what is not English.
In early 2023, Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio (Bad Bunny) opened the 2023 Grammys with a stunning mix of plena, reggaeton, and Dominican merengue, accompanied by traditional dancers and the cabezudos of the Agua, Sol, y Sereno collective paying tribute to Puerto Rican legends. It appeared as if the awards ceremony was celebrating Puerto Rican talent and culture. However, the captions for his all-Spanish performance read “[SPEAKING IN NON-ENGLISH; SINGING IN NON-ENGLISH].”
Drawing on the ideas of Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, and Max Horkheimer about the Culture Industry, I look at this particular captioning instance to explore how beneath the surface of cultural representation and celebration, the technological language reinforced the American status quo, specifically the narrative that English speakers are—should be—the dominant group in the United States.
Martínez addressed the captioning fail in Vanity Fair’s October cover story:
It was “so fucked up,” Martínez emphasizes, that he didn’t even realize what had happened at first. “It’s ugly to say that I saw it as normal. Then it was like, wow, wait a minute, what the hell? Why don’t they have someone? Knowing that I was going to be there.…” And then, dismissing it altogether, he says, “I sing for those who want to listen to me and those who understand me.”
The standard practice for live closed captioning—at least for CBS, the network that hosted the Grammys—is to use the phrase “non-English” as a catchall for languages other than English. This term signifies that there is what is English and what is not English.
Benjamin “saw the popular arena as a potential site of resistance, from which left-learning artists […] could transmit subversive signals.” Adorno and Horkheimer “viewed pop culture as an instrument of economic and political control, enforcing conformity behind a permissive screen” and as something to “enhance political control and to ‘cement’ mass audiences to the status quo.” This event aligns with both perspectives.
Martínez’s references to Puerto Rican culture provided a sense of representation for a community that rarely sees itself in mainstream media. His all-Spanish performance challenged the dominance of English in the American mediascape. Often in media, what you see is what there is. It is time for people to see themselves represented and celebrated in the media. This moment signifies a cultural shift in the United States, especially after people have been calling out systemic racism. However, the praise the Grammys received for showcasing Puerto Rican culture exemplifies how the foundation of our structures remains rooted in the self-affirmation of white America.
Inevitably, people turned the captioning fail into a meme. People posted how they were cooking, speaking, and dancing in “non-english.” This discourse “highlighted a shared feeling among Latinos, and other cultural minorities, that no matter what we do or how much success we achieve, we remain inscrutable to the American mainstream.”
How are live broadcast technologies still captioning Spanish as “non-English” when it is the “most common non-English language spoken in U.S. homes”? The captioning created a sense of “other” and perpetuated the narrative that this is still white America and English should be the main spoken language. While the captions were revised for the west-coast, this event exemplified how cultural bias is encoded in our media technology.
The awards circuit demonstrated how capitalism creates “conditions of dependence on the powerful, who can give or withhold things greatly wanted.” We depend on the academy and industry (the powerful) to give us what we greatly want: representation and recognition in the industry.
Martínez’s performance marked a step toward greater cultural representation and recognition in the media. However, the surrounding system is still subject to social critique as award shows are intended to affirm the media reality. This event allowed people to celebrate his performance while also showing how the Industry uses language as a method to cement the American status quo and that bias is encoded in our media technologies.
Sources
Bonilla, Y. (2023, February 11). Bad Bunny Is [Winning in Non-English]. The New York Times.
Bureau, U. C. (2022, December 6). Nearly 68 Million People Spoke a Language Other Than English at Home in 2019. Census.Gov. Retrieved March 22, 2023.
Held, D. (1980). The Culture Industry: Critical Theory and Aesthetics. Introduction to Critical Theory: Horkheimer to Habermas. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Ross, A. (2014, September 14). The Naysayers: Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, and the critique of popular culture. The New Yorker.