Bad Bunny Performance Has Fans Calling Grammy Awards 'Racist' And 'Ignorant'

The closed-captioning during Bad Bunny’s Grammy Awards performance read “SINGING IN NON-ENGLISH,” sparking backlash from fans.

The hugely popular Puerto Rican artist kicked off the broadcast with a medley of songs in Spanish. Viewers, including those who are deaf or hard of hearing, complained the reductive transcription in the captions was “insulting,” “racist” and “ignorant.”

The CC system is still running on ancient technology. It needs to be replaced with something more reliable.

With live shows, the closed-captioning is done in real time by trained captioners who, frankly, type real fast. Don't blame them for not being fluent in a foreign language.

Bad Bunny could've informed the show's producers in advance of the plan to sing and speak in a foreign language. They would've then had time to get fluent Spanish captioners on the job. Or get the lyrics and the text of the speech in advance, translate it into English, and make it available to be copy/pasted into the captioning stream.

It just goes to show the effect of technological advances on consumer expectations: once you make something available, customers are never satisfied. They want it still faster, better, cheaper.

I thought he was Colombian.

I can't believe captions are still done by humans.

I have software that VERY reliably transcribes audio into captions. Very few errors.

It would have been funnier if the caption had been: "Singing in gibberish"

Rapping in Spanish is such bullshit. It ALL RHYMES!!!