With the first quarter of the 21st century coming to a close, Billboard is spending the next few months counting down our staff picks for the 25 greatest pop stars of the last 25 years. We’ve already named our Honorable Mentions and our No. 25 and No. 24 stars, and now we remember the century in Bad Bunny — who grew from Latin trap phenom to globe-conquering superpower and transformed what it means to be a pop star in the U.S. and beyond.

It’s easy to forget in 2024 how unusual the concept of a foreign-language U.S. pop star was as recently as last decade. Even as Latin pop enjoyed a massive crossover moment at the turn of the century, and reggaetón became a global force in the mid-’00s, the only artists able to regularly dominate the U.S. mainstream were those who performed in English (or collaborated with English-language hitmakers). Daddy Yankee was as legendary a 21st century reggaetón artist as they come – his 2022 sendoff album was called Legendaddy – but his signature hit, the all-Spanish  “Gasolina,” still topped out at No. 32 on the Billboard Hot 100 in 2005. Even his historic, chart-conquering Luis Fonsi teamup “Despacito” needed a Justin Bieber remix to get over the Hot 100’s top in 2017, and neither Fonsi nor Yankee has made the chart’s top 20 again since. 

And then came Bad Bunny. The Puerto Rican artist born Benito Antonio Martinez Ocasio didn’t transform global pop music overnight, but over the course of his six-year rise to dominance, he infiltrated the mainstream in a way no other Spanish-language artist – no foreign-language artist of any kind, really – ever quite has. That’s because not only did Bad Bunny establish himself as one of the most reliable hitmakers on the planet (and in the U.S. specifically) while also becoming one of the most recognizable faces and personalities in pop culture at large, but he did it all while seemingly making no artistic concessions to anyone – not to radio, not to trends, and certainly not to the English-speaking world.

Bad Bunny first made his presence known in 2016, after his single “Diles” – released on SoundCloud, while Ocasio was still working as a supermarket bagger – attracted enough viral attention to both get him a label deal with Hear This Music and Rimas Entertainment and earn a remix featuring established reggaetón hitmakers Farruko, Arcángel and Ñengo Flow (and a fellow rising star in Ozuna). The song didn’t make much chart impact, but became a slow-burning streaming success – and later that year, Bad Bunny released “Soy Peor,” which would become his first entirely solo hit when it peaked at No. 19 on the Hot Latin Songs chart in September 2017, establishing him as a leading voice in the burgeoning Latin trap scene. 

Over the next year, Bad Bunny would also become a fixture on the Hot 100, appearing on hits alongside Becky G (“Mayores”) and Enrique Iglesias (“El Bano”), while also contributing his growing star power to All-Star cuts like “Krippy Kush” and “Te Boté,” the latter his first top 40 entry on the chart. While Bad Bunny was just one artist of many on the latter two songs – with a combined 10 total credited names between them – he stood out for both his distinctive voice, a congested-but-buttery croon which also made his trademark artist tag (“Bad Bunny bay-beh!!”) instantly unforgettable, and for his impeccable fashion style, an unconventional mix of the flamboyant and the basic that always seemed to land within the realm of timeless cool.

It all led up to his 2018 feature appearance on American rap superstar Cardi B’s “I Like It,” one of pop’s great star-making moments of the 21st century. While Bad Bunny did not yet have the household name recognition of either Cardi or fellow guest reggaetonero J Balvin – who’d recently scored a massive U.S. crossover moment of his own with the Willy William collab “Mi Gente,” even landing Beyoncé for the song’s remix – his verse still kinda stole the show, from its opening “chambea, chambea” chant. Wearing cat-eye sunglasses and a Puerto Rico World Baseball Classic jersey in the song’s hugely popular music video, Ocasio already looked like an icon in the making. The song reached No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100, and ensured that all eyes everywhere were now on Bad Bunny. 

The heat from “I Like It” did not take long to translate to Bad Bunny’s career as a leading man. Just a few months later, he returned with “MIA,” which landed a guest verse from perhaps the only hitmaker with even more juice than Cardi B in 2018: Drake, in the midst of a year where he’d spend a combined 29 weeks atop the Hot 100 with Scorpion singles “God’s Plan,” “Nice for What” and “In My Feelings.” Not only did the Canadian-born superstar play the hook man for Bad Bunny’s new single, he actually sang in Spanish for it – showing that this early in his rise, Benito already had the clout to get the English-speaking pop world to come to his turf. “MIA” was another enormous success for Bad Bunny, reaching No. 5 on the Hot 100 and enduring for long enough to end up the No. 1 year-end single on the 2019 Year-End Hot Latin Songs chart.

Amazingly, Bad Bunny’s entire rise to stardom transpired before he even released his debut album. That came at the tail end of 2018, however, with X 100pre. Rather than cash in on his two years of hits and big-name collabs to that point, Bad Bunny’s debut album featured only a couple of his previously released singles and just a few guests, with “MIA” stuck at the end like a bonus track. The album drew rave reviews and reached No. 11 on the Billboard 200, hanging around the chart well into the next decade and ultimately spending 177 weeks on the listing, confirming that Bad Bunny was already much more than just a singles artist. 

In June 2019, while Bad Bunny was still spinning off X 100pre hits, having further success with singles alongside hitmakers Tainy (“Callaíta”), Lunay (“Soltera”) and Jhayco (“No Me Conoces”) and taking a break in between legs of his first arena tour, Bad Bunny would further electrify his now-global audience by reteaming with his “I Like It” collaborator J Balvin for the Oasis EP. Despite having just eight tracks, the set made both the top 10 on the Billboard 200 and the top 10 of Billboard’s year-end staff albums list for 2019. Perhaps most importantly, while Bad Bunny was unquestionably the little brother of the two from a star perspective on “I Like It” just a year earlier, by the time of Oasis he and Balvin were clearly on even footing as the two leading hitmakers in reggaetón and Latin trap. 

But while Balvin’s stateside star would fade somewhat as the decade turned to the 2020s, Bad Bunny’s would only get brighter. In 2020 alone he would release a trio of albums – YHLQMDLG (short for Yo Hago Lo Que Me Da La Gana, “I Do Whatever I Want” in English) in February, castoffs compilation Las Que No Iban a Salir (The Ones That Were Not Coming Out) in May and El Último Tour del Mundo (The Last Tour in the World) in November – that continued to expand his sound and his global profile, attracting rave reviews (even from many listeners and publications who had not traditionally shown interest in Latin pop or reggaetón). His albums became event releases – doubly so because he started scheduling them around major calendar events (X 100pre on Christmas Eve, YHLQMDLG on Leap Day, El Último on Thanksgiving, etc.) What’s more, in December, Último made history by debuting at No. 1 on the Billboard 200, marking not only Bad Bunny’s first appearance atop the chart, but the first entirely Spanish-language No. 1 album in the chart’s near-60-year existence.

In 2021, Bad Bunny made the jump from pop hitmaker to unavoidable celebrity. He scored a brief cameo in F9, the latest installment of the blockbuster Fast & Furious franchise, and started appearing in commercials for Cheetos and Corona, the latter featuring his bilingual bantering with American rap icon Snoop Dogg. More unexpectedly, he launched a wrestling career – at first just performing his wrestling-themed “Booker T” at the Royal Rumble, then getting in the ring himself, both on his own and as part of a tag team with fellow Puerto Rican Damien Priest. He also used his newfound industry influence to help facilitate comeback moments for some of his hitmaking favorites of yore – enlisting Aventura for his hit “Volvi” and both co-writing and co-producing El Playlist de Anoche with Tommy Torres, giving each their biggest spotlight moment in years, if not decades. 

But as much as Bad Bunny accomplished in the first five years of his career, it turned out to all be the prelude to 2022. That May, he dropped Un Verano Sin Ti (A Summer Without You) – 23 tracks, again entirely in Spanish, with no major English-language guests, and with only closer “Callaíta” having been previously released. Like Último, it debuted atop the Billboard 200 – but unlike Último, it stayed there, spending 13 weeks at No. 1 on the listing, with at least 8-10 of its tracks also populating the Hot 100 during any given week that summer. Though no one single from it was really big enough to bring Verano to larger consciousness on its own, the album was so varied in sound –  with tracks ranging from the sublime “Neverita” to the booming “Titi Me Pregunto” to the party-starting “Después de la Playa” – but so coherent in overall feeling, that different songs from it popped off at different times (and with different audiences). It ended 2022 as the No. 1 album on both the Year-End Billboard 200 and the Billboard staff’s Albums of the Year list, and also earned Bad Bunny his first Grammy nomination for album of the year.

Between 2022 and 2023, his stateside visibility took yet another step up, as he co-starred (and had a big fight scene) with Brad Pitt in the action flick Bullet Train, pulled double duty hosting and performing on Saturday Night Live, and dominated the 2022 VMAs remotely from his headlining gig at Yankee Stadium – part of his globetrotting World’s Hottest Tour – where he won the artist of the year moonperson. (He also made headlines for kissing a male backup dancer during that performance, further demonstrating an allyship that has made him an icon for the LGBTQ community, a rarity for trap or reggaetón artists.) He also began dating American superinfluencer Kendall Jenner, news of which was met with some trepidation from his core fanbase, but which cemented him as a tabloid fixture, and half of one of pop culture’s preeminent 2020s power couples. Before 2023’s end, he even released another album: Nadie Saber Lo Que Va a Pasar Mañana, which also debuted atop the Billboard 200, albeit without quite the rapturous acclaim or staying power of Verano. 

In 2024, Bad Bunny stands as simply one of the biggest culture-movers in music. The list of accolades and accomplishments he’s racked up in his career to this point is staggering, but his truest legacy may simply be proving that you can be the greatest pop star in the world – and he was ours for 2022 – without compromising your music, your image or your language for the American market. When Bad Bunny gets up at an award show this decade and accepts entirely in Spanish, he does it without apology or hesitation, and nobody even blinks at it. Now, it’s easy to see an artist like Karol G or Peso Pluma following their way through some of the doors he’s opened. And that’s the power of Bad Bunny: to be such an obvious, all-encompassing superstar that you forget just how long – and until how recently – those doors had been closed in the first place. 

Read more about the Greatest Pop Stars of the 21st Century here and check back on Thursday when our No. 22 artist is revealed!

​​These four memoirs from artists across genres and generations are among the most anticipated music books to arrive this fall.

Over the Influence: A Memoir
By Joanna “JoJo” Levesque

After breaking through in the mid-2000s with rhythmic pop hits like “Leave (Get Out)” and “Too Little Too Late” — which hit the Billboard Hot 100 at Nos. 12 and 3, respectively — JoJo retreated from the spotlight. Years later, she detailed an extended lawsuit with her record label, along with her own personal challenges. Now, with her memoir due Sept. 17, she discloses what happened during those years, illuminating exactly what kept her away — and what brought her back.

Life in the Key of G
By Kenny G and Philip Lerman

Grammy-winning saxophonist Kenny G has long been a jazz icon — known just as much for his skillful playing as his tight curls — but he has never let fans into his life like this before. Out Sept. 24 and written with author Philip Lerman (co-producer of America’s Most Wanted and co-author of host John Walsh’s memoir), the artist born Kenneth Gorelick details how he went from a bullied, skinny kid in Seattle to a teenage backing musician for everyone from Barry White to Liberace.

From Here to the Great Unknown: A Memoir
By Lisa Marie Presley and Riley Keough

Two years ago, Presley asked her daughter Keough to help her finish an important, though daunting, task: her memoir. One month later, Presley died — and Keough was left with a mission to deliver her mother’s story, which is out Oct. 8. Keough gathered the tapes recorded for the book and listened in bed as Lisa Marie recounted her relationship with her famous parents: Elvis and Priscilla Presley.

Cher: The Memoir, Part One
By Cher

As Grammy-winning, chart-topping icon Cher approaches 80, she will share the story of her extraordinary life in her own words — and two parts. In Part One, out Nov. 19, the artist born Cherilyn Sarkisian recounts her childhood and career beginnings up through her marriage to Sonny Bono, revealing more about the pair’s complicated relationship. There is no publishing date yet for Part Two, but as Part One’s bio teases, “It is a life too immense for only one book.”

This story appears in the Aug. 24, 2024, issue of Billboard.

As Democrats rally around Vice President Kamala Harris in the wake of both President Biden’s exit from the race and the attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump, the American flag – and all the different forms of patriotism that it symbolizes – has been thrust back into the center of cultural discourse. Of course, these events have also occurred in a year that has boasted several musical releases that both muddy and call into question the dynamic between Americana iconography and Black musicians and entertainers. 

The complications of this dynamic have been a mainstay in pop culture conversations this year since Queen Bey first revealed the Cowboy Carter album cover (March 29). But her album is just the latest in a series of releases from Black R&B and hip-hop stars that incorporate Americana imagery in a way that departs from how that iconography was implemented in prior decades.

As the country enters the home stretch of the 2024 presidential election, what are we to make of some of our biggest contemporary Black entertainers in hip-hop and R&B — Beyoncé, Sexyy Red and Lil Uzi Vert, among others – holding onto the American flag amid a triad of global cataclysms, and ahead of an unbelievably consequential presidential election? 

When Black artists incorporate the American flag in their work, it is rarely as a mere decoration; they are almost always calling on some kind of history by way of irony or subversion. Whether or not that actually lands is a different conversation, but to take the use of the flag at face value as a blind, uncritical embrace of American patriotism is often too simplistic of a reading.

Though recent uses of the flag by Black musicians have drawn ire both online and in real life, the practice stretches back generations. In 1971, Sly and the Family Stone topped the Billboard 200 with There’s a Riot Goin’ On, which originally featured an album cover that replaced the stars of the American flag with nine-point stars emblazoned across a black (not blue) background. That LP’s title was a direct response to the question posed in the title of Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On, released six months earlier. Altering the classic look of the flag to complement the album’s bleak outlook on the turbulence of the 1960s in the face of a rising Black Power Movement, There’s a Riot Goin’ On is a prime example of Black musicians using the American flag to explore the questions of belonging and ownership in regard to “Americanness.” 

That question – an eternal inquiry in the story of Black Americans – is the anchor for most of hip-hop’s relationship with the American flag. The Sugarhill Gang, whose landmark single “Rapper’s Delight” helped bring hip-hop to America’s mainstream, placed their faces over the stars of the American flag on the cover for their third studio album, 1983’s Rappin’ Down Town. Released the same year that Guion S. Bluford, the first African American astronaut, reached space, Rappin’ Down Town found the rap group embracing their Americanness to access the country’s interstellar advances, through which they envisioned a life of liberation and autonomy with songs like “Space Race.” 

The ‘90s found rappers doubling down on their critiques of America through visual and lyrical subversions of the flag. As the golden age of hip-hop, the ’90s were the decade in which hip-hop canoodled with capitalism without all of the cracks showing. While Puff Daddy and Bad Boy took a blinged-out approach to both the music and the business, other ’90s hip-hop acts were still subverting Americana iconography on their own terms. Miami rap group 2 Live Crew kicked off the decade with 1990’s Banned in the U.S.A: the first album in history to bear the RIAA-standard parental advisory sticker. Banned found 2 Live Crew leaning on Americana aesthetics to double down on their claim to Americanness during a time in which they were being forced out of that label – both culturally and legally – due to the vulgarity of their music.

Despite the country’s attempt to police and other Black expressions of sexuality, 2 Live Crew called on the flag to offer a critique of the tension between their Blackness and Americanness. Four years later on 1994’s “Aintnuttin Buttersong,” Public Enemy offered cutting lyrical critiques of the flag and all that it represents, with Chuck D spitting, “The stars is what we saw when our ass got beat/ Stripes is for the whip marks in our back/ The white is for the obvious, ain’t no black in that flag.”

Less than a year before Dipset’s new eagle logo took over their output, OutKast posed in front of a black-and-white American flag for their Stankonia album cover. Now one of the most iconic photos in hip-hop history, that cover’s black-and-white reimagining of the flag immediately situated the duo’s embrace of Americana as an intentional choice of irony and critique. The album’s title – the name of a fantasy place where “you can open yourself up and be free to express anything,” according to André 3000 – works in tandem with the group’s altering of the flag. The “stank” of Black American musical genres like gospel, funk and hip-hop course through the record, providing OutKast with the necessary tools to illustrate a space of true liberation for Black people outside of the gaze of white America. Whether they were ironically dressing themselves in the country’s colors or explicitly subverting the flag’s likeness, the ‘00s found rappers using the flag to explore the dichotomy of white and Black America at the turn of the century.

By the time the 2000s rolled around, it was practically impossible to think about the use of American iconography outside of the context of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. Dipset’s musical and aesthetic relationship with America has been well-documented: While dousing themselves in red, white and blue and stars and stripes, the New York rap crew favorably compared themselves to Osama bin Laden and the Taliban. Writer and critic Andre Gee writes, “That ‘them and us’ mindset [in regard to white vs. Black America] is what paved the way for Dipset to simultaneously be victims but feel detached enough to harbor twisted esteem for the entities who had stuck one to ‘the man.’” 

The 2010s, still aglow in the shimmer of the Obama years, found the historic president’s success reflected in hip-hop’s relationship with the flag. With a Black man finally reaching the highest office in the land, two of hip-hop’s defining icons fully leaned into bootstrap ideology with art that played up the idea that, if you work hard enough, you too can access the financial spoils of the American dream regardless of your skin color. Jay-Z and Ye’s (formerly Kanye West) Watch the Throne was a total exaltation of wealth, from its gilded album cover to its lavish sonics.

“Made In America,” the eleventh track on the LP, is perhaps the exact turning point in mainstream hip-hop’s relationship with the flag and Americanness: While their overall vision of Americana still retained notes of Blackness — “I pledge allegiance to my grandma/ For that banana pudding, our piece of Americana/ Our apple pie was supplied through Arm & Hammer,” Jay spits — “Made In America” finds the two stars proclaiming that they’ve “made it” because they’ve figured out how to achieve financial success through the country’s existing capitalist framework. They leave no room for the possibility of a life beyond the American capitalist project, à la OutKast, and instead happily settle for a life in which wealth is the master key to Americanness. Watch the Throne was the culmination of capitalism’s swallowing of hip-hop, forever changing how far critiques and subversion of Americana iconography can travel, at least on the broadest of mainstream levels. 

“You can say a whole lot about [Jay-Z and Beyoncé],” says author, academic and cultural critic Dr. Mark Anthony Neal, of 21st century Black music’s reigning power couple. “The one thing that [continues to] resonate is that they are capitalists, and there’s no stronger brand in the U.S. than the actual American flag, so they need to tap into it at some point.” 

The shadow of Watch the Throne continued to loom over album releases from a younger generation of rappers – like A$AP Rocky’s Long.Live.A$AP (2013), which features him with an American flag draped over his shoulders – but political turmoil later in the decade opened up a bit of space for a return to the critiques of the ‘90s and ‘00s. In 2017, the first year of former President Trump’s first term, Brooklyn rapper Joey Bada$$ dropped All-Amerikkkan Badass – an LP chiefly concerned with unpacking the atrocities of the American project – which featured an album cover that replaced the red, white and blue of the flag with the paisley print of bandanas. 

Just as Trump’s 2016 victory influenced an onslaught of music across genres, so did the 2021 insurrection on the U.S. Capitol after the 34-time felon refused to accept the results of the 2020 presidential election. Last year, Lil Uzi Vert’s Pink Tape debuted atop the Billboard 200 in July, becoming the first hip-hop album to top the chart in 2023 and ending the chart’s longest gap between No. 1 rap albums in nearly 30 years. The LP’s cover is reminiscent of Stankonia’s, with Uzi posing in front of an American flag with pink stripes and stars emblazoned across a black background. Arriving in the wake of the insurrection and bearing a sound heavily influenced by rage rap, metal and punk, Pink Tape offers a starkly dystopian imagining of America; the official album trailer finds Uzi dancing and somersaulting their way through a fleet of warriors in what appears to be a crumbling city. What does it look like when an empire begins to fall? Visually and aesthetically, that’s the question Uzi seems to be posing with Pink Tape — but lyrically, the album doesn’t really engage with that inquiry. This combination of loaded visual imagery and comparatively empty lyrical imagery signals a new evolution in hip-hop’s relationship with Americana iconography: Uzi is aware of the essentially limitless capital of the brand of the American flag, and they incorporated it all the way to a No. 1 album.

At the end of 2023, breakout star Sexyy Red released a deluxe version of her Hood Hottest Princess mixtape, with an opening track titled “Sexyy Red for President.” By the time she released the follow-up, 2024’s In Sexyy We Trust, the St. Louis rapper doubled down on the patriotic imagery, incorporating the flag, U.S. currency, the Secret Service, the Oval Office and even Trump’s MAGA hat template into her live performance sets, album artwork, merchandise and social media presence. Of course, this all came several months after she claimed that the hood “loves” Trump because of his pandemic-era stimulus checks. 

The meaning behind Sexyy’s use of Americana iconography is a bit more coherent: She’s drawing a thread between the way Trump’s cult of personality allows his supporters to embrace the vilest forms of their prejudices and the way her music and devil-may-care persona inspire her listeners to be their most ratchet, liberated selves. The issue with this thread is that it requires a latent acceptance of all the –isms and –ists that come with this specific brand of Trumpist Americana. Like Uzi, nothing in Sexyy’s lyrics provides any sort of critique that can balance the unconditional embrace of this imagery that her visuals suggest. Ultimately, Sexyy’s use of Americana ideology is yet another example of hip-hop artists understanding the potential capital of the brand of the American flag and accessing it with little regard for their role in promoting and normalizing the most sinister parts of its symbolism. 

“I don’t know Lil Uzi or Sexyy Red’s brand of America, and if we are being entirely honest, we don’t entirely know Beyoncé’s either,” reminds critic and author Gerrick Kennedy. “We can infer, certainly, having looked at her usage of the imagery over the years. [Many] of those moments can be read as simply overt patriotism. I think about her performing under an American flag that was altered to the Pan-African flag colors, or the dress she wore with a black and white American flag as the train. Again, one could project meaning onto these moments, but with the absence of her telling you directly it’s simply projection.” 

Of course, it would be impossible to talk about contemporary mainstream Black R&B/hip-hop artists using the American flag in their art without lending serious discussion to Beyoncé. Queen Bey boldly waved an unaltered American flag on the album cover for her country, Western and Americana-indebted Cowboy Carter LP earlier this year. The record explored the oft-whitewashed roots of country music by exploring her own cultural background, from Louisiana to Texas.

Led by a historic Billboard Hot 100 chart-topper in “Texas Hold ‘Em,” the LP also platformed several rising Black country stars, including Shaboozey, Brittney Spencer and Tanner Adell. Cowboy Carter opens with a literal “American Requiem” and closes with “Amen,” in which she sings, “This house was built with blood and bone/ And it crumbled, yes, it crumbled/ The statues they made were beautiful/ But they were lies of stone.” In the Tina Turner-nodding “Ya Ya,” Queen Bey belts, “My family lived and died in America/ Good ol’ USA, s–t/ Whole lotta red in that white and blue/ History can’t be erased.” Lyrically, the album does a fine job of getting across her critiques of the country’s violently anti-Black history. 

While Beyoncé was drawing on the specific look of a Texan rodeo queen – a nod to her hometown of Houston – her artistic intent was ultimately muddied by her position as a global billionaire institution. She’s shedding light on a specific sliver of Black American culture, yet she’s also intentionally reaching for the biggest brand in her home market by embracing the flag and remaining silent on local and global political happenings. These two truths don’t necessarily cancel each other out, but they do complicate readings of the album cover and the effectiveness of subversion at that level of global stardom. A critique that calls out anti-Blackness without taking into account its very real global ramifications – especially from an artist who has previously done so – will always ring a bit hollow. Perhaps, Beyoncé’s version of critique is unlikely to get more nuanced than her calling the U.S. a “big, bold, beautiful, complicated” nation, as she did while introducing Team USA to the 2024 Paris Summer Olympics through a rework of “Ya Ya.” 

“Subversion, like art, is subjective. What one person believes is subversive, another may not,” contends Kennedy. “Beyoncé spurred an avalanche of dialogue by putting part of the flag on the Cowboy Carter cover, but without her directly offering her POV around the usage, it’s left to interpretation. Someone will read it as a nod to the rich Black cowboy tradition from her native Texas. Someone will read it as [a] reclamation of the flag’s symbolism. Someone will see it as a critique on racism and imperialism. Someone will see it as a moment of patriotism. It could be all, or none, of those things.” 

To paraphrase Vice President Harris, nothing falls out of a coconut tree, and everything exists in a greater context. It’s why the Cowboy Carter cover courted so much controversy, arriving mere months after a major kerfuffle over Israeli screenings of Beyoncé’s Renaissance tour documentary. 

“We still have to understand how this comes across at this particular time,” reminds cultural critic and writer Hanna Phifer. “We’re living in such a regressive time where a lot of rights are being [repealed and] people all over the world are being slaughtered in the name of America and American imperialism. If you are going to align yourself with this symbolism, this is what you are aligning yourself with.” 

As long as America exists, there will be artists who want access to its iconography, artists who find it important to critique the empire and artists who prioritize capital just as much as art, if not more. As mainstream hip-hop has gotten more and more intertwined with capitalism, artists have continued to reach for the flag in ways that feel more like they’re simply trying to access the brand of America rather than offering leveled, contextualized critiques of the empire and what it stands for. (None of the artists, creative directors, or photographers discussed here responded to Billboard’s requests for comment about their respective uses of Americana iconography). 

But is our current climate even properly equipped to give mainstream Black artists that space to make those kinds of critiques? 

“Frankly, I don’t believe we are in a culture where mainstream artists have the space to offer critique, especially mainstream Black artists,” says Kennedy. “Part of the discourse around Beyoncé’s usage of the imagery is rooted in the belief that she’s too rich and disconnected [from] the community to actually understand why anyone would feel a way about her having an American flag on the cover of her album. Who are we to tell Beyoncé how she can or can’t use that imagery? How is that our individual right any more than it is hers to pose on a white horse with the flag if that’s what she wants to do?” 

As hip-hop enters its second half-century and continues to exist amid late-stage pop capitalism, artists continue to wade into murky waters with their flag use, yet they do so in provocative ways that, at best, help incite helpful and necessary conversations. If only they were willing to go a bit further with it. And such is the evergreen tension between what an artist wants to do regarding their usage of such loaded iconography, and what we, as consumers and supporters, may want them to do — especially when they share our hue. 

“You’re never going to have mainstream Black artists that will critique the left from the further left,” Dr. Neal argues. “That makes you a fringe artist, that makes you Chuck D, in a kind of way. There’s a place for those artists, but those are never the mainstream ones.”

Luis Fonsi is back at No. 1 on Billboard’s Latin Pop Airplay chart thanks to “Santa Marta,” his first collaboration with Carlos Vives, which climbs 3-1 to lead the Aug. 31-dated ranking. It’s the Puerto Rican’s 11th champ and Vives’ seventh.

“It’s like an anniversary song,” Fonsi previously told Billboard of “Santa Marta,” which praises genuine love and empathy. The song — released May 17 as one of 12 songs on Fonsi’s 11th studio album, El Viaje, which earned the Puerto Rican his 15th entry on Latin Pop Albums in June — was written by Fonsi alongside Mauricio Rengifo and Andres Torres, also producers of the album.

“Santa Marta” crowns Latin Pop Airplay after a 1% gain in audience impressions, to 3.3 million, earned in the U.S. in the tracking week of Aug. 9-15, according to Luminate.

As the song lands at the summit, Luis Fonsi manages his 11th No. 1 on Latin Pop Airplay and seventh through a collaboration. His first collaboration to hit No. 1 was “Despacito” with Daddy Yankee featuring Justin Bieber, which ruled the tally for 18 weeks in 2017. All of his No. 1s since have been collaborations. His first four leaders were all solo No. 1s, unaccompanied by any other artist, including his first No. 1, the five-week champ “Nada Es Para Siempre” in 2005.

Vives, however, parked in the No. 1 slot for the first time in 1995 when “La Tierra Del Olvido” ruled for two weeks. The song, a core vallenato track, then made it to the pop radio ranking before it switched from a station-based tally to a genre-based survey. Since then, Vives has crowned Latin Pop Airplay six more times, his last through “Mujeres,” a collab with fellow country singer Juanes, for one week on top in December 2023.

“Santa Marta” places Luis Fonsi back at the lead on Latin Pop Airplay after almost three years, as the Puerto Rican last occupied the No. 1 spot with “Bésame,” with Myke Towers, in November 2021. He managed, though, three top 10s in between: “Vacaciones” with Manuel Turizo (No. 6 high in 2022), “Buenos Aires” (No. 10, September 2023) and “Pasa La Página “Panamá” (No. 6 high in January) The latter two (along with “Santa Marta”) are all from El Viaje.

Elsewhere, despite its 1% lift in audience impressions, “Santa Marta” dips to No. 32 on the overall Latin Airplay chart, after its No. 31 high (Aug. 31-dated list) during its nine-week run so far.