Esta historia se publicó originalmente en inglés en nuestro número de abril 2019. Esta versión en español es una traducción. Haga click aquí para leer la versión en español.
When he comes home to Puerto Rico, the very first thing Bad Bunny likes to do is fuck.
He tells me this in low, whispered Spanish—“chingar,” he says, deploying local slang. The statement hardly surprises. I mean, this is a guy who introduced himself to the world a couple of years ago on SoundCloud with the song “Diles,” a sexual paean about repetitive copulation, about fogging up car windows, about knowing a woman's preferred positions in bed. He starts cackling, a single gold hoop jiggling in his left earlobe. He's (mostly) kidding, he assures me.
It's the kind of playful provocation that makes Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio so captivating, and he isn't ashamed to revel in it. The truth is, when he comes home, he's more Benito than Bad Bunny. His notoriously painted nails, typically lacquered in pineapple yellow or jet black (depending on his mood), are today uncolored. He's letting them breathe; the gel manicures can leave them brittle, he says. No, the riotous rapper who's spent the past year utterly transforming Spanish-language music—becoming an omnipresent fixture on the global pop soundscape and something of an outspoken social critic—downshifts considerably when he returns home. He prefers to do pretty much what any other 25-year-old might. “I lay down and I sleep the whole day,” he tells me. “I watch movies. And later, after that, I go visit my mom,” he says in that unmistakable, acrobatic bassoon of a voice.
Just days earlier, that voice had been the key attraction in Las Vegas, at Calibash, the massive concert series highlighting Spanish-language pop's biggest stars. He's a few weeks away from kicking off a major spring tour, but for now Bad Bunny is home and in a rare state of semi-repose. Seated in an out-of-the-way corner of a tiny beachfront restaurant in San Juan's Ocean Park neighborhood, he's traded his famously flamboyant stage style—a wardrobe heavy on cat-eye sunglasses, colorful prints, and baroque Gucci suits—for an understated off-duty look. He's sporting a pair of faded blue jeans and a denim shirt over a WWE tee, seeming not much like the guy plastered across gargantuan billboards on San Juan's Baldorioty de Castro expressway, his tongue out, his pinkies under his eyes: his signature Conejo Malo (Bad Bunny) pose.
His attention-grabbing style has been strategic—a way to stand out. “When I arrived, at first a lot of people were like, ‘This kid is different,’ ” he says. “I'd go to the studio with short shorts and flip-flops, and they'd say, ‘Cabrón, what's wrong with you?!’ It was always a point of discussion.”
His look has a lot in common with his music. His dexterous wit and weirdo sensibility got him quickly anointed as the golden boy of Latin trap—a genre in which Dominican, Puerto Rican, and other Latin-American artists have re-imagined the rap sounds pioneered in Atlanta. But today Bad Bunny is much more than the face of a once polemic genre; he's now one of the foremost global ambassadors for música urbana, the catchall label used to describe Spanish-language hip-hop, reggaeton, and other styles. In 2018, urbano was—far and away—the most viewed genre on YouTube. Of the platform's ten most popular music videos, eight were created by, or featured, urbano artists. And notably, Bad Bunny appeared on the No. 1 track.
Naturally, it was only a matter of time before U.S. artists, eager to tap into the movement and attract new audiences, came flocking. They've found a willing creative partner in Bad Bunny, who's been more than happy to provide his full-throated baritone to radio smashes and remixes the world over.
Last year he collaborated on English-language hits with the likes of Cardi B (“I Like It”), Drake (“Mia”), and a slew of others. In fact, Bad Bunny has lately appeared so often, on so many of the world's biggest songs, that it seems almost impossible that his own first full-length album appeared only this past December.
The album, called X100PRE (meaning “por siempre,” or “forever” in English), dropped on Christmas Eve and included everything from ukulele riffs to emo-rap missives to mutant trapchata beats. For listeners who had largely known him for his club and radio hits, the album might have seemed like a departure, like a grand and experimental statement. “I was super prepared for that first impact and for people to be confused,” he says. “But just as I was prepared, I had a lot of faith that, in the end, people would understand me.”
And it seems they did: X100PRE easily summited Billboard's Top Latin Albums chart, occupying the No. 1 spot for six weeks straight. “When I was making this record, they told me, ‘But we don't have a commercial track,’ ” he remembers. Of course, he says, he wasn't trying to fit in with the cookie-cutter songs on the radio. He wanted something new and different. “I've always said, ‘Cabrón, on radio stations, they play some porquería [trash] songs,’ ” he says. “You listen to the radio and all the songs sound the same, from 8 in the morning to 12.”
The last time I met Benito, about a year and a half earlier, he was in a different place. He'd rolled up to our interview in clout goggles and a psychedelic floral Supreme long-sleeve tee. He was scarfing down slices of pepperoni pizza and boasting about all the collabs and remixes he had in the works with English-language artists. He had audacious plans. Sure enough, over the course of the next 12 months, he'd drop songs with a pantheon of major-label U.S. acts: Nicki Minaj, 21 Savage, Travis Scott, Future, Will Smith, Jennifer Lopez, and, of course, Drake and Cardi B.
Bad Bunny's ascent has been wild and rapid. Just three years ago, Benito was bagging groceries at a local Econo Supermarket in his home of Vega Baja. He'd been writing and making original music since he was 13, nurturing a deep appreciation of the elder statesmen of Puerto Rican rap and reggaeton such as Daddy Yankee and Vico C, but also studying the Latin American salsa vocalists and balladeers, like Héctor Lavoe and Juan Gabriel. It was a wellspring of influences that shaped the versatile sentimentality of his own voice—he's capable of both wailing about the anguish of a broken heart and rapping viciously about stealing your girl.
Eventually, as a communications student at the University of Puerto Rico's Arecibo campus, he started uploading tracks to SoundCloud. The aforementioned “Diles” caught the ear of a prominent Puerto Rican producer and label head named DJ Luian, who helped kick an elaborate release plan into high gear. Soon Bad Bunny was dropping singles and videos on a near weekly basis to guarantee his omnipresence on YouTube and commandeer the platform's algorithm in Latin America.
In the quick years since, Bad Bunny's ever expanding position within the Latinx music industry has made him a major voice on a range of social issues, too. The week before we met in San Juan, Benito dropped a video for “Caro,” a cut from X100PRE, that mushroomed into the latest Bad Bunny-prompted conversation about gender identity and masculinity in the urbano world. The video featured a runway show starring a drag queen, as well as the Puerto Rican model Jazmyne Joy playing a female proxy for Bad Bunny, getting her nails painted, donning a pair of neon green sunglasses, and lounging on a Ferrari convertible. It was just the latest instance of Bad Bunny exploring femme aesthetics. Detractors have condemned him for promoting “sexual deviance,” but fans have showered him with praise for embracing gender fluidity and for speaking out—on everything from the virtues of women who don't shave their pubic hair, to the prejudices of a nail salon in Spain that refused him service, to homophobia in the urbano movement.
At times, the praise has verged on celebrity worship, the oh-so-common lingua franca of the Internet age, with fans portraying him as a “woke king” or a “feminist icon.” Considering the long history of artists around the world who have expanded the limits of masculine expression, and the queer pop stars who have challenged gender norms, Bad Bunny's manicures are only mildly transgressive. He gets that. “There's people that appreciate what I do; there's people that criticize it,” he says. “There's people who say, ‘Thank you for sticking up [for us], thank you for defending [this].’ There's others that say I'm an opportunist,” he says.
He's wary of having his work perceived as a colossal political gesture—but he's just as wary of not utilizing his voice on issues that matter. “If I were like other artists, I'd forget about what's happening and not say anything,” he says. In September he used a performance on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon to denounce the federal response to Hurricane Maria. “More than 3,000 people died,” he said on the show, “and Trump's still in denial.” Grisly images of the storm flashed behind him on a screen.
It was perhaps an early sign that Benito was interested in exploring not just the personal politics of his identity but the politics affecting his home. He's since sounded off on Puerto Rican issues ranging from violence against women to contentious local school closures. “Three years ago, I was a citizen like anyone else, and I felt the country's problems just like anyone else,” he says. “When the gas prices would go up, I'd scream about it like anyone else; when they'd raise the [expressway] tolls, I'd yell, too. I was broke enough that I depended on scholarships to be able to study. I see the problems up close, and they affect me just the same, because these are people I love.”
Does that make him an activist? Not really, Benito says. It makes him a human being—a member of a community. “I think it's my responsibility, as a person of influence—not just as an artist but as a person—to sometimes try to do what I can,” he says. “If I have the chance to say something, I will say it—but that doesn't obligate me to always say something, or to shed light on every problem, as if I were a lawmaker.”
When I ask Benito what's next for him, a mischievous grin immediately creeps across his face and his eyes brighten. “We're going to Hobby-loos!” he jokes, cupping my hand in his and erupting into laughter, referencing a recent viral video of Dominican performer Omega mispronouncing “Hollywood.” Apparently, acting has always been a dream of his. “I want to give it the time it deserves. A lot of artists fail when they try to act, and they flop,” he says. “So when I get into acting, it's going to be to do it well, something good, something of quality. I want people to say, ‘Wow, that movie’—or that show or whatever—‘turned out really well.’ ”
But for now, of course, the music predominates. The traditional trajectory for a mainstream Latinx artist like Bad Bunny might involve trying to conquer the U.S. market, maybe via an English-language collaboration with a new Anglo artist—a timeworn, often gimmicky industry maneuver that Bad Bunny seems to have obliterated. “I think those pressures in music, I eliminated them,” he says.
The frank assessment of a future that feels entirely wide open reminds me a lot of what he said when I asked him how his sense of style has evolved. He chuckles, contemplating the creative freedom he feels he's earned: “At the beginning I did what I could. Now I do whatever I want.”
Isabelia Herrera is the music editor at the Latino culture outlet Remezcla.
A version of this story originally appeared in the April 2019 issue with the title "Good Times With Bad Bunny."
PRODUCTION CREDITS:
Photographs by Jason Nocito
Styled by Mobolaji Dawodu
Grooming by Kumi Craig using La Mer
Hair by Christopher Vargas
Produced by Louise Lund, Studio Lou
Location: Hotel El Convento, San Juan
