BAD BUNNY MADE ME THINK
(English Version)
Something that isn't always achieved with the receiver, whether it's through literature, "intelligent songs," or even reflective prose itself. But I must confess that I never liked the music of Benito Martínez Ocasio, a Puerto Rican trapero better known as Bad Bunny. When Boricua trap burst onto the Cuban soundscape, I rejected it with every cell in my body. It still seems less interesting to me than so many other musical genres. However, some of Bad Bunny's recent albums, especially the latest one, have caught my attention. Have I changed, or has the city changed?
We have to accept that Bad Bunny is no longer that clean-shaven twenty-something-year-old who opened his mouth and stuck out his tongue with a gesture that ranged from depravity to repulsiveness. Sometimes people change, artists evolve. Bad Bunny's transformation, the way he has been acquiring knowledge, social awareness, exploring new territories within the genre itself, and even outside of it, the way he has been developing his artistic proposals around an increasingly well-founded concept, reveals a complex personality, with an extraordinary capacity to reinvent himself and take risks. The first thing we have to accept is that becoming exists: No one bathes twice in the same Benito. Oh, Bad Bunny, whoever sees you, does so for the first time.
On January 5th, BB released his most recent musical production: "Debí tirar más fotos" ("I Should Have Taken More Pictures"). Seventeen songs make up this sui generis album, which brings together not only a large amount of folk sounds previously unknown to me, but also adds an interesting and promising audiovisual work. With the homonymous short film, a kind of dystopia with a strong message that breaks spears in favor of the preservation of identity as an act of cultural resistance, and where the renowned Puerto Rican artist Jacobo Morales acts, we are already being announced the quality of the promotional videos to come.
"Debí tirar más fotos" uses, in a semi-conscious way, the urban genre as an excuse to sustain a debate about the territoriality-trans-territoriality conflict. Does post-national thought, when it dissolves the customs of smaller nations and exalts those of the hegemonic centers of power, still remain an idea, shall we say, of progress? Does the meliorative nature of this term apply to all cases, to all contexts? In a globalized world, interconnected asymmetrically, Bad Bunny takes a turn in the opposite direction to the idea of thinking of ourselves as a global village and bets on the Tolstoyan belief of telling one's own village to tell the world. I repeat: I'm not saying that Bad Bunny does all of this consciously, but that doesn't matter for the purposes of this reflection.
We have been listening to Puerto Rican urban music for almost three decades, and for the first time an artist of the genre dedicates an album to showing us the culture of his country. The real culture, which also includes, of course, the culture of reggaeton. Bad Bunny's latest album reveals a Puerto Rico that we had never been able to distinguish, that had been hidden from us, even among endless spotlights, luxury cars, gold chains, and other artifices of the consumer society. Thanks to this album I was finally able to understand that reggaeton is a Caribbean artistic manifestation, that from the Caribbean has expanded to the entire world (through instrumentalization of the system, of course) and has marked the musical beat of the 21st century so far. However, that does not make it any less Caribbean, any less ours. We understand this better when we see it running wild through the fields of Puerto Rico.
"Debí tirar más fotos" explores (and also exploits) a concept from the first to the last song, something that had already happened in "Un verano sin ti", "YHLQMDLG", among other recent long plays by Benito. Of course, here comes the other part of the picture: writing about urban music can often throw us off the cliff of elitism or, worse, populism. Bad Bunny has sophisticated his ways of doing things. This is not necessarily a resounding victory against cultural colonization, although I do consider it a more significant victory than that populist idea of selling us the triumph of Latin culture as a result of the viralization of the word "despacito." Nor is Bad Bunny's an evolution that moves too far away from his commercial roots. However, in the midst of all the inertia that moves urban music, there is an artist who is thinking with relative independence about each album he delivers. He knows how to leave the stage in time and return with something new, impactful. He has the formula to hit, but from time to time he prefers risk.
The Espirituano writer Antonio Rodríguez Salvador says that reggaeton does not offer details, and therefore it is not attractive to him as an artistic manifestation. The statement is interesting, but it does not specify what kind of qualities the details of reggaeton should have, and it is also not supported, it seems, by a deep knowledge of the urban genre. Although one swallow does not make a spring, this thought serves to contextualize the following: The image that Bad Bunny puts in each YouTube song of his recent album contains information about the history of Puerto Rico, about its music, about its popular struggles, about its symbols, about its endangered species. It is a product thought out on many levels, elaborated with many layers. There are nods to the history of Boricua urban music, such as that song that ends with Wisin "roncando" (a whole emblem of Puerto Rican reggaeton). I also loved the detail of "por un beso de la flaca yo daría lo que fuera," which refers to an indisputably Caribbean song. In short, details, details, details... Like those that we find in cuts that give us a silence and a spoken reflection of the creator himself. This resource, far from causing noise, produces an effect of distancing.
I stopped thinking of Bad Bunny as another automaton of the industry since his album "YHLQMDLG," but then I didn't find anything that caught my attention in his subsequent albums, and I even thought that he wouldn't return to that path. Now he does, and without shooting off rockets, or building him an altar, or going around singing his songs, I celebrate it, and I listen to it, and I even think about it and learn from it. Because it is impossible to bathe twice in the same Benito and because I like reggaeton to listen to, not to dance... Or was it the other way around?
