<\/p>\n
In 2016, a sinuous remix of a track called \u201cDiles\u201d began pulsing its way through streaming services and night clubs. It featured a handful of Puerto Rican performers, but the main one was an emerging hitmaker with a silly name and a serious voice: Bad Bunny. His real name is Benito Antonio Mart\u00ednez Ocasio; his stage name, as fans later learned, was inspired by a childhood photograph that captured him, scowling, in a rabbit costume. And his voice was doleful and elegant: he sang (and sometimes rapped) with a plainsong solemnity, even when the rhythms and the lyrics suggested mischief, as they often did. Diles<\/em> means \u201ctell them,\u201d and in this case Bad Bunny was urging a woman to tell her friends precisely how well he had treated her. \u201cDice que le gusta hacerlo con mis temas de trap<\/em>,\u201d he sang: \u201cShe says she likes to do it to my trap tracks.\u201d This was both a sexual boast and a musical one. A newish style known as Latin trap was ascendant in Puerto Rico, and Bad Bunny was declaring himself one of its leading exponents.<\/p>\n Nine years later, it\u2019s clear that Bad Bunny had good reason for his immodesty, at least when it came to music. In the course of six deliriously good solo albums, he established himself first as Latin trap\u2019s breakout success and then as something else altogether: a stylish and unpredictable star with no real precursor or peer. He may be the most popular Spanish-language singer of all time, and he is probably the most important musician in the world right now\u2014the person future generations will point to when they talk about what the early twenty-twenties sounded like. (\u201cUn Verano sin Ti,\u201d from 2022, is the most listened-to album in the history of Spotify, and last month one of Bad Bunny\u2019s songs became the first track released in 2025 to reach a billion Spotify streams.) He has moonlighted as a professional wrestler (WrestleMania\u00a037) and worked as an actor (\u201cBullet Train<\/a>,\u201d \u201cHappy Gilmore 2,\u201d \u201cCaught Stealing<\/a>\u201d); he has spent time with a Kardashian (Kendall Jenner) and collaborated with fashion brands (Adidas sneakers, Calvin Klein underwear). But one of the keys to his success is that the bigger he gets, the more local he seems. This summer, he was home in Puerto Rico, playing a thirty-show residency at the island\u2019s largest indoor venue, the Jos\u00e9 Miguel Agrelot Coliseum, which holds nearly twenty thousand people.<\/p>\n On a steamy, rain-swept Saturday night in August, as Hurricane Erin blustered offshore, the show started with dozens of dancers and drummers in traditional Puerto Rican dress. Bad Bunny emerged wearing something less traditional: a shearling hat, which made him look as if he had just arrived from someplace cold and was happy to be home. This was, of course, a celebration, but one made sweeter and more memorable by an underlying sense of ambivalence. The name of the residency is \u201cNo Me Quiero Ir de Aqu\u00ed,\u201d or \u201cI Don\u2019t Want to Leave Here,\u201d a sentiment often expressed by peripatetic celebrities. (A few albums ago, Bad Bunny taunted an unnamed rival with a couplet that translates as \u201cNobody knows you, not even in your barrio\u00a0\/\u00a0Yesterday I was with LeBron, and also DiCaprio.\u201d) In this arena, \u201chere\u201d was actually two places. There was a main stage covered in greenery and mist, to evoke an unspoiled hillside. And, toward the back of the arena, there was a squat pink casita that was hosting a raucous house party. During a thunderous track called \u201cSafaera,\u201d Bad Bunny delivered the lyrics from the casita roof, while one of the revellers below danced so vigorously with a decorative plant that he seemed to be trying to pollinate it.<\/p>\n The two stages represented the twin impulses behind Bad Bunny\u2019s glorious recent album, \u201cDeB\u00cd TiRAR M\u00e1S FOToS\u201d (\u201cI Should Have Taken More Photos\u201d), which enriches state-of-the-art tracks with infusions of salsa and other, older Puerto Rican styles. When he ascended the synthetic hillside to sing \u201cPIToRRO DE COCO,\u201d a tribute to homegrown music and homemade alcohol, he was accompanied by a cuatro, a ten-string guitar used in j\u00edbaro<\/em> music, and he brandished a jar that looked as if it contained the moonshine for which the song is named. Bad Bunny\u2019s low-key delivery somehow makes his big hooks even hookier, and he loves to exploit the contrast between his equanimous voice and his boisterous music. All night, he seemed to generate his own microclimate, as if he were at least fifteen degrees cooler than anyone else in the arena. Which might help explain the shearling hat.<\/p>\n Before there was Latin trap, Puerto Rico was transfixed by reggaet\u00f3n, a swaggering style based on a loping, staccato beat known as dembow<\/em>, which derives from dancehall reggae. (The name comes from \u201cDem Bow,\u201d a 1990 track by Shabba Ranks that helped popularize this rhythm.) In the two-thousands, the reggaet\u00f3n<\/a> explosion made stars of brash Puerto Rican performers like Daddy Yankee and Don Omar, who also happened to be rivals. Latin trap, which draws both its name and its sound from the thumping-and-ticking hip-hop of the American South, is slower and woozier, and in some ways more flexible. In the early days, Latin trap was associated with sex and violence. A few months before the \u201cDiles\u201d remix was released, Anuel AA, one of the movement\u2019s defining voices, was arrested; he was later sentenced to thirty months in prison for unlawful firearm possession. Bad Bunny drew from both Latin trap and reggaet\u00f3n, but he took a markedly introspective approach; in \u201cSoy Peor\u201d (\u201cI\u2019m Worse\u201d), one of the songs that made him a star, he sang about buying a gun, but only so he could assassinate Cupid, to avenge his broken heart.<\/p>\n From the start, Bad Bunny nurtured a bohemian image; most of his fans merely shrugged when, in the 2018 video for \u201cEstamos Bien\u201d (\u201cWe\u2019re Good\u201d), he showed off fingernails painted bright blue. More recently, he has emerged as a political advocate, flying the light-blue version of the Puerto Rican flag, which is associated with the island\u2019s independence movement, and speaking out against the New Progressive Party, or P.N.P., which supports Puerto Rican statehood. The P.N.P. was in charge in 2017, when Hurricane Maria<\/a> killed nearly three thousand people and led to a months-long blackout in parts of the island. (In 2022, he released \u201cEl Apag\u00f3n,\u201d or \u201cThe Blackout,\u201d a truculent and profane expression of Puerto Rican pride. It starts with ancestral bomba drums and then explodes into a late-night rave; like many Bad Bunny songs, it is formally inventive while feeling casual and intuitive.) Last year, Bad Bunny paid to erect a number of digital billboards, one of which read \u201cVOTAR PNP ES VOTAR POR LA CORRUPCI\u00d3N<\/em>.\u201d It turns out that local politics is just about the only world that he has failed to conquer: last fall, Jenniffer Gonz\u00e1lez-Col\u00f3n, the P.N.P. candidate, was elected governor of Puerto Rico. She declined to attend any of the Bad Bunny shows, although she acknowledged that the residency represented a \u201cgreat opportunity\u201d for the island, because it drew tourists from around the world.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n \u2018 The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n \u2018 Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.newyorker.com \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" In 2016, a sinuous remix of a track called \u201cDiles\u201d began pulsing its way through streaming services and night clubs. It featured a handful of Puerto Rican performers, but the main one was an emerging hitmaker with a silly name and a serious voice: Bad Bunny. His real name is Benito Antonio Mart\u00ednez Ocasio; his […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2025313,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[25179],"tags":[22008,23083,362131],"class_list":["post-2025312","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-music","tag-magazine","tag-pop-music","tag-splitscreenimagerightinset"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/09\/Bad-Bunnys-Puerto-Rican-Homecoming.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2025312","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2025312"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2025312\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2025313"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2025312"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2025312"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2025312"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}