Bad Bunny during the Billboard Awards, in Los Angeles.Kevin Winter / BBMA2020 / Getty
The famous Puerto Rican reggaeton singer known as Bad Bunny has been speculating for some time with the idea that he is going to leave the world of music after a year of glory and awards.
This Thursday, at midnight in Puerto Rico, he released his fourth solo album, The Last World Tour, on all musical platforms, a title that condenses his global fame and bombast.
A work with which he does not clarify yet if he is ready to abandon the microphone, but which has raised all kinds of suspicions
.
It is an album with 16 songs that starts with one in which he recognizes his glory (he reiterates that he does what he wants for "the world is mine" and he "will be forever"), goes through singles with the Spanish Rosalía, Puerto Rican Jhay Cortez and American ABRA, and ends with a song like a bolero for the holidays in “Cantares de Navidad”.
His single with
Jhay
Cortez,
Dákiti
, the only single from the new album that he released in advance, has been in first place in recent weeks among the most listened to songs on Spotify, ahead of the American pop princess Ariana Grande.
Bad Bunny has had a dream year for any Latin artist in the global market.
In February he released his second album
YHLQMDLG
(Yo Hago Lo Que Me Da La Gana), one of the most listened to albums in Spanish in the United States that won the award for best Latin album at the American Music Awards and was recently nominated in the category of Best Latin Pop Album for the 2021 Grammys. The American musical association ASCAP awarded him the 2020 Composer of the Year award, Netflix announced that the ragman will be one of its new characters in 'Narcos: Mexico', and started the year singing in the crowds Super Bowl that airs around the world.
On stage, next to J Balvin, Shakira and Jennifer Lppez, Bad Bunny has already warned that he was leading a new generation of Spanish-speaking urban music artists whom he has baptized as the
Latin gang
.
When many singers still seem to resort to the traditional formulas to handle Twitter or Instagram through a manager, Bad Bunny shows every time he releases a record or a single that he handles social networks like trap with equal creativity.
On November 24, when he posted a tweet with a list of untitled songs, only with the name of the great song and an emoticon of a flame, thousands of followers were burned by the launch of the new album - the third this year pandemic if takes into account
Those That
Weren't Going Out
, a compilation with the discards of
YHLQMDLG
- but also because of the possibility that it is the last.
Among the hundreds of thousands of responses he received, the reminder was repeated that on February 29, just before the pandemic, the reggaeton player announced that in nine months he would release another album and retire.
Hours after the tweet, he published a short promotional video on his Instagram account - with 28 million followers - in which the singer appears dressed in black at a press conference announcing "my retirement from music", generating shouts and questions among the journalists after the announcement.
The one who watches him as a spectator on the small screen is Bad Bunny himself, now dressed in light colors from a sofa, laughing at the scandal created by the media when they learn of his departure.
He shakes his head, turns off the TV, gets up to the record player to listen to his new album.
The video ends.
The artist makes fun of the famous and wants to turn it off forever to give music back the central place it deserves.
On February 29, when the covid-19 was just a Chinese virus, Bad Bunny also published
YHLQMDLG
at midnight on a Saturday
.
The singer shared the launch with his friends in the bars of Puerto Rico as he showed on his Instagram account.
From that album, whose themes were adding visualizations and listens, it will be especially remembered
Yo perreo sola
, the theme with which he dismantled the arguments of the critics who maintain the tagline that reggaeton is macho.
In the video for this song about women who can dance as they please without the need for a man, Bad Bunny appears in drag, wearing high-heeled boots and a leather miniskirt.
"I did it to give support to whoever needed it," explained the singer a few weeks ago to
Rolling Stone
magazine
.
Two and a half months after publishing
YHLQMDLG
, coinciding with Mother's Day, in full confinement and with the record industry trying to find a place to find oxygen, Bad Bunny published another feature length,
Las que not going to leave
, an album by shorter songs, in total ten of less than four minutes.
Christmas Day 2018 was when he decided to release his first solo album, "
X100PRE
", a successful album that
featured
one of his great singles, "We are well", a song he composed weeks after Hurricane María destroyed good part of the island of Puerto Rico.
"Mera, devil, what a downpour," says the song.
"Thank God because I'm healthy / Life has no repetition / After Mommy gives me the blessing / Don't worry, we're fine."
The 26-year-old Puerto Rican artist has gone in less than five years from packing the purchase in a supermarket from his home in the town of Vega Baja to being the fifth most listened to artist in the world on Spotify in 2019. With the expectation in social networks that has generated with
The last tour of the world
, Bad Bunny threatens to drop the microphone at the same time that his new singles enter Spotify and YouTube to break a record in the history of reggaeton that Bad Bunny himself created.