In 2020, the year of his consecration, Bad Bunny became not the music of the pandemic, but the music against the pandemic.
The disease fell on everyone like a snow that disfigured the lines of custom, and now there is something degraded in reality, more granular, with less resolution, as if we plugged our spirits into the outlet and experiences could not charge from the everything, or as if, suddenly, we had stopped inhabiting our lives to inhabit the tour package of our lives.
Bad Bunny, on the other hand, has constantly drained.
He took out a record, he took out the songs that were left over from that record, he sang live on his social networks, he transformed into a woman in one of his
clips
, then he disappeared and, when he appeared, he did it out of the strange side of duty.
Finally, dressed as the Matrix at the gates of autumn, he gave a concert in New York on the roof of a van shaped like a train car.
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With the movements closed to the spread of the plague, people began to listen to what was not supposed to be made to be heard as well.
With normality shattered, and the artistic products that normality produced, Bad Bunny's perreo has survived as an erotic point in the exhaustion of stillness.
It is the soundtrack of the day after landing in the arthritic present as the melody that marks the exit route.
His voice has the undulation of the Jíbaro cult, the convoy of air that unexpectedly enters the vibrating station of the body as an ear, as an interior noise.
"In PR we 'drag' the erre. Tell me who you erre", sings Kendo Kaponi in
P FKN R
, one of the last songs on the
YHLQMDLG
album
(
I do whatever I want
).
The r, like the harmonic rails through which reggaeton passes, is the figure of both a resistance and a vindication, a wing beat dragged in the saliva of the neighborhood, the plumb line gravitating towards the aesthetic order of the badly spoken word.
Those euphonic deviations were partially extirpated from reggaeton by the Latin music industry in the Miami and Medellín laboratories.
Without a gallbladder, the gender falls asleep, neutralized.
Under the swindle of their intact appearance, ostentation or display no longer mobilize as possible states of desire, but as limits or peaks of reality.
Ignoring the spoken categories and synchronizing this discourse of the rhythm to the written domestic norm supposes a transvestite semantic maneuver such as spell checking.
The semantic maneuver depigments the skin of the sound beast.
That same mistake is made by well-meaning defenders who open up reggaeton in a cultural tradition that does not operate around the body, instead of reading the body as an idea, the gesture as speech, and dance as memory.
It seems necessary to draw an intellectual fence to protect the throbbing animal from the poisoned morality, arrow of judgment, which considers it tribal or indecent.
But reggaeton laughs at all that and writes itself on the lines of sensitive muscle.
It establishes its own norm, coined on the far side of language.
Any interpretation is just a footnote in the fiefdom of a music that, in its first expression, has been dancing who knows since when and that is transmitted not as an inheritance but, to put it with María Zambrano, as "ancestral continuity."
The last theoretical discussion is always established in the gathering of the track.
What Bad Bunny seems to have understood, or what he probably never had to understand, is that in that sign, in the R, the possibility of the accompanied route was at stake, fame as an architecture different from the empire of solitude.
In
YHLQMDLG
several consecrated faces appear, but not widely known in other latitudes, of Puerto Rican reggaeton.
They are not relics adapted to a washed-out script, but instead graft their particular identities into the jargon of the global culture that the album talks about.
The corner puts bodies in history and removes Ricardo Rosselló, former governor of Puerto Rico, from power.
He does it through Bad Bunny, who waves a flag at the head of the crowd.
"And if I die tomorrow, I'm used to being always in heaven", is heard in
We are well.
The singer here makes a custom from the top, a usual statement among reggaetonists, but also Puerto Ricans, devastated by hurricanes and buried under the contempt of political institutions, protected by that title in the first person plural, recognize that their life is and social death.
The aesthetic displacement that the artist has rehearsed within reggaeton and
mainstream trap
is the result of the same discomfort that in real time endows him with an ideology sewn by hand, as if through an
live
we could see the most famous singer At the moment, just 25 years old, adjusting his sights and turning his intuitions and annoyances into ideas and facts that always seek the horizon of a community.
"I don't like to force anyone. We young people don't like being told what to do," Bad Bunny said at the traveling concert in New York.
"But it is important to go out and express ourselves with our vote and give ourselves respect. We have had a government that has not respected us, both in Puerto Rico and in the United States."
This is not someone who used his virtue to escape from the supermarket where he worked as a packer, but someone who made a virtue out of his own knowledge of the supermarket packer, hence the confusion it causes.
"It is not hell, it is the street. It is not death, it is the fruit shop," says Lorca.
Bad Bunny exercises his leadership without pontificating.
He assumes it, feeds it, seems to find there the counterweight to the solipsistic fatigue of fame, but with a cunning gesture, as if he didn't want to, fiddling with the forms.
When he closed ranks with Residente, and they produced a song together, it was not Residente who legitimized it artistically.
It was Bad Bunny who brought joy, the most subversive of feelings, and who gave a second political air to his friend and teacher, allowing him to escape from the dead end in which he had gotten into.
Which one?
The anger no longer resonant, the inevitable lassitude into which the black sheep of late capitalism have been sinking, the blind clash against the wall of paralyzing nostalgia, the endearing but useless and distorted account of the bright days of youth without notoriety;
without concerts, controversies or tours.
"I infiltrate the system and explode from within," Residente sang in 2010. Bad Bunny, who does not owe his name to the tasks of the industry, no longer had to infiltrate any system, much less clarify why he infiltrated, by time that recognizes the weight of Resident in his sentimental education, or how his artistic career is just another of the vanishing points of a multiform choral movement.
Of the two highest representatives of the
trap
industry
, the paisas Maluma and J Balvin, it was Balvin who followed the pattern of Bad Bunny, who grabbed his
flow
and his gestures, and that is precisely why Balvin is the other global ambassador of the genre.
After the management society ASCAP awarded Bad Bunny the 2020 Composer of the Year award, his lyrics and poetics were subjected to a cheap and wrong revision.
Contrary to what his colleagues usually do, Bad Bunny did not respond with any self-help phrase of the type "live your life that I live mine".
He said nothing.
He appeared several weeks later, registering his electoral card with the San Juan State Elections Commission and inciting young people to vote in November.
It also had a new
look
.
Matted hair matte and Mexican cantina mustache.
That face, already trend and style, face of fashion, was first stamped on his voter card.
It is not the serious or alien citizen whose conventional office photo has been hijacked by the features of the bureaucracy.
It is a
close
fashion
subject
.
In the background, the lyrical hand of his voice.
It was an impeccable way of making politics attractive, of mixing arbitrarily separate categories.
There is in the r, in its manifest emphasis, the mineral aftertaste of an oiled tongue in the success of its misguidance, tongue as an organ and as a groping of a certain language on the wall of rhythm.
That aftertaste, that stain, may be what we call the Caribbean.
Lezama says: "The rabbit's mole is its life in the snow, if it is not homogeneous it will destroy it."
Carlos Manuel Álvarez
is a Cuban journalist and writer, author of
Los Caídos
(Sixth Floor).
