"You have to break that that gringos are gods ... No, daddy"

An old and out of tune piano sleeps in a corner of the large warehouse converted into a photographic studio.

Bad Bunny arrives just 10 minutes late for the appointment in East Los Angeles, courtesy of a city without traffic, the work and grace of the pandemic.

He says hello in the distance, he stares at the thing and I caress the keys to see if it fits into the cloth.

"I don't know how to touch it," he says as he approaches.

"Me, just this."

"Do I carry the famous notes of

Frère Jacques, Frère Jacques, Dormez-vous?

Dormez-vous?

"Me, not even that."

Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio (Puerto Rico, 1994), alias Bad Bunny, that is, Bad Bunny, worked in 2016 bagging the purchase of customers from a supermarket in Vega Baja, a city half an hour from San Juan.

In 2017 he had already jumped onto the international scene and today, at the age of 26, he has broken several records of the music industry of this century.

He is the # 1 global artist of 2020 on Spotify, with over 8.3 billion views.

He has won the Latin album of the year award for

YHLQMDLG

(acronym for I do what I want) at the American Music Awards, and the album he just took out of the oven,

The Last World Tour,

has made history as the first work entirely in Spanish that debuted at the top of the Billboard 200 chart.

Interview with Bad Bunny

El Conejo dances tap on the musical frontiers: he came to the market singing

trap,

a subgenre of rap, but in his cocktail shaker he mixes reggaeton rhythms from his land with hints of pop ballads, bachata and rock.

He has defied the laws of the industry, launching a brilliant career without the protection of any great music label behind and singing only in his native language.

And he confronts the prejudices against urban Latin music without giving an inch to lewdness or profanity, vehicles he uses to tell neighborhood stories, sometimes melancholic, suddenly filled with messages that vindicate women or that protest corruption of Puerto Rico.

Ramona Rosales

He is a fine sensor of his time, he takes the reggaeton that he has sucked since he was a child, shakes it together with the sensibilities of his generation and obtains a new concoction.

All with a staging reminiscent of the extravagance of the Lady Gaga of yesteryear or the provocative ambiguity of Prince.

The same is wearing a skirt that paints her nails or appears with impossible glasses.

When the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers awarded him the 2020 Latin Composer Award this year, criticism raged.

But the Bad Bunny phenomenon is a steamroller.

He has 29 million followers on Instagram and 30.5 million subscribers on his YouTube channel.

One of his latest video clips,

Dákiti,

surpassed 350 million views in a month and a half.

He doesn't play any instrument, he can't read the notes, and he doesn't need to.

Everything has been so fast that sometimes you forget that you are rich and find yourself thinking that you should go to the supermarket.

Others want to shut themselves up in their world and not hear from anyone.

Most of the time he enjoys it.

2020, a stinking year for the world, a year of glory for him.

Can you be Bad Bunny and not be crazy?

"Some days it is difficult," he replies smiling, "but I haven't had time to go crazy."

“I have recently been 100% clear in my head what I have achieved, perhaps a year or six months ago;

But until then, many times I forgot, I felt like I was the kid from the supermarket.

Something happened and he said, 'Hell!'

And then: 'Ah, no, wait, if I have here… ”, he says pointing to his pocket, the place of the wallet.

Contact

He grew up in a middle-class home, with a mother, an English teacher, who made punctuality a matter of State, and with a father, a truck driver, who grabbed for his unused sneakers and, to his despair , gave them to other boys in the neighborhood.

He studied Communication for a couple of years at the University of Puerto Rico and dropped out.

In the Vega Baja store he entertained himself analyzing the clientele.

Poor families and wealthy families, ladies, kids passed through the business.

There an idea was formed of how different people could be, also how similar.

Then he would run to sketch his first songs on the computer.

At neighborhood garage parties, she put them to the test with her childish, nasal voice.

The snowball started rolling on Instagram, on SoundCloud, on YouTube.

DJ Luian listened to him and asked him to launch outside of Puerto Rico under the independent label Hear This Music.

At the end of 2016,

I am worse was released,

a

slow

trap

song

, and madness broke out.

The new Latin rap star had just been born.

Today the world presents him as a pop artist.

Has pop already swallowed reggaeton and

trap

?

Have you swallowed him?

"Yes, definitely.

Pop is popular,

mainstream,

so

trap

now ... And I'm not just talking about

Latin

trap

, I'm talking about

trap-hip hop

from here in the United States.

Song number one is from a

ragman.

And as for the urban reggaeton genre, you have to be from Puerto Rico or a fan of the genre to distinguish a reggaeton from Thalía.

Everyone already includes reggaeton rhythm in their songs ”.

This assault on Latin urban music has occurred while a rejection persists — often classist — towards the genre that not even Bad Bunny, one of the greatest exponents of this conquest, has been overcome.

“And it will never be overcome, that is like racism or homophobia.

It sounds fucking ugly, it sounds horrible, I don't know if I woke up negative today, "he says," but that's something that will never end. "

When asked about the reasons, he elaborates: “Reggaeton is a genre that comes from the street, from the

underground,

from poor people who had no options.

Sometimes even criminals, but I'm not saying this in a derogatory way.

People who got out of jail, or sold drugs, and in the end saw a light in that genre of reggaeton.

Many were able to abandon that lifestyle and buy a house and car.

I think that's where that rejection comes from ”.

"But it doesn't bother me, let them say what they want, there is a whole world dancing to the songs, enjoying life without prejudice."

Ramona Rosales

He has just returned from filming the series

Narcos: Mexico,

a new adventure, the culmination of a unique year.

When recounting his confinement, one imagines a caged tiger.

February began with that memorable performance at the Super Bowl alongside Shakira, Jennifer Lopez and J Balvin.

Weeks later he released his second album,

I do what I want

: "I was good bastard, to dog, to break the road."

And the pandemic broke out.

Goodbye to the big concert in Puerto Rico.

Goodbye to the European tour.

Goodbye to the discos.

He missed acting so much that sometimes he would go to a room, in front of the mirror, and sing and dance alone, imagining the audience.

From the remnants he took out another album,

Las que not going to leave.

At the end of November,

The last tour of the world

.

Three in a year.

“And I have ideas all the time;

If I get serious with them, I don't live, ”he says.

In her quarantine she recorded a song with her partner, Gabriela.

For laughing, for playing.

You can write and compose in any way and anywhere, on the road, at home, with your computer and even with your mobile.

It shows on the screen a kind of roulette with numbers.

It is an application recommended by René Pérez, the famous Puerto Rican rapper known as Residente.

Play some notes with your fingertips.

Ramona Rosales

“I am not a musician.

I consider a person who plays a musical instrument a musician, because of life's tragedies I don't play any of them, but I'm not going to leave the world without doing it, ”he says.

Bad Bunny would like to learn to play the piano.

- If you are not a musician, how do you define yourself?

—Like an artist who sees things differently and tries to create his own world.

The phenomenon can drive other artists crazy, like when he received the award for best composer, but technology allows making music without knowing it and Bad Bunny is a reality.

“Maybe it would bother me instead, I try not to be spiteful about it, but people are not taught how to process changes and the world is changing every day.

They don't teach you from childhood to live with something as natural as changes and many people fear them, ”he says.

The scandal also has to do with his lyrics.

In Bad Bunny songs there is a lot of sex and very explicit;

sometimes transactional, other times sentimental.

"If your boyfriend does not like mama's ass,

pa '

why not mame" impels in

Safaera.

"He fucked the cat but it didn't come, calm down, I'll solve you," he says in

Bichiyal.

Because Bad Bunny, to sing to a girl he misses, does not write about the nights he loved her, but is "snatched" thinking "all the times" he put it, as he does in

If I see you mother.

Ramona Rosales

“I could have said 'all the times we made love', but it's not honest.

If I tell a friend of mine that I miss a girl, I tell him: 'Hell, I remembered again when I put him in the

parking lot

there…'.

This is how many people in my nation express themselves.

Sex plays the same role here as in any other gender.

The bolero was always dedicated to a woman and said, in a cute way, that she wanted to put it on her.

And the salsa, the meringue, the bachata… ”.

Do you think lewd desire is confused with machismo?

"A lot, and I watch that a lot in my lyrics."

El Conejo Malo sings like a neighborhood chop, albeit a neighborhood permeated by a sensitivity typical of its time, the push of the feminist wave or LGTB rights, the mark of a generation that has begun to use the generic

Latinx.

In 2018, a sinister year of femicides in Latin America, she published

Solo de me,

a song in which she says: “Tonight I wake up.

That you loved me

I appreciate it, but I don't belong to you ”.

In the video, it is a young woman who sings with Benito's voice on stage while bruises appear on her face, until suddenly they disappear and she smiles.

In February, after a homeless transgender woman was murdered in Puerto Rico, she appeared on a show wearing a skirt and a T-shirt with the slogan: "They killed Alexa, not a man in a skirt."

You are aware that a part of your audience needs to hear those messages.

“And that's why I do it, because I know the scope I have in Latin America.

I have fans of many kinds;

fans of the LGTB community and also, I'm sure, homophobic fans.

Feminists and macho.

I have the ability to hook them with this reggaeton and with this vocabulary.

I speak to them as we speak and I give them a message without making them feel like I am giving them a sermon ”, the artist reasons.

Ramona Rosales

A few months ago, he released the video of the very outgoing

Yo perreo sola,

a provocative disruption of male goat reggaeton, where he dresses as a woman to sing verses like this: She has men as a

hobby,

a

spoiled '

like Nairobi, and you

see her'

drinking from the bottle, the boys and girls want with her… ”.

At the end of the video, leave a message: “If you don't want to dance contagion, respect.

She dogs alone ”.

Benito is not afraid to take risks, to pull the seams.

Shortly after launching the song, he went out with Arcángel, another Puerto Rican artist, in Santurce, a neighborhood of San Juan where he recorded his first video.

“And I was there with the kids on the street, who could say that they no longer like Bad Bunny because he is doing strange things, which are not typical of macho, but the song seemed brutal to them.

One told me, 'Hey, when you dressed as a woman, that took you through the sky.'

And I thought, 'Wow, this is the neighborhood.'

Some artist or someone from the industry could have told me that the street was not going to support me, but the street was there, listening to the album ”.

"Because the street is changing too."

"Exactly, even the street is changing."

His skirts and painted nails have something provocative and a lot about himself.

Since he was a child, Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio wondered why women used them and men did not.

The feminine clothes caught his attention, he saw them more creative, more dynamic.

"It is part of me and has ended up being revolutionary," he says.

In the photo shoot he becomes a

performer.

Dark glasses.

Hard roll.

He sits.

It shakes like a fighter preparing for an assault.

Press your lips together.

Does the goose.

He has always liked it.

His alias comes from a photo of him as a boy dressed as a rabbit and with a mean face.

Ramona Rosales

At the beginning of the year he hinted that he would retire.

On the last

YHLQMDLG

song he

said that he would release one more album and that on the crest of the wave he would leave the madding crowd for a while.

One final stride to become a 21st century pop culture myth.

Or maybe a good advertising strategy.

“Some wrote that and I can't complain, but at that moment I said it because I was sorry;

I am a person who changes of mind suddenly, very sentimental ”.

Sometimes you seem overwhelmed with success.

That need to hide will bring it up several times during the interview.

A few years ago, during the

professional

boom

, his head crashed.

He didn't go to a doctor for a diagnosis, but he thinks he went through depression.

“You asked me before how I hadn't gone crazy.

Well, I think that was the moment that was going to determine if I was going to go crazy or not.

From 2016 to 2018 I disappeared, I was stuck in a capsule, without knowing anything.

The world saw me, but I was missing ”, he recalls.

Opening his eyes he realized that he had not seen a single boxing match, his passion, in all that time, or movies.

She discovered that she had new cousins, that a relative had gotten sick ... "And that's when I said: who am I? What's going on?"

At that time he was in Argentina, flew back to Puerto Rico and spent a season out of orbit.

Something clouded him this summer too.

In the midst of a wave of racial protests, there were those who were ugly to shut up.

"At that time I was horrible in my personal life, I was going through a situation where I did not feel well, and I had dropped my phone and social networks," he explains.

Now he gets up between eight and nine in the morning, at eleven he trains and, if he has no commitments, he writes, records, tests.

He doesn't know what he's doing when he's not making music.

A number of people work around him that he no longer manages to specify.

In the hard core, a dozen people, including several friends and one of his two brothers.

But the Bad Bunny phenomenon has expanded as a small empire, still independent, he says, from the big traditional labels.

Ramona Rosales

No one tempts him to sing in English, he says, because they already know the answer.

He has acted with Drake, with Cardi B, with Jennifer Lopez, but in Spanish.

The tendency he saw in Latin America to idolize American stars drove him crazy.

"You have to break that that the gringos are gods ... No, daddy."

For Benito, the Puerto Rican salsero Héctor Lavoe was God.

While he was growing up, artists like Ricky Martin or Enrique Iglesias released their

singles

in Spanish and later covered them in English.

“Maybe it was necessary and they opened doors to this

Latin

boom

, but that moment for me is over.

I am very proud to reach the level where we are speaking in Spanish, and not only in Spanish, but in the Spanish that we speak in Puerto Rico.

Without changing the accent ”.

He wants to own property in Los Angeles, Miami and New York, but his home is Puerto Rico.

Puerto Rican pride overflows.

The calamities that Hurricane

María

caused on the island in 2017, already burdened by a serious financial crisis, lit a fuse in his social conscience.

In the summer of 2019 it went into combustion.

The leak of a chat between the then governor, Ricardo Rosselló, with other authorities outraged citizens for his sexist and homophobic comments, the mockery of those killed by the hurricane and the corruption compadreo.

Benito, who was in Europe, returned and, along with other artists from the island such as Residente and Ricky Martin (the target of homophobic attacks), took the lead in the protests.

From those days dates back to the “Start with the hell and go away / and let's welcome the generation of I don't leave myself”, from

Sharpening knives.

Rosselló fell, but a year and a half later Benito does not make a very hopeful balance.

When asked if Puerto Rico, a Commonwealth of the United States, should advance toward independence or, on the contrary, become State 51, he frankly replies that he does not have a prepared political or economic argument, but makes it clear that "never I would like to see Puerto Rico as a State ”.

Bad Bunny likes to interview himself.

He does it as an exercise to find out what he thinks about things, the reason for his story.

He recently wondered about the mark his parents had on his career, he thought about responsibility, about discipline.

In the constancy of his mother;

in the honesty of his father.

Time is running out and Benito prepares to transform into the Bad Rabbit in the photos.

One last question to the Puerto Rican star.

Why do your songs have so many $ 100 bills?

“It's part of the

fronteo,

the urban genre.

I always try to maintain that balance and always be with my roots, with the street ... In the end I like it, I grew up listening to that.

Sometimes there are people who criticize it, but the public likes it, they like to sing it ”.

Because they like?

Is it playful?

"Sure, singing it is like feeling that you have them."

Styling: Storm Pablo