#447: Bad Bunny, ‘X 100pre’

RIMAS, 2018

I am tempted to write about this album in the context of its release being the height of Trump’s America. I think that is lazy. Progressive writers love to frame the events of the world as a reaction to Trump or a commentary on white supremacy. I have already done this about 40 times in this newsletter. It’s easy and it can help us understand the timing and the gravity of different ideologies and policies that trickle into our creative spaces. 

On the topic of Bad Bunny, it is naive for me to frame this album as a reaction or even conversation piece to Trump’s vision of America. 

Bad Bunny did not show up to help white people fall in love with reggaeton or motivate American voters to look beyond the traditions of white supremacy in policy creation. Not everything is about us whites or even about Trump.

This album has nothing to do with any of those things. There were a trillion little moments of brilliance, coincidence and work that led up to that Christmas Eve when Benito Antonio Martinez Ocasio released his first album as Bad Bunny. It was simply about making great music. He made a diverse album full of twists, manipulations and blends of every genre in Latin music and beyond. It is soulful and fun and invigorating and thoughtful. 

In his first album, Bad Bunny makes no effort to pander. He makes no effort to dumb anything down or vanilla it up to meet audiences where they are. Instead, this album invites audiences to get their cute little butts in action and meet him where he is. He does no one any favors, treats all listeners the same and makes music authentic to his interests and community, setting the standard for his following five albums (all released since December 2018). 

I am struggling writing only about this one album of Bad Bunny’s. I want to talk about Bad Bunny and where he is today, what he has accomplished and what he represents. I want to talk about how he is the number one streaming artist on Spotify for the second year in a row. He is the biggest artist in the world and he did it without singing in English – the imperial expectation for world domination. In this, he shows us a different way. He shows us a world not soaked in the blood of colonization and creates space for a more multicultural and multilingual Billboard hit list. Maybe our top 40 pop charts can actually reflect the diversity of our country? It is exciting. 

The time of his rise is interesting though. It is okay, I think, to acknowledge that the universe/fate/ironies that rule us all made space for Bad Bunny to thrive against the backdrop of even more normalized anti-LatinX propaganda and rhetoric made into real life policy. I take it as a gift from the celestial powers that be that we are given this contrast: the highly moral art vs the hateful rhetoric. 

I think that when people strive to create in their greatest capacity, fate sometimes engages that creation in the battle of morality with those ideologies of lesser minds. All this while the creator of the art is not declaring war, they are simply creating. Their work is weapon enough. It holds all the power its creator could endow, lovingly and with care. 

It is important to trust in creativity. It is important to make beautiful and honest things. You never know when those things will be used to create balance and, possibly, with absolute optimism and hope, a vision of a new way.

Also, HAPPY NEW YEAR! As a lil’ treat, here is a cutie vid of Bad Bunny in 2018: