Bad Bunny leaps from grocery bagger to rap star
CHICAGO — Bad Bunny had just finished performing with Shakira at the Super Bowl halftime show and was being rushed back to his dressing room when he stopped.
“Listen, we’re going to stay here,” he told his handlers. “The show’s not over yet.”
For the next few minutes, as the crowd of 65,000 screamed for Jennifer Lopez and fireworks streaked the Miami sky, the 25-year-old Puerto Rican r a p per lingered on the field.
He danced with friends, posed for photos in his glittering, Swarovski-encrusted suit and took a moment — just a moment — to revel in the fact that in a handful of years, he had gone from bagging groceries at a supermarket to all of this.
“It was overwhelming,” he recalled. “And I said to myself then: ‘I have to slow down and enjoy things more.’ ”
It can be tough finding time to take stock of your life when you’re one of the fastest-rising stars in music. In just a few years, Bad Bunny has remade reggaeton with his inclusive politics, freaky fashion and moody trap beats, challenging the genre’s deeply rooted stylistic and social norms while becoming one of the most streamed artists on earth.
At the same time, he has blazed new paths in the American market, churning out chart-topping hits with the likes of Cardi B and Drake and playing the country’s biggest arenas, all without the backing of a major label and all while rapping almost exclusively in Spanish.
Amid the collapse of traditional music genres and soaring global demand for urbano — an umbrella term that includes reggaeton, Latin trap, dancehall and dembow — everybody wants a piece of Bad Bunny. “Yo Hago Lo Que Me Da La Gana” — the title of his new record, released Saturday, and it’s a phrase that is his mantra in life. Translation: I do what I want.
Before an awards show in 2017, he decided on a whim to paint his fingernails, a small act that set off shock waves in reggaeton’s machista culture even as young men around the globe began copying his style. “He’s just very different,” said Fernando Lugo, who has directed nearly 30 music videos for the star. “He’s kind of magic.”
He has lately been cramming with an English tutor up to eight hours a day.
Benito Antonio Martinez Ocasio grew up in Vega Baja, a town about an hour from San Juan, the oldest son of a truck driver (his father) and a teacher (his mother). He always tried to stand out, wearing abovethe-knee shorts favored by skaters and flashy patterned shirts, a kind of preppy swag look distinct from the baggier hip-hop garb popular at the time.
“My dad would say, ‘You’re really going out like that?'” he recalled. “But he always supported me.”
Growing up, Benito soaked up the sounds of iconic reggaeton rappers such as Daddy Yankee and Vico C as well as the Juan Gabriel and Hector Lavoe that his mom blasted while they did housework. He still loves listening to salsa.
In 2016, he was working at an Econo grocery store and paying his way through college when he started uploading songs to SoundCloud. He was one of a handful of musicians on the island experimenting with trap rhythms.
Noah Assad, a music lover who had been booking acts since he was a teenager, stopped in his tracks when he first heard “Diles,” on which Bad Bunny sings about sex in a deep, slurry baritone over a hard Atlanta beat. It felt, Assad said, like a Gen Z reinvention of reggaeton, which had emerged from the island’s poor barrios in the 1990s.
He was intrigued, too, by Bad Bunny’s irreverent moniker, which stood out in an industry with serious egos. “I wanted to meet this guy just because of the name alone,” Assad said.
He became Bad Bunny’s manager, and they began releasing dozens of dozens of singles in quick succession, always with a video attached. They never concocted an elaborate crossover strategy. Instead, they just flooded the internet with content and watched as demand grew.
Bad Bunny’s new album, released Saturday, is a party record packed with twerkable perreo hits. “I changed it all up,” he said of the album, which he recorded at a rented house in Miami in a closet converted into a vocal booth. “When people expect something from me, I like to go in the other direction.”