With a troubled voice, the Puerto Rican raps his way through his genre-destroying album Un Verano Sin Ti.
Rapper Bad Bunny’s performances are a work of art made up of contradictions. Colombia, October 2022.
Benito Martínez Ocasio is somewhere in a Puerto Rican supermercado at the very bottom of the chain of workers and packs bags, now he’s at the top of the Spotify pedestal as a bad bunny. The rapper and former shopping bagger is one of the most interesting figures on the music scene right now. On his album “Un Verano Sin Ti”, in English “A summer without you”, he presented this spring, in May 2022, an exciting hybrid of trap (autotune-soaked southern rap), reggaeton and other Caribbean rhythms such as cumbia, bachata and Dembow.
It should be a summer album. With songs to hear on the beach. And yet he resists any kind of beach bar cliché. With dark melodies and his troubled sounding, sonorous voice, he gives his songs a heaviness. He has effortlessly overtaken artists like Drake or artists like Taylor Swift on Spotify. With his album he is the most streamed musician on the platform. The third year in a row.
Not without Benito
However, the 28-year-old from near San Juan has not only benefited from the hip-hop and reggaeton boom – music genres that he uses. He has marked his territory within Puerto Rican party music. He preserves and renews them at the same time. He has been unstoppable since his debut in 2018. He has always made it clear to everyone who asked him that he would never make a record that was exactly like another, he tells the New York Times. He wants to be changeable and unmistakable.
The versatile rap musician Benito Martínez Ocasio has already made it onto the covers of fashion magazines such as “Harper’s Bazaar” with his style.
Martínez has always been singing about relationships he couldn’t save and diamonds that no longer sparkle like they did on the day of his last shopping spree. More and more, however, the sense of mission flashes up, which was previously known primarily from its social media channels. There, Martínez positioned himself several years ago against the crisis management of the Puerto Rican and US governments after Hurricane “Maria” or against the Corona policy.
Immaculately manicured fingernails
Aside from the ambition to merge and distort genres in whole new ways, he refuses to bow to other industry conventions. So he now wants to straighten out a lot at the same time in the course of his career.
He writes protest songs against the contempt for poverty of those in power. He stages himself so ambivalently that he challenges the notions of masculinity that are particularly prevalent within the reggaeton genre. On the cover of the American “Harper’s Bazaar” he wears a white skirt and pearls in his ears. He regularly presents his immaculately manicured and colorfully painted fingernails on Instagram. He speaks publicly about his depression. He disappeared from the social media scene for a long time. Reappears. Encourages his community to vote. He mixes up the zeitgeist in texts, videos and Instagram posts alike.
With “Un Verano Sin Ti” Bad Bunny convinces musically, even if or precisely because he seems to ignore the laws of streaming uniformity. For example, he still doesn’t do without intros, doesn’t have to immediately draw attention to himself with a refrain. The king of Spotify has his own rules.