The demonstrations of July 2019, which successfully demanded Rosselló’s resignation, were the first Benito ever attended. His experience wasn’t unique. What scandalized the public and galvanized an often-complacent middle class was the extremely vulgar language these privileged elites used in their messages to denigrate almost every sector of Puerto Rican society. Political rivals were “whore” and “son of a bitch.” They made snide references to Ricky Martin’s sexuality. They joked about the corpses that piled up after Hurricane Maria. These white-collar thugs doubled down on misogyny and homophobia in the vernacular often associated with the lower classes and blamed on música urbana, including reggaeton. In fact, Rosselló’s father, Pedro Rosselló, presided in his own tenure as governor (from 1993 to 2001) over a major effort to censor reggaeton’s predecessor — underground — as one element in the aggressive policing agenda known as “Mano dura contra el crimen,” the Puerto Rican equivalent of Bill Clinton’s disastrous crime bill.
In February 1995 — when Benito was 11 months old — the police organized showy raids against six record stores, three of them in Plaza las Américas. Underground wasn’t new, but it was newly accessible: The government decided to criminalize the music’s obscenity when it began, from the official perspective, to contaminate the minds of middle-class kids and infiltrate spaces like Plaza, the most prestigious showpiece of capitalist respectability. Benito is alive to this history: “They’ve always scapegoated young people, like diablo, kids these days, but these are the same young people that have this incredible hunger. We’re the future.” In his verse on the protest song he made almost overnight with Residente and iLe — “Afilando los Cuchillos,” or “Sharpening the Knives” — Bad Bunny addresses Rosselló directly: “This doesn’t have anything to do with bad language/I talk dirty in my own home and on all my songs/this is about your shameless lying to the people/about how you hid the dead.”
The Telegram chat revealed what many of us already knew: Urban music was never to blame for the degradation of Puerto Rican society. The real degradation has always been Puerto Rico’s colonial condition and the nihilistic corruption it cultivates among local power brokers. Given this context, there was an air of pleasurable vengeance in the fact that the protests that ousted Ricardo Rosselló were galvanized by what came to be called perreo combativo — militant twerking — set to the driving dembow rhythm of the music his father tried, and failed, to eradicate.
This is not to say there wasn’t, and isn’t still, plenty of misogyny and homophobia to go around in música urbana. But it’s striking to note that the perreo combativo — like the protests more generally — was driven largely by young women and queer people, that sometimes the perreo broke out in ecstatic bouts of vogueing in front of the governor’s mansion. It’s not a stretch to say that Bad Bunny has played some role — however minor — in supporting the genre’s much-needed progressive redirection. But he identifies the limits of his own role in “Más de Una Cita,” from his latest mixtape: Es que los hombres ya no tienen credibilidad — it’s just that men these days have zero credibility.
Benito often condemns gender-based violence on Twitter and live TV, but much of his advocacy takes the form of performance art: grinding in full drag in the “Yo Perreo Sola” video, wearing a skirt on “The Tonight Show” to publicly mourn the murder of Alexa Negrón Luciano, a trans woman in Toa Baja. For Benito, these moments seem to map out a personal journey as much as a political strategy: He uses his body as a tool to explore and challenge the limits of his own desires and the social norms that might discipline them. Like Dennis Rodman and Prince before him, Bad Bunny knows his femme flamboyance serves a disruptive public function, but it emerges from a much more intimate inquiry into his own identity as an artist.
In person, I suggested that he might be interested in embodying a woman’s perspective in his music and videos because men are not always afforded the same emotional range. “Exactly,” he agreed. “When I bathe I’m a little bit feminine,” he explained, and as with “Yo Perreo Sola,” “The idea for ‘Sólo de Mí’ also came to me in the bath.” I asked what he meant by feeling “feminine,” but he wisely sidestepped the potential trap in the question. “I don’t feel good talking about what is or isn’t feminine,” he said. “I could tell you what society thinks, but for me, I don’t know.” Originally, he wanted to write the lyrics for “Sólo de Mí” completely in the woman’s voice, using the feminine form of “yours” — tuya — in the refrain “I’m not yours, I’m not anyone’s, I belong only to myself.” But the speculation gave him a headache, and he scrapped the idea: “The message will get lost, and people will start talking about my sexuality instead of what the song’s actually about.” He didn’t intend to write a political song, exactly: “It wasn’t like I sat down and said” — here he put on a pretentious voice — “I must write a song in defense of women!” Instead, the song defends vulnerability as a sacred principle in all of us that should never be exploited: “Don’t come back calling me baby. You know I’m not for you — not even a little bit.”
I was surprised to learn how few women or queer people occupy Benito’s inner circle. It’s an effect, no doubt, of his fame — he’s had mostly the same skater-boy, SoundCloud crew since high school — and of the fact that the genre in which he has made his name is still heavily male-dominated and inhospitable to queer people of any gender.
Cecilia Cassandra Peña-Govea thinks we’ve seized on Bad Bunny as a symbol and extracted more political meaning from him than he can take credit for himself. His flexible attitudes toward gender and sexuality owe a lot to the zeitgeist: He’s emerged as a star very much online, where his generational peers put the X in Latinx and demand accountability from pop stars and politicians alike.
When I interviewed the Puerto Rican rapper Villano Antillano, they acknowledged that Bad Bunny has “brought a lot of important conversations to the table,” but they also admitted that hasn’t made much of a material difference in facilitating the careers of those who lead openly queer lives. Our conversation was haunted by the 2019 killing of the Puerto Rican trapero Kevin Fret. After a perfunctory police investigation that yielded no arrests, many questions still remain about the role of the industry’s own homophobia in failing to protect him. “Everyone knew something bad would happen” to Fret, Villano Antillano said, “and no one did anything.” Later they followed up on our phone call with a long text message that ended like a poem: “We are our own icons and idols. The ones who get chased down with cars and beat up and abused. We save ourselves every day.”
At the end of my time with Benito and his friends, my mind turned back to what we owe superstars (probably nothing) and what they owe us (maybe something). The night was soft. Ormani volunteered to drive me back to the garage where I left my rental car, and it was easy to pretend we were friends on our way out for pizza and a movie. He cued up a freestyle Benito recorded around 2014, when he was just beginning to post on SoundCloud, and I was startled to find his voice much higher, his flow more frantic. He was broke back then, but he knew there was only one way to get where he wanted to go: “Aquí nadie sube sólo, él que te diga eso miente, uno siempre necesita ayuda de la gente.” The verse hit like a prophetic footnote to his future fame — as if Benito knew to warn Bad Bunny against understanding his own rise as an individual triumph.
Even in the terrifying early weeks of the pandemic in New York, I tried to protect my sanity by riding my bike in the evenings from West 113th Street up to the George Washington Bridge at 178th by way of the riverside path. I rapped along to the “Ronca” freestyle, as if it were a spell: “El conejo es la verdadera pandemia” — “The bunny is the real pandemic.” Would that it were so. This stretch of park is intensely Latino, so I’m never the only one listening to Bad Bunny: I hear his music pouring from Bluetooth speakers hooked to handlebars and full sound systems with amps and turntables set up for baby showers and birthday parties. Always a working-class refuge, the park has now become one of the only places to gather, so the scene has leveled up accordingly: bowers of white and blue balloons, elaborate hookah setups with embroidered pillows, steaming trays of plantains and pernil, a salsa combo with a 12-year-old girl on maracas, couples in skintight athleisure and impeccably maintained Nike Huaraches. When Bad Bunny brags about lapping his competition como la vieja en el parque, he’s evoking the plazas of small-town Puerto Rico, where older people have promenaded for centuries, but there are viejas here, too, in lawn chairs, listening to rancheras or shuffling cards at little folding tables with masks dangling from their chins.
Toward the end of August, I couldn’t help wondering who among us had lost a loved one to the virus, who was dancing through deep grief. Many of the people around here are Puerto Ricans, Central Americans, Black Americans — and most of all, Dominicans — who earn livings, often barely, as bike messengers and store clerks and schoolteachers and bus drivers and home health aides. In other words, “essential workers” — as Benito would have been, too, if he never left Vega Baja, never stopped bagging groceries at the Econo supermarket. I wove past little girls in ribbons on scooters and shirtless men on skateboards whose musk had come to seem, in quarantine, like rare perfume. Sometimes I could almost feel my third eye opening up, like the little boy on the cover of “YHLQMDLG,” who flees a blurred and burning world and barrels toward us on his bicycle with his supernatural vision fixed firmly on the future. In Ralph Ellison’s 1955 essay “Living With Music,” he writes: “Perhaps in the swift change of American society in which the meanings of one’s origin are so quickly lost, one of the chief values of living with music lies in its power to give us an orientation in time.”
On Sept. 20, 2020 — the third anniversary of Hurricane Maria’s landfall in Puerto Rico — Bad Bunny descended unexpectedly on my city. On YouTube, I watched him cruise down the Grand Concourse in the Bronx on top of a semi truck styled to look like a graffitied subway car, a stream of exuberant pedestrians running in his wake. “Dreaming is everything,” Benito had told me, and this vision was indeed dreamlike: a larger-than-life enchantment of our quotidian reality here in the uptown corridors where so many Puerto Ricans have become, and refused to become, Americans. He wore all black — sunglasses, a long leather coat — like a true New Yorker, but also like a man in mourning, like the black resistance flag that has dominated street protests in Puerto Rico since the passage of PROMESA. He was in Washington Heights by then, performing “La Romana,” one of his collaborations with the dembow artist El Alfa.
I tracked him coming closer as if I’d summoned this live concert myself: I ran east to Lenox and arrived at Harlem Hospital Center as the last bit of equinox blue left the sky, just before Bad Bunny turned the corner. A buzzing congregation of passers-by joined the essential workers who were gathered by Univision to receive his benediction. He performed exactly one song, directing us to take over the chorus — oh, the ecstasy of singing “Yo Perreo Sola” in a crowd! — then disappeared in a black car, abandoning us to our collective wonderment. We looked at one another and laughed, as if an outsider had posed a question too obvious or too complicated to answer directly. The exhausted technicians descended from the truck, and I glimpsed the elaborate armada of backstage machinery that made the mobile concert possible. Bad Bunny, the phenomenon, had been produced through this tangle of world-spanning wires, this intergenerational labor of call and response. On my way home, I walked through Morningside Park, where dark knots of people stayed after hours to gather around bonfires. Remember? It was a whole season of nights like that, with his music in our headphones and his music at large in the streets. We couldn’t always tell whether we were hearing one voice singing many songs, or many voices singing one.
Carina del Valle Schorske is a writer and translator in New York and San Juan, P.R. Her first book, “The Other Island,” is forthcoming from Riverhead. In 2020, her essay “The Ladder Up,” originally published in Virginia Quarterly Review, was a National Magazine Award finalist. Her last essay for the magazine was a Letter of Recommendation for literary translation as an accessible and radical practice. Mara Corsino is a Brooklyn-based photographer, born and raised in San Juan, Puerto Rico. This is Mara’s first assignment for the magazine.
Styling by Storm Pablo
Design and development by Shannon Lin.
Source: Music - nytimes.com
