TIME Magazine call Bad Bunny “a legitimate heir to Frank Sinatra, Michael Jackson or Beyoncé”. (Read More Here).
But right now, Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio, who also goes by Bad Bunny, is slouched almost completely horizontally on a green-room couch in downtown Los Angeles, thinking about being with his parents back home in Puerto Rico.
“I was upset. But now, that feeling has passed me… It’s not like I feel like that right now. It’s good to do what you want,” he said in the interview. “And the same for other artists that are gringo (white) that never would have the opportunity to work with a Latin artist or do a song in Spanish, and now you see them looking at Latin music because it’s on top. It became ‘cool’ to be Latino.”
He continued: “They’re not just making our music; they’re trying to copy the flow of Latinos. But then I think about it — our culture and music runs far and wide. It impacts people in other places. They want to try it and feel it. So why am I going to be bothered by that if they do it with respect?” When asked who his music is for and about critics who won’t listen to his music now, he says that he makes his music for those who love him. “If you don’t want to listen to my music anymore, that’s OK. That’s fine; someone will like it,” he said. “I do music for [those] who want to listen to me and for who want to connect with me. If you don’t like what I’m doing, I’m not going to do something else for you to like it. If you don’t like it, well, brother, there are plenty of artists out there, and perhaps you’ll find someone you’ll like.”
“Outside of that house, perhaps the world is listening and talking about me,” he murmurs in Spanish. “But in that house, everything is the same. Nothing has changed. It’s beautiful for me to go there and they still look at me with the eyes of, ‘Come here, Benito Antonio. The baby. The son.’”
Bad Bunny wants to be the biggest artist in the world—and he is. Last year, his fifth solo studio album, Un Verano Sin Ti, was Billboard’s top-performing album of the year, beating out Taylor Swift and Harry Styles. He broke the all-time record for tour revenue in a calendar year—with $435 million earned—and was Spotify’s most streamed artist for the third year in a row. But Bad Bunny also wants to just be Benito; to do whatever he wants, or hace lo que le da la gana, as he named his sophomore album. And until this point, it is exactly this mentality that has brought him unprecedented success. Where other musicians reaching for his level of stardom have hidden certain parts of themselves, Benito has refused to compromise: on the language he sings in; the political stances he assumes; the dresses and nail polish he wears.
One of Benito’s Un Verano Sin Ti global hits is “El Apagón,” where he talks about non-Latines trying ‘to be Latino’ nowadays. The most popular lyric of the track is arguably: “Ahora todos quieren ser latino’, no, ey / Pero les falta sazón,” which he is now seemingly being used against him. When asked about this shift, he said feeling “upset” over those “wanting to be Latino” had passed.
