If you use Google Bad Bunny – also known as 28-year-old Puerto Rican Benito Ocasio – one of the suggestions the search engine throws is the question: “Why is Bad Bunny so big?” This is a pertinent question, especially in the Atlantic, where he remains a marginal figure with a lone hit single, Mia, assisted by Drake since 2018. And yet he can be called the world’s biggest pop star: he was the most streamed artist on Spotify in 2020 and in 2021, collecting 17.4 billion streams in two years. In the United States, he is huge on a historical scale: the first artist to top the Billboard charts with an all-Spanish album, El Último Tour Del Mundo. It was recently announced that he will star in an upcoming Marvel film about a wrestler named El Muerto, whose mask gives him superhuman strength; before that, he will star with Brad Pitt in an action movie called Bullet Train.
This is the kind of success that lends itself to big statements. El Último Tour Del Mundo was the third album he released in 2020 (the first, YHLQMDLG, was the highest entirely Spanish-language album in US history until it improved its own record). Un Verano Sin Ti contains 23 songs and lasts most of the hour and a half. According to its author, it is designed to work as a mixtape, to run in the background while people have fun on the beach or by the pool (its title translates as Summer without you).
As with El Último Tour Del Mundo, the production is maintained internally – without credit to the producers of celebrities who make hits whose names appear on every major pop album naturally – and its guest stars are entirely derived from the Latin American music world. including the Colombian psychedelic duo Bomba Estéreo and the Los Angeles-based indie band Marías, as well as many Puerto Rican rappers and singers. Why would you need the stellar power of Cardi B or Dua Lipa to help you cross the cross, once you’ve done it on a large scale?
From psychedelic cumbia to indie-pop, the striking thing about Un Verano Sin Ti beyond its length is the scenic route it takes to maintain its position of world domination. There are certainly times when the album sounds standard. Moscow Mule is a nice song with a nice sunny mood – not for the last time in the album, attempts to create a coastal atmosphere extend to the use of seagulls – but its combination of reggaeton beats and AutoTuned vocals seems very familiar, regardless of language. who sings; also Dos Mil 16, a ballad on a trap beat. But these moments happen less often than you would expect – and are usually followed by staggering in significantly different territory.
Moscow Mule is inherited from Después de la Playa, a distorted version of mambo that includes something that sounds like live vocals. Otro Atardecer’s support sounds like a Vampire Weekend game underwater. The album’s lead producer, Marco “MAG” Borrero, seems to love sounds that feel unstable on their feet, warping and slipping in and out of the melody; the best of the reggaeton tracks here may be Andrea, which tempers the beats with countless layers of clumsy synthesizer. Tití Me Preguntó, meanwhile, is turning to dembo, a frantic musical subgenre known in the Dominican Republic.
Some songs seem to exist in their own special musical universe. One-third of El Apagón is dedicated to muffled sampled voices, chanting vocals and rattling percussion, before the unexpected appearance of a buzzing synthesizer turned it into a house song for the peak of the night. Then the atmosphere shifts again: a female voice conquers, electronics soften and the mood for small hours conquers. All this is trampled in three minutes. At the end, the listener is placed in a completely different place from where he started.
Not everything is so great here – like most 23-song albums, Un Verano Sin Ti could use a squeeze and a twist. But when it reaches its peak, it leaves you puzzled by Britain’s lack of interest in Bad Bunny. Why don’t you want pop music to be as creative and surprising as this one? The depressing conclusion is that this has something to do with traditional snobbery, which takes almost anything that is not sung in English to the realm of novelty; in the United States, 41 million people speak Spanish, and it is a language that is part of everyday life, which is clearly not the case in the United Kingdom. Maybe Un Verano Sin Ti will change people’s minds – although if it doesn’t, you doubt Bad Bunny will lose much sleep.
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