As the most-played artist on streaming platforms for the past three years, Puerto Rican Bad Bunny – real name Benito Antonio Martinez Ocasio – has achieved a tour de force. He dethroned Britain's Ed Sheeran and Canada's Drake, with tracks performed solely in Spanish. The former choirboy is the first Latino rapper to top the American charts with two full-length albums, El Ultimo Tour del Mundo and Un Verano Sin Ti, both in Spanish – not even Ritchie Valens' "La Bamba" (1958) did better. All this while the rapper has branded himself with a ridiculous name worthy of a Mexican wrestler. The cover of his fifth album, Nadie Sabe Lo Que Va a Pasar Mañana – released on Friday, October 13 – is thus full of meaning: A rider who masters his mount during a rodeo, the quintessential gringo sport.
Another tour de force for Bad Bunny is that he hasn't won this award with the festive reggaeton of his predecessors – Daddy Yankee or Don Omar – but with music inspired by Atlanta trap. In this darkest form of trap, his style is close to that of Travis Scott, on whose track "K-Pop" – from Scott's latest record, Utopia – he featured. Bad Bunny has the nerve to challenge his American colleagues on their home turf in Spanish. This is the challenge he has set for himself once again on this 22-track album, overall sad ones. Only two titles at the end of the tracklist, "Perro Negro" and "Un Preview," have the typical reggaeton rhythm. "No Soy Trapero, Ni Reggaetonero," is how he described himself in this fifth opus.
Right from the start, as if to drive the point home, Bad Bunny launches into a long, six-minute monologue set to solemn violins. He looks back on his early career in the track "Nadie Sabe" ("No one knows" in English), addressed to his detractors as much as to his new fans who have made the mistake of not knowing him since his first releases: "Diles" (2016) or his song with rapper Cardi B and Colombian artist J Balvin, "I Like it" (2018).
He does not take the easy road: He takes a stand against the murders of transgender people, protests against the corruption and homophobia of a governor in Puerto Rico, doesn't hesitate to dress as a drag queen in his "Yo Perreo Sola" video and defends sexual fluidity. "Twenty years from now, I'll be able to love a man," he told the Los Angeles Times in 2020. In the meantime, his new girlfriend is model Kendall Jenner – little sister of the Kardashians – with whom he parades around in Gucci bags.
Luxury and the desire to be among the happy few who attend the Monte Carlo Rally is the theme of his second track, "Monaco." It is a "revenge on life" for this son of a truck driver and a schoolteacher, who was bagging groceries for supermarket shoppers when he began his career, by broadcasting his tracks on SoundCloud. On this egotrip number, he samples Charles Aznavour's voice for his chorus: "Hier encore, j’avais 20 ans, je caressais le temps/J’ai joué de la vie." ("Just yesterday, I was 20, I was caressing time/I played with life.")
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