Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio’s career, which burst onto the urban music scene in 2016 as Bad Bunny, has been marked by success. But without a doubt, this has been his dream year.
In just four years, the Puerto Rican reggaeton player went from working in a supermarket in his hometown to dominating the music scene by placing at the top of the Spotify and Billboard charts.
LOW VEGA, WHERE IT ALL BEGUN.
Bad Bunny was born in Vega Baixa, a town about 45 minutes from San Juan, into a lower middle class family with parents working to support him and his younger siblings, Bernie and Bysael. His father drove trucks and his mother taught English.
He wanted to be a singer from a very young age, but did not grow up listening to urban music. As he told New Yorker magazine, he could not afford to shop at music stores, and at the time, Tego was the only reggaeton player his mother let him listen to on the Top 40 station when she was on her way to school, because according to her, “if they sound like it here it’s because it was good.”
It was not until later that Benito began to listen to the reggaeton of masses, when it had access to the discs that were sold in the stops of the popular urbanizations and they were interchanged in the parking lots of the secondary ones of San Juan.
As a teenager, and while working in a supermarket, he began to do “beats” and improvise in his room, next to his friends, some of whom are still his closest collaborators.
He stopped studying to devote himself completely to the world of music, and Latin trap was the genre that accompanied it. Music journalists claim that it was Bad Bunny who shaped the genre to make it an innovative experience and show.
“This was my diary living from chamaquito, imagining and letting the mind manifest and, if I have an idea of something, at least try,” Bad Bunny himself recalls in a documentary of just over ten minutes where he explains his first steps in music.
“My dream has always been this: for people to know my music, for people to enjoy my creations, my inventions and ideas,” the 26-year-old artist adds.
Small shows in his homeland, videos on instagram or self-productions on Soundcloud were the means Bad Bunny used to get into the trap music scene. Thanks to his talent and innovative proposals, the artist was gaining more and more fans, until with his song “Tell Them” caught the attention of a producer who hired him for his record label.
LATIN URBAN MUSIC ICON.
In a short time he became an emerging star of the subgenre that has expanded the range of reggaeton with a sound more digital and close to hip hop. In 2017, his song “I’m Worse” peaked on Billboard’s top Hot Latin Songs, the thermometer of Latin music in the United States.
By 2018 Bad Bunny was already an icon in the Latin urban music scene with the success of Cardi B’s song “I like it”, in which he collaborated alongside his friend J Balvin. The following year he released “Oasis”, an 8-song album in collaboration with the Colombian.
That same year, the protest song “Sharpening Knives,” written by Bad Bunny himself alongside Resident, was released during protests against Puerto Rican Governor Ricardo Roussillon. The song garnered 2.5 million views on YouTube the same day it was released.
And after two years bombarding with singles for mass cyber consumption and collaborating with figures like Jlo, Drake or Pharrell Williams he released, without warning, and in the middle of Christmas Eve 2018, his first album, “X100pre”.
The album was very well received by his fans and the American media who released flattering headlines after its release.
“Bad Bunny broke boundaries in 2018. His debut drops more,” Jon Camarica wrote in The New York Times. Elias Leight wrote to Rolling Stone magazine: “Bad Bunny was a master on the hit single. With ‘X100pre’ he arrives as an album artist.” But it was Chris Richards, in the Washington Post, who was most excited to be seen: “Bad Bunny has released the best album of 2019 before even the year begins.”
But certainly the year of consecration of Bad Bunny has been 2020, which started with the release of his second album “YHLQMDLG” (I Do What Gives Me The Win), the most listened to of the year on Spotify with 3.3 billion views.
He sang in the middle of the Super Bowl, a show that airs during the most televised sporting event in the world. On stage, in the band of Shakira, Jennifer Lopez and J Balvin, the Puerto Rican made it clear that he leads the new generation of Spanish-speaking urban music artists whom he calls the “Latin gang.”
Then, in the midst of the pandemic, he pulled out the leftover songs from “YHLQMDLG” and just released his fourth album, “The Last Tour of the World,” with which he raised speculation about his retirement from the music after a year of glory and awards.
Not only that, he also sang live on his social media, of which he disappeared for three months to reappear with a mustache, a “look” completely different from his usual shaved, and with his ballot in hand encouraging young people to go out to vote.
In the fall and with the concerts canceled by the coronavirus, he was seen riding and singing in a truck in the shape of a train car, which crossed the streets of New York. He received the Composer of the Year 2020 award from the American music association ASCAP and Netflix announced that the reggaeton player will venture into acting with a role in the series “Narcos: Mexico”.
This Latin trap singer moves masses. His videos have millions of views on Youtube, millions of followers on Spotify and millions of young people looking for and imitating him. He is a controversial character who knew how to take advantage of the rise of reggaeton and Latin trap in the United States and now positions him as the most listened to artist globally.