Bad Bunny’s Puerto Rican Homecoming

In 2016, a sinuous remix of a track called “Diles” began pulsing its way through streaming services and night clubs. It featured a handful of Puerto Rican performers, but the main one was an emerging hitmaker with a silly name and a serious voice: Bad Bunny. His real name is Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio; his stage name, as fans later learned, was inspired by a childhood photograph that captured him, scowling, in a rabbit costume. And his voice was doleful and elegant: he sang (and sometimes rapped) with a plainsong solemnity, even when the rhythms and the lyrics suggested mischief, as they often did. Diles means “tell them,” and in this case Bad Bunny was urging a woman to tell her friends precisely how well he had treated her. “Dice que le gusta hacerlo con mis temas de trap,” he sang: “She says she likes to do it to my trap tracks.” This was both a sexual boast and a musical one. A newish style known as Latin trap was ascendant in Puerto Rico, and Bad Bunny was declaring himself one of its leading exponents.

Nine years later, it’s clear that Bad Bunny had good reason for his immodesty, at least when it came to music. In the course of six deliriously good solo albums, he established himself first as Latin trap’s breakout success and then as something else altogether: a stylish and unpredictable star with no real precursor or peer. He may be the most popular Spanish-language singer of all time, and he is probably the most important musician in the world right now—the person future generations will point to when they talk about what the early twenty-twenties sounded like. (“Un Verano sin Ti,” from 2022, is the most listened-to album in the history of Spotify, and last month one of Bad Bunny’s songs became the first track released in 2025 to reach a billion Spotify streams.) He has moonlighted as a professional wrestler (WrestleMania 37) and worked as an actor (“Bullet Train,” “Happy Gilmore 2,” “Caught Stealing”); he has spent time with a Kardashian (Kendall Jenner) and collaborated with fashion brands (Adidas sneakers, Calvin Klein underwear). But one of the keys to his success is that the bigger he gets, the more local he seems. This summer, he was home in Puerto Rico, playing a thirty-show residency at the island’s largest indoor venue, the José Miguel Agrelot Coliseum, which holds nearly twenty thousand people.

On a steamy, rain-swept Saturday night in August, as Hurricane Erin blustered offshore, the show started with dozens of dancers and drummers in traditional Puerto Rican dress. Bad Bunny emerged wearing something less traditional: a shearling hat, which made him look as if he had just arrived from someplace cold and was happy to be home. This was, of course, a celebration, but one made sweeter and more memorable by an underlying sense of ambivalence. The name of the residency is “No Me Quiero Ir de Aquí,” or “I Don’t Want to Leave Here,” a sentiment often expressed by peripatetic celebrities. (A few albums ago, Bad Bunny taunted an unnamed rival with a couplet that translates as “Nobody knows you, not even in your barrio / Yesterday I was with LeBron, and also DiCaprio.”) In this arena, “here” was actually two places. There was a main stage covered in greenery and mist, to evoke an unspoiled hillside. And, toward the back of the arena, there was a squat pink casita that was hosting a raucous house party. During a thunderous track called “Safaera,” Bad Bunny delivered the lyrics from the casita roof, while one of the revellers below danced so vigorously with a decorative plant that he seemed to be trying to pollinate it.

The two stages represented the twin impulses behind Bad Bunny’s glorious recent album, “DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS” (“I Should Have Taken More Photos”), which enriches state-of-the-art tracks with infusions of salsa and other, older Puerto Rican styles. When he ascended the synthetic hillside to sing “PIToRRO DE COCO,” a tribute to homegrown music and homemade alcohol, he was accompanied by a cuatro, a ten-string guitar used in jíbaro music, and he brandished a jar that looked as if it contained the moonshine for which the song is named. Bad Bunny’s low-key delivery somehow makes his big hooks even hookier, and he loves to exploit the contrast between his equanimous voice and his boisterous music. All night, he seemed to generate his own microclimate, as if he were at least fifteen degrees cooler than anyone else in the arena. Which might help explain the shearling hat.

Before there was Latin trap, Puerto Rico was transfixed by reggaetón, a swaggering style based on a loping, staccato beat known as dembow, which derives from dancehall reggae. (The name comes from “Dem Bow,” a 1990 track by Shabba Ranks that helped popularize this rhythm.) In the two-thousands, the reggaetón explosion made stars of brash Puerto Rican performers like Daddy Yankee and Don Omar, who also happened to be rivals. Latin trap, which draws both its name and its sound from the thumping-and-ticking hip-hop of the American South, is slower and woozier, and in some ways more flexible. In the early days, Latin trap was associated with sex and violence. A few months before the “Diles” remix was released, Anuel AA, one of the movement’s defining voices, was arrested; he was later sentenced to thirty months in prison for unlawful firearm possession. Bad Bunny drew from both Latin trap and reggaetón, but he took a markedly introspective approach; in “Soy Peor” (“I’m Worse”), one of the songs that made him a star, he sang about buying a gun, but only so he could assassinate Cupid, to avenge his broken heart.

From the start, Bad Bunny nurtured a bohemian image; most of his fans merely shrugged when, in the 2018 video for “Estamos Bien” (“We’re Good”), he showed off fingernails painted bright blue. More recently, he has emerged as a political advocate, flying the light-blue version of the Puerto Rican flag, which is associated with the island’s independence movement, and speaking out against the New Progressive Party, or P.N.P., which supports Puerto Rican statehood. The P.N.P. was in charge in 2017, when Hurricane Maria killed nearly three thousand people and led to a months-long blackout in parts of the island. (In 2022, he released “El Apagón,” or “The Blackout,” a truculent and profane expression of Puerto Rican pride. It starts with ancestral bomba drums and then explodes into a late-night rave; like many Bad Bunny songs, it is formally inventive while feeling casual and intuitive.) Last year, Bad Bunny paid to erect a number of digital billboards, one of which read “VOTAR PNP ES VOTAR POR LA CORRUPCIÓN.” It turns out that local politics is just about the only world that he has failed to conquer: last fall, Jenniffer González-Colón, the P.N.P. candidate, was elected governor of Puerto Rico. She declined to attend any of the Bad Bunny shows, although she acknowledged that the residency represented a “great opportunity” for the island, because it drew tourists from around the world.