The New Yorker:

The Latin-trap performer is probably the most important pop musician of our time. Key to his success is that the bigger he gets, the more local he seems.

By Kelefa Sanneh

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.

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