Thank you, Benito
Happy new year my friends! I hope you are feeling settled.
I just wanna have a lil chit chat today, just like any other blog post to be honest but I’m feeling particularly casual today (go on, put the kettle on!). I have been revisiting some old thoughts recently. Most of them bring me joy, but one of them frightens me and we have Benito Antonio Martinez Ocasio, AKA Bad Bunny, to thank for this!
On January 5th, Bad Bunny released his sixth studio album DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOTos and on January 10th, I tuned in and haven’t looked back. I was not a Bad Bunny hater before, I just didn’t give him much attention outside of the few songs of his I had saved. I wasn’t keeping up with him on any social media, or following him on Spotify so when his album came up as a recommendation, I had every reason to ignore it (especially because my stubbornness doesn’t like it when an algorithm is telling me what to listen to heheh), but I was going for a long walk and I like Latin music so I gave it a go. I am a Bad Bunny fan now.
The opening track, NUEVAYol grabbed me by the scruff of my neck and still hasn’t really let go of me. Another reason why I didn’t really listen to Bad Bunny is because I’m not a lover of reggaeton. A little reggaeton pocket during a DJ set, wonderful, but for my everyday listening, nah, it’s not for me. But this album is more than reggaeton, it has salsa, bachata, dembow and SALSA. Had to say it twice because I love salsa, man. Hearing him honour both the traditional roots of the genre and fuse it with reggaeton was a feast for the ears.
The People and PR!
Even better than the music is the message. He said “I love Puerto Rico (PR). I love being Puerto Rican. Puerto Rico is my home. If Puerto Rico is not your home, stay away from Puerto Rico” (majorly paraphrased) and I love that! The short film for the album shows how tourism and gentrification is changing the face of the island, to the point where the natives wonder if they still exist there. It was so moving to watch people comment and make videos about what this album means to them as Puerto Rican people on the island, in the diaspora, and the wider Latinex community across the world. People are celebrating and mourning their home, and finding comfort in this album.
I had a great time going through the album a second time whilst reading the lyrics translated into English just to catch a glimpse of the emotive content (though a translation will never do it justice). Some of the songs had the signature boisterous sexual lyrics that you expect from the reggaeton, and other songs that I previously overlooked, like TURiSTA and LO QUE LE PASÓ A HAWAii, stepped into a new light. TURiSTA uses the relationship between a tourist and their holiday destination as a metaphor for how a lover can be a tourist in your life, only getting to experience the best of you and leaving without seeing the hurt. LO QUE LE PASÓ A HAWAii is like a cautionary tale and a prayer for the island, hoping that it won’t be eroded in the same way Hawaii has been by American imperialism and tourism. It’s so beautiful!
History nerd wants to salsa!
My biggest joy from this album is how it has reminded me of a burning interest that I put aside. I adore music history, specifically the sounds of the African diaspora! Through our displacement, largely due to the European Slave Trade (otherly known as the Trans-Atlantic slave trade but I recently had a discussion where it was highlighted that the onus should be out in the captors, not the ocean they dragged people across, and I agree!), African people fused their cultures with those in the new country. All my favourite genres of dance music were born out of resistance whether that be house, amapiano or baile funk. I was just reading about the history of reggaeton and how it developed from a genre born in Panama called “Reggae en Espanol”, which is exactly what it sounds like. Many of the Black people in Panama were of Jamaican descent because they were brought over to build the Panama Canal, and they were adding spanish lyrics to reggae beats. Then pass that on to the neighbouring islands, add in dancehall, hip-hop, systematic oppression and you get reggaeton (once again, majorly paraphrased).
I eat it up every time. And it's the same story over and over again, because they tried to ban reggaeton in PR for inciting violence or being too sexual, which is the same thing they tried to do with grime over here in the UK, but the sound persists because the people do! And our dance floors are better for it. And to think I used to believe I didn’t like history because I didn't enjoy the content we covered in secondary school but when I see how happy I am to throw myself down these rabbit holes, it makes me wanna devote my life to research. Thank you Benito for reminding me of what I love learning about.
I’ve already mentioned that I love salsa music, and listening to the album reminded me that I have free will so if I want to dance salsa, I can just go! So I did! The day after listening to the album, I went to a free salsa event and danced the night away. I love how social it is because you get to dance with so many people across one evening. I danced with a lovely sixty-something year old man from Portugal who told me about when he first came to this dance event in 1998. Then I danced with this twenty-year old Guatemalan boy from New York who was visiting London with his cousins. He felt bad because he’s Latino and didn’t know the steps but I told him it didn’t matter and we just made it work! Bottom line is, I’m gonna go salsa dancing more often because it's fun and people are sweet!
Home?
Hearing Bad Bunny speak about this album in interviews, he always highlights how he loves that he was born and raised in PR and he doesn’t want to leave because it is home. Something as simple as that was remarkable to me because I don’t feel that way. As previously discussed in my zimdependence post, England is my home but I don’t want to stay here forever. Zimbabwe is also my home but it doesn’t feel like it because I have never lived there and my Shona (one of our native languages) is choppy. I didn’t realise how much time I spent thinking about where I could make a home until I listened to the album. Which also makes me giggle because I don’t know when I decided that England wasn’t going to cut it haha.
Migration is just the way, right? I think because my parents and a big chunk of my extended family moved, it feels like the natural progression to pack up and leave. But I am in a very privileged position in comparison because my parents needed to leave Zimbabwe to survive, I just want to leave England because it’s bad vibes. Bad vibes being defined as capitalism, blatant racism and cold weather, but I’m going to find the first two in most places so I guess I just wanna be warm whilst I suffer? But if I plan to move to a warm country that happens to have a far lower cost of living, making me immensely privileged relative to the native people, contributing to a culture that’ll eventually push them out, I’ll literally be a gentrifier and a hypocrite so… London will have to do for now.
Perhaps the desire to move for leisure (ie. not for urgent or dire reasons) is also generational. With our technology, the other side of the world feels accessible in a way that it just wasn’t before. I had only previously heard about older people moving countries if it meant returning home, or retiring in the sun. Otherwise, you move towns or change houses if you want to spice it up. I don’t know if it’s the climate anxiety, generational trauma, or being raised on 2010’s recession pop music where every song declared that “tonight is the night, don’t think about tomorrow, #yolo”, but my peers just want to have a good time now, because who knows what is next? It’s less about laying down roots and more about making life enjoyable. I’m not just talking about the party enthusiasts, this also includes those who want to raise children, (these are not mutually exclusive, I sit happily in both camps). The people are thinking about where they can have a family and be happy with their lives. Not to say that you can’t do that here but when you feel like you have the option to do this elsewhere, it gets you thinking.
Anyway, I genuinely need not concern myself with any of this because I’m twenty-two and broke but I will be thinking about where home could be, besides where the heart is or whatever else they say.
Hey, that’s all from me today. Bad Bunny can now accompany Lin-Manuel Miranda on my “Top Puerto Rican Artists That Are Men That Love Being Puerto Rican and Also Love New York” list (that’s the whole list). I’ll put some links below to interesting videos that kicked off my music-history-rabbit-hole digging. As always, if you get the chance to shimmy your shoulders, please do. THANK YOU, BENITOOOOOOOOOO.
