RUNAWAY BUNNY

Bad Bunny has conquered the world. This summer, he came home.

- KELEFA SANNEH

Bad Bunny has sometimes swerved away from traditional Puerto Rican music. Now he is swerving back.

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 hit-maker with a silly name and a serious voice: Bad Bunny. His real name is Benito Antonio Martinez 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.