How Bad Bunny bent global pop culture to his will—by refusing to compromise on anything
By Andrew R. Chow and Mariah Espada
In 40 minutes, the former grocery bagger from Puerto Rico will try on outfits worth thousands for the cover of this magazine.
In 12 hours, he will be photographed embracing the world’s highest-paid supermodel. In one month, he will be staring out onto a sea of 125,000 superfans from the heights of Coachella’s main stage.
But right now, Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio, who also goes by Bad Bunny, is slouched almost completely horizontally on a green-room couch in downtown Los Angeles, thinking about being with his parents back home in Puerto Rico.
“Outside of that house, perhaps the world is listening and talking about me,” he murmurs in Spanish. “But in that house, everything is the same. Nothing has changed. It’s beautiful for me to go there and they still look at me with the eyes of, ‘Come here, Benito Antonio. The baby. The son.’”
Bad Bunny wants to be the biggest artist in the world—and he is. Last year, his fifth solo studio album, Un Verano Sin Ti, was Billboard’s top-performing album of the year, beating out Taylor Swift and Harry Styles. He broke the all-time record for tour revenue in a calendar year—with $435 million earned—and was Spotify’s most streamed artist for the third year in a row. But Bad Bunny also wants to just be Benito; to do whatever he wants, or hace lo que le da la gana, as he named his sophomore album. And until this point, it is exactly this mentality that has brought him unprecedented success. Where other musicians reaching for his level of stardom have hidden certain parts of themselves, Benito has refused to compromise: on the language he sings in; the political stances he assumes; the dresses and nail polish he wears.
Bad Bunny is perhaps the world’s first reverse crossover artist, whose success comes from a refusal to cater to the mainstream. His stubborn originality, independence, and fiercely local lens have made him a radically new kind of global pop star, etching pathways to success that completely bypass New York or Hollywood industry gatekeepers.
But the further Benito ascends into the stratosphere, the more the expectations of his growing fandom threaten to exceed what his whims can deliver. His unequaled stature means he is often asked to speak for an entire region, a responsibility that he alternately embraces and chafes at. During the course of our conversation, he dances around political questions and refers to himself as a cha
