What is Bad Bunny Doing?
tl;dr: Darshan and I went to Bad Bunny’s Residencia! Here are some reflections on how art and music reveal the power of specificity, cultural belonging, and love as acts of resistance.
We are not here to please the masses. We are here to dare to dream what is ours to dream. To dare to want what is ours to want. To place ourselves in service of the creative life force.
And do everything we can to get out of the way.
To make something that only we could make.
Something specific. Something that comes from the core of our own soul. That place where our ancestral lineages are already woven. To bring it forth courageously. To know that it will be rejected by many. And to trust with all of your heart that it will find its way to the people it is meant for.
And then these people will be delighted. They will not be able to believe that somebody gets them as intimately as you do. The delight will be so great that they will not be able to help telling the others. And those who are meant to know you will know you. Those who you are meant to serve will be served by you. And you will wield your art to love them.
My son Darshan and I just had one of the peak musical experiences of our lives. I’ve seen some great acts. I’ve participated in fully immersive life orienting festivals like the 25th Anniversary of Woodstock, and of course Burning Man! But this was Darshan’s first big live music event. And I kept it a birthday surprise. He did not know what was happening until we were there. Immersed in the hours-long fiesta that precedes the opening of the doors to the colosseum (aka El Choli.)
San Benito, el Conejo Malo, is doing something specific, something unique and single pointed. He is composing a long love letter to a people and a culture. And the more he makes it about us, the more the world seems to love it.
I have been blessed and privileged to spend a lot of time working with artists and organizations who understand that culture is upstream from politics. People who get that if you want to bring perspective to a nation that has lost its way it is essential to support a cultural ecosystem. We have to get behind artists whose longing for justice becomes a powerful creative force. This is work I want to continue to do.
But the rise of Bad Bunny had little to do with these efforts. He is part of a more organic process that continues to emerge out of the Caribbean. The heart of Africa outside of Africa.
He emerged from the sea that gave us bomba and plena, reggae and ska, soca and compas, merengue, bachata and reggeaton. Reggeaton is the genre that made him. And he went on to redefine it. He is woven within threads of musical lineages that make up the very song that make the tiny island of Puerto Rico a cultural powerhouse. He could see, sense, and love the very landscape that grows and nurtures this power.
The Spanish came to Borikén in 1493, and the island has not known political freedom since. Every act of Puerto Rican cultural brilliance, from bomba and plena to Benito’s residency. All of it carries this history as its backdrop. Even as its source.
Oddly. Miraculously. (Although anthropologists might have better explanations.) It can easily be claimed that while most people around the world have a great love for their land, these colonized Boricua people can be said to have a uniquely obsessive adoration for their island and their culture. They hold an awareness that their very being, their joy, passion, pride and yes, sometimes their chaos, is something to be cherished. An accident of birth gives all of us our life defining perspective.
We call Puerto Rico La Isla del Encanto, and Bad Bunny has tapped upon its magic. He knows himself to be enchanted and he has allowed himself to become an instrument for this enchantment. As Hafiz, the Sufi Saint, would say it, he has become a “a whole in the flute that the [Mytery’s] breath flows through.” And we can feel it. Puerto Ricans know this song to be true because it resonates with the song of our own hearts.
Enchantment, most fundamentally, is about how a thing belongs to its world. To thoroughly belong to a place is to experience both it and ourselves as enchanted. Through the consciousness of our Wild One, we’re allured by our terrestrial place and, through that allurement, come to experience how we were made for that particular place.
We cannot experience our own magic without experiencing the world’s. Each requires the other. Conversely, the world becomes disenchanted when we no longer feel and act on our deep and innate belonging to it…
Enchanted derives from the French enchanter, which means “to be sung.” The Wild One is enchanted because it has been sung into the world by the world and knows this. And the Wild One’s song harmonizes fully with the grand song of the world itself.
- Bill Plotkin, Wild Mind: A Field Guide to the Human Psyche (p. 56)
Bad Bunny is so evidently in touch with this Wild One that Plotkin describes. Sung into the world by his place, harmonizing with it, and in turn giving voice to us. This is why he feels both utterly singular and yet like a channel for something larger.
This young and remarkable artist has consistently been ahead of his time (I still can’t believe that he eccentrically styled a facemask before anyone knew covid was coming - ponder that!) He is an excellent collaborator. He is always showing up in other people’s songs. And he is always using his own celebrity to lift up voices that deserve our attention.
He makes music that many people love and don’t even understand. He rose to the top of the charts by mastering his unique style. And then decides to make “DeBí TiRaR MáS FOToS” an album, a risk, that veers far away from what was clearly working. And he gets deep into a cultural niche that is loaded with references that only Puerto Ricans, not even other Caribbean people, not even other Spanish speakers, could possibly understand.
He says “I love you” to his people.
And he says it in the way all of us should say “I love you.” With a deep understanding of who is receiving this love, how they are, how they listen and speak, what they love. How they move their bodies when they feel most authentically themselves. What is their heartache? What do they long for in being loved?
The political seeps through these love notes. Not as preaching, not didactic, not ideological, but as self-evident, as a celebratory act of deep, deep love. Love that brings people together. Love that invites others to love us too. Love that reminds us that there is something that we have that has not been taken away and cannot be taken away. Because that something was literally born out of the beauty of a land combined with the suffering of extracted labor, extracted wealth, and all the horrors of enslavement and colonization.
Benito makes an album just for us. And the whole world comes to love it.
Then, to take things to the next level he decides that his World Tour, the world tour of one of the most loved artists in the world, will start with a two-month residency in Puerto Rico. Thirty shows over two months. He will not play any venue in the mainland United States during this tour. To experience the power, the passion, the love and the magic, you have to get to Puerto Rico in the first place. You have to come to know him in the context that has bred him. You have to come to know him by coming in touch with the people who love their enchanted island in a way few others know how to.
He is getting charged up with our fire. Then he’ll take it all around the world. Excepting the 50 states.
La Residencia, as we’ve come to call it, is called “No Me Quiero Ir de Aquí,” “I don’t want to leave here.” It is an invitation for Puerto Ricans who are still on the island to find a way to stay.
The island would have declared bankruptcy if we were allowed to declare bankruptcy. But you can’t even do that when you are a colony. You don’t even have the freedom to declare yourself bankrupt. The island elects its powerless governor, but has no votes in the congress that rules it. It’s US Citizens cannot vote for a President that has the power to send its people to war. And to top it off, real power is held by a Financial Oversight and Management Board, better known as “La Junta.” And it has 7 members appointed by the U.S. president, whose name I tend to prefer not to say.
This is the context from which the magic emerges. The political and economic crisis from which San Benito channels the healing power of our bodies in rhythmic movement together.
And within this context, the concert itself becomes something beyond description. I won’t try to capture it all. Others have written beautifully about it. And if social media is good for anything, it is good to give you glimpses into what is happening there.
But I can tell you that it is a place of pilgrimage. Fans, great artists, famous athletes, beloved actors from all around the world have been landing in La Isla del Encanto to get a taste of what Borikén’s medicine has for the world. The way my cousin Rolando put it: “it’s like he finds a vein in your heart that you did not even know was there and he tugs it and tugs it as tears of love and joy flow from your soul.”
For me, one of the most extraordinary parts of the experience was that on that specific night, his guest was Residente. You could say Residente is like the Bad Bunny of my generation. Still killing it, bringing beats and consciousness. Demanding freedom. Teaching the young ones. And learning from them. This was more than I could have possibly hoped for. I wish you had seen the dynamic between these two masters. I wish you could have experienced 18,000 people exploding at this moment of collusion.
Can you imagine what it was like to be there with my teenage son? Can you sense the blessing of experiencing such grace with this Puerto Rican child who moves through the world with his Chinese looks? To be loved and love where I learned to love with one of the humans that I love the most?
Like my mother always says: “El Señor ha sido bueno con nosotros y estamos alegres.”
I could stop here. And probably should. But if you read this far you are probably familiar with my work and the Evolutionary Leadership Framework, the way to find our way through complexity by creatively iterating one tiny experiment at a time.
What I take from Benito’s current turn towards a narrow niche connects directly to Evolutionary Leadership. Like Seth Godin taught me, and I love to teach in turn:
We are not here to please the masses. We are here to dare to dream what is ours to dream. To dare to want what is ours to want. To place ourselves in service of the creative life force.
And do everything we can to get out of the way.
To make something that only we could make.
Something specific. Something that comes from the core of our own soul. That place where our ancestral lineages are already woven. To bring it forth courageously. To know that it will be rejected by many. And to trust with all of your heart that it will find its way to the people it is meant for.
And then these people will be delighted. They will not be able to believe that somebody gets them as intimately as you do. The delight will be so great that they will not be able to help telling the others. And those who are meant to know you will know you. Those who you are meant to serve will be served by you. And you will wield your art to love them.