It’s not a stretch to say that Bad Bunny has played some role — however minor — in supporting the genre’s much-needed progressive redirection. Like Dennis Rodman and Prince before him, Bad Bunny knows his femme flamboyance serves a disruptive public function, but it emerges from a much more intimate inquiry into his own identity as an artist. Cecilia Cassandra Peña-Govea thinks we’ve seized on Bad Bunny as a symbol and extracted more political meaning from him than he can take credit for himself. Our conversation was haunted by the 2019 killing of the Puerto Rican trapero Kevin Fret. Bad Bunny, the phenomenon, had been produced through this tangle of world-spanning wires, this intergenerational labor of call and response.

Source: New York Times October 07, 2020 16:05 UTC