Good Times With Bad Bunny

He’s the barrier-blurring king of Latin trap – and one of the most streamed artists on Earth. But Bad Bunny is way more than merely popular. We go to Puerto Rico to meet the most forward-looking pop star on the planet

- Isabelia Herrera

When he comes home to Puerto Rico, the very first thing Bad Bunny likes to do is fuck.

He tells me this in low, whispered Spanish – chingar, he says, deploying local slang. The statement hardly surprises. I mean, this is a guy who introduced himself to the world a couple of years ago on SoundCloud with the song “Diles”, a sexual paean about repetitive copulation, about fogging up car windows, about knowing a woman’s preferred positions in bed. He starts cackling, a single gold hoop jiggling in his left earlobe. He’s (mostly) kidding, he assures me.

It’s the kind of playful provocation that makes Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio so captivating, and he isn’t ashamed to revel in it. The truth is, when he comes home, he’s more Benito than Bad Bunny. His notoriously painted nails, typically lacquered in pineapple yellow or jet black (depending on his mood), are today uncoloured. He’s letting them breathe; the gel manicures can leave them brittle, he says. No, the riotous rapper who’s spent the past year utterly transforming Spanish-language music – becoming an omnipresent fixture on the global pop soundscape and something of an outspoken social critic – downshifts considerably when he returns home. He prefers to do pretty much what any other 25-year-old might. “I lay down and I sleep the whole day,” he tells me. “I watch movies. And later, after that, I go visit my mom,” he says in that unmistakable, acrobatic bassoon of a voice.