Bad Bunny

Bad Bunny blasted out of Puerto Rico to lead a global Latin music revolution and the rapper and singer is bringing his legions of devoted fans along for the ride.

- BIANCA BETANCOURT

When Bad Bunny was growing up in Almirante Sur, a rural area in Vega Baja, Puerto Rico, he would often go clothes shopping with his mother. "I always remember seeing the pieces in women's clothing, and they would always fit me so much better, and they had so much different variety," recalls the rapper and singer, born Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio. Seated in his office in San Juan, Bad Bunny takes a moment to reflect. "Obviously, as you get older, you start seeing what the world shows you," he says, "and if I lived my life that way, then I wouldn't be able to dress in the way that I really want to." He's wearing a Marni logo tee, a mini knit beanie, and flashy Balenciaga sunglasses; the mirrored "BB" logo at the temples isn't custom-made, but it might as well be. "To a point, the fame and where I am gives me the confidence to do all of these things."

That fame Bad Bunny mentions-it's on another level. This year, Drake, Kendrick Lamar, BTS, and Beyoncé have all released new music. But Bad Bunny's Un Verano Sin Ti, which dropped in May, has topped them all, with a record 183 million streams on Spotify on the day it was released. In fact, in 2020 and 2021, he was the most-streamed artist on the platform worldwide. Bad Bunny's ascendence has become Puerto Rican lore: a young grocery bagger turned SoundCloud sensation who spurred a seismic shift in what reggaeton and trap urbano-the gritty and arguably de facto musical genres of modern-day Puerto Rico-could be. He was born in 1994, the eldest of three boys, to a schoolteacher mother and a truck-driver father.