On the penultimate night of his sold-out 31-show residency in San Juan, a visibly emotional Bad Bunny stood in front of the towering “mountain” he had ordered erected on the floor of the Coliseo de Puerto Rico José Miguel Agrelot and delivered a message of love.
“Value every minute, every second that life and God gifts us,” he told the crowd of 15,000, his voice shaking at times. “Thank you, thank you. And to those who one day left Puerto Rico dreaming of coming back, and to those of us who are still here, I don’t want to leave!”
“I don’t want to leave” — No Me Quiero Ir de Aquí — the name Bad Bunny gave his Puerto Rican residency, is intrinsically tied to his album DeBÍ TiRAR Más FOToS (I Should Have Taken More Photos), a love letter to Puerto Rico and the island’s music that Bad Bunny dedicated on its back cover “to all the Puerto Ricans around the world.”
It may as well have said, “To all the world around Puerto Rico.” Since the album’s Jan. 5 release (on the eve of Three Kings’ Day, a significant holiday on the island) and since the July 11 launch of the residency, “No me quiero ir de aquí” has become a rallying cry of pride for both Puerto Ricans and the multicultural global diaspora that has seen itself reflected in Bad Bunny’s most autochthonous songs.
Just nine months after its release, the success of DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS — which spent four nonconsecutive weeks at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 — has been breathtaking, particularly for an album that delves into styles like plena and salsa and that Bad Bunny describes as a labor of love with “zero” commercial expectations. Globally, it’s a phenomenon, a unifier of cultures, an incentive to dance, an enraptured call for love and celebration. It all boils down to Bad Bunny’s island, with its dichotomy of stunning natural beauty and miasma of economical issues, the place he calls home and says he “always returns to.” As his star has risen, the performer born Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio has become the most passionate and effective ambassador in Puerto Rican history. Come February, he’ll have his biggest platform yet when he headlines the Super Bowl LX halftime show in Santa Clara, Calif.
Hundreds of thousands of fans — who can now distinguish between a plena and a salsa and know that the old man in Bad Bunny’s videos is 90-year-old Puerto Rican actor Jacobo Morales — flocked to Puerto Rico to see the residency, which ran from July to September. Once there, audiences experienced a “party de marquesina” (backyard party) set to the backdrop of the production’s massive mountain and its now-iconic casita (little house) — designed to resemble the houses found in a typical Puerto Rican neighborhood — built inside the Coliseo. A host of celebrities, from LeBron James to Jon Hamm, partied at the casita, and dozens of artists — including Young Miko, Arcángel, Ricky Martin and Rubén Blades — performed as guests at the show.
Among them was longtime pal Residente (real name: René Pérez Joglar), the irreverent Puerto Rican rapper known for incisive lyrics, social pronouncements and his passion for the island’s politics. In Bad Bunny, he found a similar, though gentler, iconoclast. The two became fast friends after meeting for dinner at a San Juan restaurant in December 2017 and collaborated musically on the 2019 singles “Bellacoso” and “Afilando los Cuchillos,” the latter an incendiary anti-government track released after Bunny and Residente paid a surprise nighttime visit to then-governor Ricky Rosselló.
Rosselló would resign his post that same year, but the friendship between the two musicians has endured. After performing once at Bad Bunny’s residency and attending as a guest a second time, Residente sat down to interview his friend for Billboard. The wide-ranging conversation — which took place the day after the engagement’s penultimate show, weeks before Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl announcement — spanned nostalgia, music, film and, of course, Puerto Rican pride.
Photos have been released from Bad Bunny’s Shoot from Billboard and I have added them to the gallery.
