Switched on Pop - How Bad Bunny won 2022

Episode Date: December 13, 2022

For Switched On Pop’s end of year coverage, we just have one superlative: who won 2022? The answer, of course, is Bad Bunny. This year alone, the prolific Puerto Rican artist has topped charts worldwide, became Spotify’s most streamed artist globally, and his record Un Verano Sin Ti has obtained many accolades including being the first Spanish-language album nominated for Album of the Year at the Grammys. The record itself serves as a textbook to the sounds of Latin America: over the course of 23 songs, we’re introduced to bachata, dembow, cumbia, merengue, bomba, and of course, reggaeton. This episode, alongside LA Times journalist Suzy Exposito, we unpack Un Verano Sin Ti and why the album is so important, both for Bad Bunny and the Latin diaspora. Vote for the Signal Awards: https://vote.signalaward.com/PublicVoting#/2022/shows/general/music Songs Discussed: Bad Bunny – Callaita Bad Bunny – Diles Cardi B, Bad Bunny, J Balvin – I Like It N.O.R.E., Daddy Yankee, Nina Sky, Gemstar, Big Mato – Oye Mi Canto Ruben Blades – Plástico Bad Bunny – Después de la Playa Bad Bunny – Tití Me Preguntó Bad Bunny – El Apagón Héctor Lavoe, Fania All Stars – Mi Gente - Live Omega – Si Te Vas Aventura, Don Omar – Ella Y Yo Nando Boom – Ellos Benia Dem Bow Daddy Yankee – Gasolina El General – Tu Pun Pun Shabba Ranks – Dem Bow El Alfa, CJ, Chael Produciendo, El Cherry Scom – La Mamá de la Mamá Bad Bunny – Me Fui de Vacaciones Bad Bunny, Bomba Estéreo – Ojitos Lindos Stan Getz, João Gilberto, Astrud Gilberto – The Girl From Ipanema Bad Bunny – Si Veo a Tu Mamá Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Welcome to Switchton Pop. I'm songwriter Charlie Harding. I'm producer Rianna Cruz. Each year publications typically do superlatives to say, who did the best things and the various genres and types of music.

For special on pop, we just have one superlative, and it's Bad Bunny. Yes, you know I am a longtime Bad Bunny fan, scholar, even dressed up as him for Halloween this year, so I could not agree more. He is the most streamed artist globally on Spotify, the third year in a row. He sold $373.5 million in ticket sales, highest grossing touring artist this year. Wow.

His album Unvarano Sinti is the most streamed album on Apple Music. It is the first Spanish album to top billboards year-end charts, and it's the first Spanish language album nominated for Album of the Year at the Grammys. And when it's got a hit like Kayita on it, how could it not be? Bad Bunny's new album isn't just breaking records. It's also steeped in musical history and countless references. So to help us unpack that history and to explain how the album helped Bad Bunny take over the pop music world, we've invited LA Times music journalist Susie Expozito, whose 2020 Rolling Stone cover profile of Bad Bunny helped turn the world onto this prolific artist. Hello, Susie. Hey, Charlie. Hey, Rihanna. Howdy. Thanks for having me.

It's such a pleasure, especially because I think you're one of the world experts on Bad Bunny. We last featured him on the potty. cast extensively in March 2020, and around the same time you were in conversation with him. Do you mind giving us a quick refresher on Bad Bunny? What do we need to do about his story? Bad Bunny is a prolific singer, songwriter, and producer from Puerto Rico and ended up going to school in San Juan for college, where he studied AV communications, that sort of thing. And he was making music and posting it on SoundCloud while he was working at a grocery store, bagging groceries. And in 2016, he dropped this song called Diles, which is his breakthrough single, at least on the SoundCloud circuit. So this is like a standard Latin trap song and became, you know, this definitive moment for Bad Bunny.

It was his breakthrough moment. And he gets signed. However, one really important part of Bad Bunny's career is Hurricane Maria, which happened in September 2017. And I think that this is like very, very crucial when it comes to his career because he started becoming an advocate for Puerto Ricans and, you know, justice for Puerto Ricans who were really like left out in the cold after the hurricane. And so he really started to build his profile, not just as a rapper and as a singer, but as like an activist. He ended up performing on the Jimmy Fallon show. After one year of the Uy King, there's still people without electricity and their homes. More than 3,000 people die and Trump is still in denial.

But you know what? after this, you know, he starts collaborating with Cardi B and J Balvin. The song I like it was like a huge smash in 2018. Okay, so Rihanna, you're the self-reported Bad Bunny scholar. What happens post-2018 to catch us up to 2022 in the new album? It's a lot, dude. He just releases album after album. Starting in 2018, he drops his first solo record.

then the next year releases a collaborative album with Jay Balvin. Then in 2020, he drops three separate records. All of them went multiple times platinum. And then last year he took a break, only to give us Unvanos indeed this year, one of his biggest hits of all. And I honestly found the record pretty challenging. How did you find it challenging? I think it's very dense.

I think there's a lot to explore on it, where I think it is very easy to listen to and accessible, but personally I found it challenging because I'm sort of exploring all the different themes he's talking about, all the different genres. It's a very intertextual record, I think. Did you find the challenging, Susie? Not at all. I found it very nostalgic and comforting. It's like a pleasant surprise that this album was as popular as it was because you're right. It's very dense. It's rich in Caribbean music. history, right? It brings in, you know, popular types of music that people haven't been as reverent towards. I don't think there's as much reverence in Latino culture at large,

beyond the Caribbean for genres like merengue, like Dembo, you know, very, I mean, very particular to the Dominican Republic, which Bad Bunny credited as a major inspiration. spending time in the DR for him was really crucial to the creation of this album. But I also think about how these genres, I don't want to say they had their heyday,

like everybody forgot about Merengen because that's ridiculous. The album is an hour and 20 minutes long, and as we've established, it is fairly dense. Like, there's a lot of musical references, but I think we should start with perhaps the most pertinent,

which is, You say in your album review that Puerto Rico remains his muse. What do you mean and how can we hear Puerto Rico on this album? I think that it's more than genre. The island itself is like humanized through Bad Bunny's work. It's like given kind of a human form with like its own personality. You know, he's really proud of being Puerto Rican. If you go back to, I mean, that song with, like, Nore and Daddy Yankee, Nina Sky, you know,

Oa mi canto. Yeah. Just the fact that, like, people were reping their countries. That's such a Latin American tradition, you know. Like, Boricua, Morena. That is a Latin American tradition. You go back to Ruben Blades, you know, making the song Plastico. Panama, present.

Puerto Rico. Mexico. Venezuela. You know, like, he shouts out all the different countries in Latin America. That's like, we have pride. And I think Babini speaks to the. pride that we have, you know, in our respective, like, countries or diasporas. And as far as, like, you know, Puerto Rico being his muse, he really humanizes the island.

The way that he sings about it, the way that he documents quotidian life in Puerto Rico, I think, about a song like this was de la Playa. You know, what are we doing after we go to the beach? Where are the afters? What's good? Whose house are we going to? Where are the afters? You know, or like sitting around with his aunt, you know, his Dipi, who's, like, grilling him about having a bunch of girlfriends. And he's like, I'll tell you what, you'll meet all of them.

And that's what Titi me Pregunté is about is he's, you know, he's playing the field and his aunt is grilling him and grilling him. And you know, this is such a like universally Latina experience is getting grilled by like the meddling aunt. I cannot. With these Titi's, like I have these aunties. They know who they are, but like leave me alone.

Tite me Pregundoz my brother's favorite song on the record, and he played it so much that his girlfriend got mad at him because he was singing it so excitedly about having so many girlfriends. Like, are we Polly now? What's happening? Right. His girlfriend got so mad. And whenever it comes on now, he's like, man, like, Ophelia, I can't sing this around. Yeah, but it's like, it's so funny because the reason why so many people love bad. Bunny. You know, you don't have to be Puerto Rican to feel seen by Bad Bunny's music. And a song like Titi Me Pregunto is so funny because it doesn't just like, you know, touch on our cultures and like kind of the ridiculous, like, liberties that our aunts take, you know, when they want to grill us about, why aren't you married? Why don't you have kids? What are you doing? Why are you

messing around like that? But then he gets vulnerable with it at the end of the song. and he's talking about how he wants to be in love but he can't allow himself to be in love. Because then he'd have to be vulnerable with one person. And that's like a lot to ask for him. And that's something that is really relatable. You called one song on the album The Zenith.

The high point of, I think Puerto Rico. representation. What's that song and why does it stand out to you? Yeah, El Apagon, it translates to the blackout. Puerto Rico has had a series of rolling blackouts. They have, what's happened is there's been this like private energy company called Luma that's been that's been rolled in to the island and it's like the worst service in the world. The most like inconsistent. They're really like they're messing up on all fronts, but like, you know, they're failing at getting like consistent energy to the people of Puerto Rico. The reason at La Pagón is important, it's not just because it talks about, you know,

the energy crisis. It's like a call to arms in a way for people to speak out in defense of the island. It's also, you know, Puerto Rican culture, identity. There's a really good line in El Apagon where bad bunnies, like, everybody wants to be Latino, but they lack the flavor. They lack, you know, the spice, you know, they don't got the flavor to be out here. You know, rebranding reggaeton and dance hall as tropical house, they don't have the sassonne to be doing that.

And so it's like, he's firing these warning shots like, hey, we see you. This is ours. And we're protecting it. It's like a very patriotic song. It's sort of a call to action for Puerto Ricans. But also, I think for a lot of us to give credit where it's due. You're making me realize that. The music mirrors the quality of being in a blackout and looking for community and support.

The song starts very sparsely. It's just Bad Bunny, some simple percussion. Yeah, the bumba beat. And slowly it builds and becomes this overwhelming party song, everybody celebrating together. God, I love that. It feels like we've gone from the dark into the light. You know, people making it through that difficulty, through culture, through music. I mean, even at the end of the song, there's like that gang vocal where it sounds like he's just getting everybody, all of his homies in the studio to just shout.

Yep. The hook. Yeah, these lyrics, some of these lyrics are not safe for work, I will say. That's what, when I was doing the rounds for Song of the Summer, I kept bringing up this song. but I was like, hey, you might need to find the clean version when you play it on the air. But, you know, like at the end of this song, there's this cool, like, Euro House moment where the beat like simmers down and then you have La Gabi. Yes, Gabriella Berlingerri. Bad Bunny's, like, not girlfriend now.

I don't know. Bestie. His, like, soulmate. I don't know, platonic soulmate, romantic soulmate, I'm not sure. But she sings, you know, this is my beach, this is my son. She's telling everybody to get out. You know, she's telling everybody to get out of Puerto Rico. You know, through her, it's like the people of Puerto Rico kind of staking their claim to all these like outsiders going to the island and trying to cash in on like, you know, it's natural resources, including the people.

people, culture is like a natural resource. And it's important to like have that context when listening to Bad Bunny. He's he's like a patriot, you know, when it comes to Puerto Rico, Puerto Rican identity. I think he's, he approaches it the way that like a patriot does. He's become sort of, I feel like as somebody who's Puerto Rican, like become a de facto mascot for the island. A lot of people I've noticed associate being Puerto Rican with bad bun. Mm-hmm. Bad Bunny, you know, topping charts, being the most streamed artist has, like, made me proud to be from the island because I have somebody like Bad Bunny. I want that man to represent us, you know? Yeah. Like, I'm Cuban. We have such a rich history when it comes to, like, salsa. But I feel like a lot of us, you know, in the Caribbean, our cultures are very intertwined. I think about watching the Fania All-Stars, like the legendary show that they did in the Democratic Republic of Congo, how powerful it was to see someone like Hector Lavaux, who I think is like one of like Bad Bunny's ancestors.

I feel like he was like a predecessor of Bad Bunny. And seeing Hector Lavaux sing My Gente, you know, in Africa with all the like Fania All Stars mixed with like Celia Cruz and like Willie Colon, like all these. Caribbean rock stars, really. Because salsa was like the rock and roll of the Caribbean, you know, in the 60s and 70s, those were our rock stars. So I think about how similarly, you know, there's a similar kind of renaissance happening the same way that like salsa had this fantastic renaissance, you know, especially in like New York City in that time and thinking about how meaningful it is to see us or like extensions of like our culture making this much of a

global impact. Maria, you have a podcast now and you need to start acting like it. What's the first step as a podcaster? Well, you have to ask lots of questions. I'm Maria Sharpova and I'm hosting a new podcast called Pretty Tough. Every week I'm sitting down with trailblazing women at the top of their game to discuss ambition, work ethic, and the ups and downs that come on the path to achieving greatness. I have a few pretty tough questions for you. Okay. Ready? Ready. Do not sugarcoat something for me. No, no. No. We'll dive into their stories and get valuable insights from top executives, actors, entrepreneurs, and other individuals who have inspired me so much in my own journey. Pretty tough is your front row seat to the women who have demonstrated the power in being

unapologetic in their pursuits. I hope you'll join us. New episodes drop Wednesdays on YouTube or in your favorite podcast app. So Bad Bunny is making specific cultural callouts, whether it's through hilarious conversations about his aunties or more meaningful political issues. We obviously also hear throughout the album, I feel like holding it all together is reggae tone rhythms. And yet, the album is full of so many pan-Latin pop cultural. references. You've made a handful of them.

Let's take a listen to Displace to the Playa. It starts in this very sort of synthy Latin trap vibe. And then we get this total change-up. I love this song for reasons I don't fully understand. But I particularly enjoy that change up from this very polished, very poppy sound to moving into this morangay style that isn't just using those rhythms. They change the entire production. To me, it sounds like I'm driving in Los Angeles and listening to FM radio.

Like, he actually goes on a cheaper microphone. It sounds like, it sounds like, we're on a cheaper microphone. sounds much more DIY. It feels, it's a word that I hate to use, but it feels, like, authentic, if you will, in the way that it is produced. So maybe you could all give me a hand, and what are some of the rhythms and callouts that we're hearing here? Well, he calls it, he calls it Mambo, like, Mambo Dominican. It's part of, like, the family tree that's merengue, and it was popularized by, I feel like Omega is, like, one of the most famous Mambo, Dominican artists. And even actually, like, gets a shoutout in like a Rosalia's song, you know, that song Dispecha.

But talking about, you know, merengue being hot again, having this moment. Oh my God, there's so many references in this song, you know, he calls back to Batchata, specifically in a reference to the song by Abentura featuring Don Omar. It's like such a legendary song for those of us who grew up in the 2000s listening to Spanish music. Like, the boy is mine, but instead of Brandy and Monica, it's like Romeo Santos and Don Omar, you know, talking about. Yeah, very like, like superpower, me against the music, Britney Madonnava. Like two superstars. Two superstars. going at it, you know, and bad buddy, he chooses Don Omar.

He's like, he was like comodon. He just throws in tendrils of, like, Caribbean pop culture references into these songs, which makes them that much more thrilling, you know. But for Charlie, knowing that you didn't grow up with this stuff, It's like, it's just a fun song. It's like a really invigorating and dynamic song with all these like different sounds thrown in, you know, and shaken up. Because the thing about mumble and the thing about Meringe is that they're genres to dance too.

Yeah. So you can listen to this and feel good and get the movement to dance without like knowing the exact like moringa steps. Yeah. Because it's so ingrained in the music. Talk about lack of understanding. I played more than a decade ago in an Afro-Latin jazz band trying to play bass. We attempted many different Caribbean styles in this group. It was like an academic course.

And for me, it was musically like trying to do advanced calculus because my subdivisions of rhythms were not substantive enough or well practiced for me to be able to hold down the group for the entire group. And so I just have these horrible nightmare memories, flashbacks of the drummer staring at me so angry that I could not play these rhythms properly. I'm familiar with Rangame, but I can't play it well. But that's part of why this album has such an appeal to a lot of Latinos in America because it's things that are ingrained in our bodies and in our bones where we can listen to this and feel an instant. connection, whether or not we're inherently familiar. Like, I don't know how to dance bachata, you know what I mean? But I can listen to this and be like, yeah, I feel it. I feel the groove.

And it's something innate that Bad Bunny is accessing. He has sort of like a key and he's unlocking different, different locks, you know, in the dancing spirit of Latinas across the globe, really. Speaking to that bodily connection, I feel like something I kept thinking about in listening to this album was how reggaeton has become heritage sound. It's like a type of, you know, what we would call like folk music, we usually think of something more analog. We don't think about drum machines when we think about folk music. But reggaeton really has become a type of folk music. What's so stunning about that is that the genre, as you're sort of hinting it, is only about three decades old.

Yeah. It comes about in the 90s from Nando Boom. And was largely popularized by Daddy Yankee. Yeah. And it feel like Bad Bunny treats it like it's been around forever. I don't say that lightly. He has reverence to this sound. Yeah, thinking back to it, I mean, I also want to say, like,

You know, I'm probably going to upset a lot of people, but I also want to say that, like, reggaeton is not just a heritage sound in Puerto Rico, but also in Panama, talking about Nando Boom, let's give the Panamanian some love. El General was like the, like, you know, tu-pum-pum was like ground zero. Or like Dembo by Shoe, Mommy, Mammy, Mimmy, no me, ban. Or, like, Dembo by Shoe by Shoe. Or like Dembo by Shabaranks. These were the roots of it.

And in Panama and eventually, you know, Puerto Rico in the late 80s, 90s, you know, they were taking it in like these different, like, really cool directions. But I do think it's reasonable to describe regato. at this point in time as a kind of homegrown folk music. Well, I think, like, we're even starting to see a sort of changing in the guard in the gods of regaton where, like, Daddy Yankees retiring and Bad Bunny is the biggest star in the world. Yeah. It's getting to the point where there's an actual shift in the sort of types of artists that are topping the charts, where it's still so young that an artist like Daddy Yankee is still,

you know, going out with a bang and going out on top. top, but there's whole younger generations of artists that have lived with reggaeton. You know, they've never been without it. And now they're making it. And it's getting on the radio and it's getting radio play and topping billboard charts in America. I wouldn't be surprised if there were some sort of nostalgia revivalist group doing reggaeton on traditional acoustic instruments now. You know, I feel like it could sit in that space. Like, bluegrass is exactly that.

Like, bluegrass is a contemporary form from the 50s, maybe the late 40s. And when electrification was very popular, people were like, why don't we do something which sounds older and put it on a bunch of acoustic instruments? I feel like we could, I feel like Racqueton could almost be played in that same sort of way now because of its ubiquity. Going back to El Apagon being like a half-bomba, half-house song. Right. That's why what Bad Bunny does is so important. is he made a bomba house song and it's a pop song right exactly like like things like that

are why he's such a great artist and that's why i said originally that the album i found to be dense and challenging because it's so thoughtful in his intentions where like bomba is a portoican protest music you know like the rhythm that the bomba which is also the name of a drum the the the rhythm that the is using on a song is a Sika pattern, which is rising up, you know, and it's supposed to be protest music. It's supposed to be unification. And it's supposed to bring everybody together. And even in the pattern, you know, that is, is there and that's in it. And the album has such a wealth of connections from that to its relationship with Dembo, to its relationship with cumbia. It's all in there and it's all over the songs. It's truly like a well of Latin

culture all sort of mixed together and whenever you can reach in and pull something out, it's going to be something different. It's going to be a new reference. It's going to be a new inspiration. And I think that's the beauty of the record. Well said. You're calling out a bunch of specific styles that Bad Bunny is pointing to. Could you give some examples of where we're hearing that on the album? Yeah, totally. I see Dembo all over the record, but specifically in Titi Me Pekunto, where he starts with this sort of Batchata beat. And then transitions into the rhythm of Dembo, which comes from Jamaican dance hall. It's regaton, but faster.

It draws from the trisio rhythm but becomes more repetitive, thinking of like L alpha, you know, the music of L alpha. Yes. Who appeared in the first Bad Bunny album. We talked about Marenga and Mambao on Desbo de la Playa. Bomba, El Apagon, and there's also little hints and pieces of different genres. Mefue de Vacationes uses Jamaican rega and steel drum Calypso. So you have sort of Calypso, West African influence. You have cumbia.

The only artist not from Puerto Rico featured on the record is Bomba Astero. They're Colombian, and they've sort of modernized the cumbia sound, making electrocumbia, which is related to techno cumbia. There's a lot of sub-genres of general cumbia, but on O'Holodilindos, you sort of have this slowed-down cumbia be backing the track. And all of that is seamlessly folded into the grand scope of the album, where when you're listening, you may not notice these specific sub-genres. There's even Bossa Nova in there. And they're all present. That's what I mean by like the wealth of material to draw from.

Like it's very like wink wink, wink, nudge, if you know, you know, taking the key, taking the lock, you know, like unlocking sort of innate connections to this music. And also for people who aren't aware of genres like Bossa Nova, I think about how in his second record, Bad Bunny reference Girl from Epinima. And si be it a tu mama. Like thinking about references like that, these nice little Easter eggs that he plants in these albums, they're very educational. Totally. And not just about like, you know, Puerto Rican music, but I think music across Latin America, I don't think, you know, Puerto Rico is an island, but it's not that much of an island, you know. Right. Would we have frigaton if it weren't for Jamaica?

If people weren't listening to reggae in Puerto Rico, like, I don't know would it sound the way that it does? No, very true. It reflects the breath, not just of Bad Bunny, but I think Latin music as a whole. There's so many cool, interesting sounds. It's like a textbook to the music of Latin America. It is. It is. And that's why I enjoyed this album so much just because of how it's like, you know,

bad bunnies, like, people's history of the Caribbean, you know, in songs. Yeah. In a song. Exactly. In like 20 songs, you know. There's something there for everybody. This has been so much fun to chat with you all. Susie, Rihanna.

Thank you so much. Of course. Weepa, baby. Weppa! Thanks, Susie. Switched on Pop is produced by Rihanna Cruz, engineered by Brandon McFarlane, edited by Art Chung, illustrations by Iris Gottlieb,

community management by Abby Barr, our executive producers, Ahana Rosen, and Ashok Kerwa, or member of the Vox Media Podcast Network, production at Vulture. You can find this anywhere you get podcasts or online at switchedonpop.com. We're on social media at Switched on Pop on Twitter and Instagram. Haller at us what you think is the best bad bunny song on this record. Why do you love it? We love to know. We'll be back again on Tuesday. We're going to be talking about Brazilian and Spanish music and how it fits into Latin music at large.

It's made a really fun conversation. And until then, thanks for listening.