Isabelia Herrera opinions Dangerous Bunny’s current work and presence for The New York Instances, explaining that his fourth album was impressed by a spectrum of Caribbean music. “I’ve made it clear to folks that I’m by no means going to make a document that’s the identical as one other,” the pop star mentioned.
Most pop stars would transfer heaven and earth to attend the Met Gala. However for Dangerous Bunny, one in all music’s most idiosyncratic figures, it’s simply one other Monday night time. “Clearly I’m completely happy that they invited me,” he mentioned, twirling backward and forward in a excessive leather-based swivel chair at New York’s commemorated Electrical Girl Studios about 48 hours earlier than the unique style fête. “I do know that day goes to be an thrilling factor,” he continued. “However I’m working quite a bit this week!”
Final Monday, he introduced his casting because the lead of a live-action Marvel film, taking part in a personality from the Spider-Man universe named El Muerto. Two days after that, he was filming music movies in Puerto Rico. All through all of it, he was getting ready for the discharge of his fourth studio album, “Un Verano Sin Ti” (“A Summer season With out You”), which dropped on Friday.
On the gala on Monday, Dangerous Bunny — born Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio — wore a customized cream boiler go well with and skirt with puff sleeves, designed by Riccardo Tisci for Burberry. At Electrical Girl, calmly placing the ultimate touches on the album and dealing on some new materials, he sported a quintessentially Benito look: pastel pink swim trunks, a checkered blue cardigan and a wide-brimmed sage fisherman’s hat. His left thigh was lined in tattoos, together with the sad-faced cartoon coronary heart that seems on the paintings for his new album, and a top level view of his dwelling, Puerto Rico. His proper thigh bore just one design: the brand for Pokémon Go.
Since his genre-crushing debut in 2018, Dangerous Bunny, now 28, has been practically unstoppable, colliding pop punk, synth-pop, bachata, dembow and reggaeton on his approach to turning into a worldwide famous person. He launched two LPs in 2020, together with “El Último Tour Del Mundo,” the first absolutely Spanish-language album to hit No. 1 on the Billboard 200 chart. He’s been probably the most streamed artist on Spotify two years in a row.
The story of Dangerous Bunny’s legendary ascent from a grocery bagger within the small city of Vega Baja to a torchbearer for a brand new era of reggaeton and entice artists has grow to be practically folklore. Up to now few years, he’s additionally reworked right into a style renegade, an rising social critic, a semiprofessional wrestler and a budding actor. In July, he’ll make his function movie debut in “Bullet Prepare,” a bloody motion film through which he fistfights Brad Pitt. Dangerous Bunny mentioned he skilled with stuntmen for weeks to organize.
“I all the time needed to behave and the chance got here alongside, however I didn’t know that one of many first ones was going to be with Brad Pitt,” he mentioned incredulously.
“On the finish of the day, I’m nonetheless the identical individual I’ve all the time been,” he added. “That’s what’s essential, what you need to know. I shouldn’t care how the world sees me, however somewhat, who I do know I’m,” he continued. “With that, I’ll be very completely happy.”
Dangerous Bunny has approached every of his albums with an express objective. “Since eternally I’ve made it clear to folks that I’m by no means going to make a document that’s the identical as one other,” he mentioned. However past the ambition to warp genres, he’s additionally refused to genuflect to trade conventions, particularly ones for Spanish-speaking artists.
“I might have carried out a observe with, who is aware of, Miley Cyrus or Katy Perry,” he defined, referring to his first 2020 album, “YHLQMDLG.” “However no, I used to be making ‘Safaera’ with Ñengo Stream and Jowell y Randy. And I used to be placing the entire world onto underground from Puerto Rico, you understand? That makes me really feel pleased with what I characterize.”
He approached “Un Verano Sin Ti” with a little bit of a lighter contact: “It’s a document to play in the summertime, on the seashore, as a playlist.” He drew on each current experiences and nostalgia for canine days of the previous. “After I was a little bit child, my household would go to the West on trip,” he mentioned, referring to the coast of Puerto Rico. For “Un Verano Sin Ti,” he determined to discover the jap facet, close to Río Grande and Fajardo. The vast majority of the album was recorded there and within the Dominican Republic.
“Un Verano Sin Ti” is a pop album, however not essentially an easy one. Dangerous Bunny infuses it with electrifying beat switches, raunchy raps and astral synths. The document was impressed by an expansive spectrum of Caribbean music: the deep cuts of the beloved salsa singer Ismael Rivera; Dominican dembow; and teams like Buscabulla, who seem on the tune “Andrea.”
“The album may be very Caribbean, in each sense: with its reggaeton, its mambo, with all these rhythms, and I prefer it that method,” Dangerous Bunny mentioned. Although his profession usually takes him removed from dwelling, he’s all the time stored Puerto Rico shut — typically, he nonetheless pronounces his “Rs” with the guttural, back-of-the-throat intonation so frequent within the countryside. And he nonetheless has that Caribbean humorousness. When requested about what he hoped to do on the Met Gala, he joked, “I need my hookah,” cackling.
On the mutant mambo of “Después de la Playa,” Dangerous Bunny sings on a stay mic over the Dominican band Dahian el Apechao, echoing the model of the merengue experimentalist Omega El Fuerte. “Titi Me Preguntó,” a shape-shifting dembow observe with a horror-movie synth outro, samples Kiko El Loopy, the pink-haired dembow eccentric.
“Un Verano Sin Ti” additionally accommodates collaborations with indie artists just like the Marías and Bomba Estéreo, and plunges deeper into gauzy dream-pop textures and wistful synth interludes that really feel huge and intimate . The aural panorama is harking back to indietronica artists like M83, however Dangerous Bunny and his producers Tainy, MAG and La Paciencia immerse it in Caribbean gloss.
Each MAG and Dangerous Bunny have been partially impressed by Buscabulla’s lush synth pop, and Dangerous Bunny mentioned he listened to the duo’s 2020 album, “Regresa,” on repeat throughout quarantine.
“It was Easter Sunday and we received a name from a bunny,” the duo’s multi-instrumentalist, Luis Alfredo Del Valle, joked in a telephone interview. On “Andrea,” Dangerous Bunny renders a portrait of a Puerto Rican lady hoping to stay life on her personal phrases, and Buscabulla’s vocalist, Raquel Berríos, assumes the character’s voice. “I felt that the refrain needed to carry plenty of weight about what it means to be a girl from the Caribbean,” Berríos mentioned. “I had by no means labored this difficult for a tune.” [. . .]
For full article, see https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/06/arts/music/bad-bunny-un-verano-sin-ti.html
Additionally see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8sy194z8krk