Two or three hours before the start of his 30-concert residency in San Juan on July 11, Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio, the artist known as Bad Bunny, logged into his social media accounts. There, he saw things that shook him: all of Puerto Rico, including programs and spaces that normally do not deal with these issues, was talking about the historic feat that, with him as the main protagonist, was about to take place in the Puerto Rican capital.

For the first time, he felt the full weight of the moment pressing down on him. "In the moment, my skin crawled, I felt like this is that big. I felt at the moment, a weight. I saw people happy and like, seriously, today, today, the happiness of Puerto Rico depends on me. And without any ego. I didn’t look at it in a selfish way. It was like I had responsibility and a weight, but I was like, ‘I’m only human,’" recalls the artist.

Within days, he had sold close to half a million tickets. People from countless countries would come specifically to see Bad Bunny. It had been estimated to be a multi-million dollar injection into the economy. The planet was talking about Puerto Rico. The gigs here always put additional pressure on him (“I can let anyone down anywhere else, but here I can’t let my people down, or myself,” he says). And Benito Antonio, the 31-year-old in the midst of all the turmoil, at that critical moment, he felt the most basic human emotion: he was simply afraid that something would go wrong.

“I never have it in my mind to fail. But at the time I started talking to myself like I was talking to people, about if something goes wrong... and I remember I started crying,” he recalls.

He admits that the enormity of the moment overwhelmed him. His mother—whom he often talks about, but has never introduced publicly out of a desire to protect his private life—was with him. She hugged him. Bad Bunny describes the moment as being like a phone that’s out of battery being plugged into a charger; his energy, focus, and willpower began to return instantly.

“I hugged my mom. A hug for like five minutes. And that was like when you have 1% left and it starts to come up. She said a lot of nice words to me. We just hugged. And already after that, I kind of charged, I understood and said ‘ok, I know what it is,’ let’s do it,” he reflects.

The anecdote, told by Benito Antonio in an exclusive interview with El Nuevo Día prior to his last performance of the residency, illustrates the ups and downs in which the career of the world’s most successful musician moves at the moment: on the one hand, there are the unprecedented artistic feats, such as the residency that ended up being 31 concerts, records in nominations for different awards, world tours, movies, and more. And on the other, faced with the weight that such immense fame places on the shoulders of a young man who, at the end of the day, is still only 31 years old, he turns to the most basic, to his origins — to his mother — in order to reconnect with himself.

To the root.

That’s how Bad Bunny’s career has always been. He’s a global pop icon, the biggest Puerto Rican musical phenomenon since Ricky Martin. But to his family, and the pre-famous circle of friends he continues to surround himself with, he is still Benito Antonio, of Almirante, in Vega Baja. They are the Ariadne’s Thread that has helped him rediscover his essence when fame, which, like war, is a big monster, has threatened to stun him.

Bad Bunny is at a level of fame where you can fear things like other mega-famous people who become eccentric, erratic, flamboyant. Michael Jackson, Britney Spears, Justin Bieber, people like that. At the beginning of his successes, he says, he walked near those plains for a time, not for very long, one he does not remember with pleasure.

“It got to me, but I didn’t go all the way,” he says.

“I received this drastic change when I was 22 years old. I started to see the world, as they say, to travel, to see money, to see luxury, things. And there was a moment when I was not present here... I even disconnected from things I liked, like boxing. It was like a moment when I left, I forgot about everything... I wasn’t happy with all the success I was having at the time, fulfilling dreams, traveling and I wasn’t enjoying it. A lot of people I loved weren’t around me, I wasn’t sharing with my family what I should have been sharing. In terms of my musical and artistic vision, I was not where I wanted to be. There were many things that happened and that I was able to overcome," he says.

“I can now say with certainty, thank God, that I don’t think there’s any kind of whirlwind that could change me or make me get a big head and believe the hype,” he states.

Benito Antonio says he’s been able to stay grounded in his career because the people around him — including his immediate and extended family — “aren’t acting like they’re in a movie,” as he puts it. “My family stays the same. My parents are the same. My extended family too — cousins, everyone. Every time I see them, they make me feel so good. They don’t treat me any differently. They treat me the same. I see my aunts and they treat me just like always. ‘Benito Antonio, God bless you, here, take this with you,’” he says.

Benito grew up in the Almirante neighborhood of Vega Baja. His mother is a teacher and his father a truck driver. From the working-class, salaried, middle-class rigor in which he was formed, he says, he obtained the responsibility, discipline and vision of the world with which he has had one of the most successful artistic careers of the last decades.

“My mom, my dad, they were never people who taught me arrogance. On the contrary. Many qualities in the discipline of what I do I learned at home. Being responsible, being disciplined. My parents were not the strictest. But, for example, my mom, I never saw her late for work. I saw her always on time. And I learned that. My dad always, if there was a man who needed something fixed, he would go and fix it. My dad was the kind of guy who, if I had three pairs of tennis shoes and there was a little boy in the neighborhood who was missing them, he would give them to him. At that time I didn’t understand and now when I grew up, wow. That also helped me," he says.

The residency -31 concerts, at the Coliseo de Puerto Rico José Miguel Agrelot, during eleven weekends-, is something never seen before in Puerto Rico. The concert series ended this Saturday, with another full house. It was an extra performance entitled “Una más” (One more), added during the past week at the conclusion of the original 30 shows.

But Bad Bunny thinks the opportunity was always there and that he was simply the first to seize it. He and his manager, Noah Assad, had contemplated it “as something in the future, as a fantasy, as a desire”. But, “and the idea turned from a future idea, an immediate idea, when for the moment everything was lined up.”

“Daddy Yankee did 12 concerts (in 2019). He could’ve done it as a residency — announced 12, 30 shows all at once — and the world would have come. Ricky Martin could do it any time he wants. Chayanne, El Gran Combo. There are so many artists, from urban music and all genres, who could do a residency in Puerto Rico. And it doesn’t have to be at the Choliseo,” says Benito Antonio.

In the interview, Bad Bunny revealed himself as a storyteller — someone who enjoys creating and sharing stories. He talks a lot, but not by himself; he locks his intense dark eyes on his listeners and invites them to connect. Yet even he struggled to find the words to fully express what those 31 nights — singing and dancing in front of nearly 15,000 fans each night — meant to him.

“I feel like I’m at home or at someone’s house, but I’m bringing the party with the help of the people’s energy, because that’s where the people get into it,” says Bad Bunny. At the beginning of the show, from the mountain, he barely interacts with the audience. “It’s like a fantasy. But later, when I go to the house, it’s like I’m going down to the neighborhood,” he adds.

The residency has two protagonists: Bad Bunny and Puerto Rico. All the aesthetics, the staging, the costumes, the messages, the aura, everything has the purpose of highlighting the idea of Puerto Rico in the collective consciousness of its fans, who are young.

Bad Bunny made the generation shaped by crisis, bankruptcy, and mass emigration look back at Puerto Rico and take an interest in their roots and traditions. He did this with his latest album — “DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS” — and through his residency, titled “No me quiero ir de aquí” (I don’t want to leave), an extraordinarily meaningful phrase in a country that has lost 18% of its population over 20 years and where some of its most valuable places and communities are undergoing displacement.

For Bad Bunny, it’s not difficult to explain why he made Puerto Rico the centerpiece of his artistic vision: it’s basically natural and inevitable for him, since he has shown an almost instinctive patriotism for as long as he can remember. As a child, he says, he always said he never wanted to leave Puerto Rico. In everything he has done artistically, he has incorporated elements related to Puerto Rican culture and traditions. He consciously chose to present himself to the world in the most Puerto Rican Spanish possible.

But when he began to travel, two things happened to him: one, that from a distance, as often happens, he missed and appreciated Puerto Rico more and, two, he became aware of the many erroneous notions about the country that exist abroad.

He recalls, for example, when he tried to explain to a German why Puerto Ricans, even though the island isn’t a U.S. state, travel with U.S. passports. “Being away from Puerto Rico made me, number one—miss it a lot, made me value it more, and made me want to learn more. Sometimes I’d talk to people and didn’t know how to answer. Suddenly, their questions were the same as mine,” he explains.

Benito Antonio, a product of public school, acknowledges that he graduated with huge gaps in Puerto Rican history. But he started reading - he has been seen publicly with the books "War Against All Puerto Ricans“, by Nelson Dennis, and "Puerto Rico: historia de una nación“, by Jorell Meléndez Badillo- to talk to people, to educate himself about the parts of Puerto Rican history that are not taught in school and to gain a different perspective on Puerto Rican history.

“I also have family members whose stories of fighting for Puerto Rico I didn’t know about before, and now, at this age, I’m finding out,” he says.

Puerto Rico is at the center of Bad Bunny’s artistic proposal, but not in an abstract or symbolic way: his songs, his residency, his preaching, are centered on the theme of displacement, the phenomenon by which communities are transformed in ways that exceed the economic means of their original residents. Bad Bunny says the concern for the issue also came to him in conversations abroad.

“I met some millionaires and when I told them where I was from, Puerto Rico, they said, 'oh, great, taxes’. I felt like, it’s so fucked up, that I say Puerto Rico and the first thing this gringo says is, 'oh, yeah, taxes’. Then I find out that this person didn’t know anything about the political situation. Nor did he know that in Puerto Rico you don’t vote for president (of the United States), for example. And I realized that, ok, if the only thing you know about Puerto Rico is that, you’re the kind of person who goes there to party. I also experienced that kind of thing a lot and it was one of the things that also inspired me," he says.

Displacement seems to be the subject closest to his heart. It is the central theme of "LO QUE LE PASÓ A HAWAii“, his very slow tempo song, with a melancholy güiro in the background, in which Bad Bunny, almost whispering, makes statements like ”they want to take away my river, and the beach too, they want my neighborhood and they want grandma to leave" and “don’t drop the flag or forget the lelolai, I don’t want them to do to you what happened to Hawaii.”

The song, for going through the issue that most divides Puerto Ricans, the status, has been quite controversial. Benito Antonio says that, while outside Puerto Rico, he was sleeping on a Caribbean island he did not identify, when his companions, at about 2:00 a.m., woke him up. When he tried to go back to sleep, the lyrics came to him, which he wrote in an application on his phone and which is exactly the same one he recorded later.

“I wrote it and then slept until 12 in the afternoon,” he says.

The issue of displacement is a personal one for Benito Antonio, especially because he feels that, had he not become Bad Bunny, it would most likely have been his fate as well (“if it ever touched me, how much it would hurt,” he says, in “Lo que le pasó a Hawaii”).

“I don’t just think about people, but also about the kid I was — who maybe, if he hadn’t had the blessing of becoming what he became, might have been struggling and had to leave… I identify not because of who I am now, as a recognized artist, but because of Benito, the kid who was born and raised here and never wanted to leave. And I know that every time I talk to someone, no one, no one wants to leave. Nobody ever wanted to leave,” he adds.

“If I were there, let’s say, working some minimum wage job, I’d probably be in the neighborhood complaining about what’s going on — this and that — posting stuff on Facebook. Sharing news articles, saying, ‘These jokers, look what they’re doing to the country, damn it, always voting for the same people,’ and then, bam, hit send. Three comments, my aunt who is popular getting pissed off…” he reflects.

He is reminded that during the political campaign he paid for billboards with messages like this, against the New Progressive Party (PNP, in Spanish) and, to a lesser extent, against the Popular Democratic Party (PPD, in Spanish). “It’s the same thing,” he says, “but on a different scale.”

The main stage of the residence simulates a mountain, in the middle of which there is a billboard on which, before the concerts begin, messages are projected. One of the messages reads: “I told you so”. To the question “What did you say?”, he smiles mischievously and answers: “You know what I said”.

The billboards made him one of the central figures in the 2024 campaign. Since then, he has avoided speaking directly about the issue, although his album, which came out just two months after the election, contains heavy political statements as rarely seen in popular music in Puerto Rico.

From that perspective, Bad Bunny understands the message behind “I told you so” — and, at its core, his entire artistic vision. “There’s a reason I’m an artist, and there’s a reason my best way to express myself, to say what I want to say and have the strength to share what I feel and want, is through music. So right now, I don’t want to be the one who dodges questions, but honestly, the billboard that says ‘I told you so,’ I think I put it up for that — to make people wonder what it was that I said, what I’ve been saying,” he explains.

In Puerto Rico, every person, fan or not, knows what Bad Bunny has said.

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This content was translated from Spanish to English using artificial intelligence and was reviewed by an editor before being published.