Dangerous Bunny Is Right here on the Proper Time | Cowl Interview

“Yo soy Boricua, pa’que tu lo sepas.”

I ship the road in my greatest Cuban/Puerto Rican-raised-in-Miami Spanish.

The blue hoodie slides again revealing a crisp New York Yankees snapback, a mop of curls beneath, deep brown eyes, and the suggestion of a smile amid three-day stubble.

Lastly, I breathe.

Analysis for this story had me satisfied that Dangerous Bunny can be a person of few phrases, a tough interview. On the flight down I careworn a lot about methods to get the 27-year-old Puerto Rican rapper-songwriter to open up, I didn’t discover we’d arrived till the aircraft’s wheels touched floor and passengers broke into applause (a Puerto Rican custom). “Simply inform him you communicate his language,” my San Juan-based uncle recommended me as he navigated the potholed streets outdoors of Luis MuñozMarín Worldwide Airport. Dangerous Bunny’s language is a Caribbean Spanish punctuated with profanities, damaged phrases, and extremely explicit regional phrases. It’s a dialect fully distinctive to him, delivered in an unmistakable rumbling baritone; a language that Google can not translate, but half the world is singing alongside to.

After I let him know that I too am from the island, we comply with do the interview in Dangerous Bunny’s native tongue — I’ll deal with the translating later. With this association, I quickly discover he’s neither a person of few phrases, nor a tough interview.

Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio is from Vega Baja, a rural city about 30 miles west of San Juan. Whereas attending school and dealing as a bagger on the native grocery retailer, Benito uploaded self-produced songs to SoundCloud as Dangerous Bunny, a reputation impressed by a childhood picture of him dressed for an Easter celebration. In 2016, the observe “Diles,” a Puerto Rican spin on the entice sound of Atlanta, caught the eye of Rimas Leisure and Dangerous Bunny was signed to the powerhouse Puerto Rican label. Chart-topping collaborations with Cardi B, Drake, and J Balvin quickly adopted. In 2020, Dangerous Bunny carried out on the Tremendous Bowl LIV half-time present that was headlined by Jennifer Lopez and Shakira, and a few month later launched his second studio album, YHLQMDLG (a Spanish initialism for “I do no matter I need”). The album, an homage to reggaetón (a method popularized in Puerto Rico within the 1990s that blends a wide range of Caribbean and Latin American sounds with U.S. hip-hop), turned the highest-charting all-Spanish album ever on the Billboard 200 and was Spotify’s most-streamed album globally in 2020.

Joined by Dangerous Bunny’s supervisor Noah Assad, publicist Sujeylee Solá, and a handful of his associates, we settle in for lunch at a seafood restaurant the place you’d sooner go for a silver-anniversary celebration than a sit-down with the world’s greatest reggaetón famous person. However it’s the place Dangerous Bunny likes to cover out nowadays. “I all the time inform people who to grasp the tradition of Puerto Rico, it’s a must to come right here and expertise it,” he says, ordering a soda for himself and codfish croquetas for the desk. “It says loads that the shoot and the interview have been right here on the island. Not many individuals know Puerto Rico, and the reality is that proper now it’s at a cultural peak, with a number of children making artwork.” A snapshot of the cultural panorama might be seen at Pública Espacio Cultural, a big gallery house in San Juan’s Santurce neighborhood devoted to up to date — and infrequently politically charged — works in addition to trend pop-ups by Puerto Rican artists; or heard on the native web radio station RadioRed, a self-described platform for inventive change; or tasted at Lote 23, a meals truck park the place younger cooks like Mario Juan Pagán are serving up to date takes on conventional Puerto Rican delicacies out of retrofitted Airstreams and kiosks.

As if on cue, a waiter interrupts us to provide Jan Oliveras, one of many crew who wears his hair buzzed, bleached, and stenciled with hearts, a drawing {that a} patron sketched of him and despatched over to the desk. “¡Eso está cabrón! Eres como la musa de Picasso,” says Dangerous Bunny. The desk erupts into laughter. (Cabrón, which accurately means “male goat” in Spanish, is slang for badass.)

Sure, the drawing is cabrón. It’s all cabrón. Oliveras’s splendidly bizarre coiffure, the teenage Dangerous Bunny clones you see decked out in his trademark itty-bitty glasses and campy florals, and the easy incontrovertible fact that, due to Dangerous Bunny’s affect, my 11-year-old lacrosse-playing son unironically paints his nails with glitter.

Does Dangerous Bunny really feel answerable for the fearless inventive spirit that has taken over males’s type; for tapping the effectively of feelings round tradition’s inflexible expectations of sexuality and gender expression?

“It’s tough to fathom,” he says. “As a result of folks earlier than me have performed what I do, breaking guidelines and pushing boundaries. However possibly I received right here on the proper time, with the precise drive, and every little thing aligned.”

Among the many viral hits on YHLQMDLG is “Yo Perreo Sola,” an anthem for women who wish to twerk in peace. For the music video, Dangerous Bunny carried out the track in full drag: crimson latex, swooping lashes, prosthetic breasts. It’s not the primary time his gender-bending tendencies have made headlines. In 2018, the singer popped right into a nail salon in Oviedo, Spain, the place he was on tour, for a contemporary manicure and was allegedly denied service as a result of he was a person. A month later he launched the hit “Como Soy” (“How I Am”) with Daddy Yankee and Pacho; within the music video, Dangerous Bunny defiantly recordsdata his nails as he bops round a basketball court docket rapping about medicine, thugs, and respect.

“My look wasn’t a part of any particular plan,” he says. “After I was beginning to make my music, my type got here as a part of the method of liberating my thoughts and liberating spirit. Since I used to be younger, I had it in me — I simply needed to liberate it.”

Dangerous Bunny describes a childhood spent taking part in with roosters, driving horses, and swimming within the river. “Going to the mall was an important day,” he says. However it was on these journeys to el metro that he started to soak up the limitless prospects of trend and the injustice of gender stereotypes.

“Going buying with my mother was one in every of my favourite issues as a result of I might get misplaced within the ladies’s division, seeing the combos, the colours, the cuts, the designs. After which it was my flip to purchase garments and it was boring as hell. The identical denims and T-shirts, denims and T-shirts in numerous sizes. The ladies had all of it!” Don’t even get Dangerous Bunny began on the iniquity of handbags. “For ladies there are such a lot of differing kinds, colours, shapes, designs…. And what do males get? A beat-up previous pockets to stuff in your pocket.”

There is no such thing as a doubt that Dangerous Bunny’s unconventionality has helped make trend and sweetness extra enjoyable for males. If one thing makes him completely satisfied, he wears it, he paints it on his nails, he posts it on Instagram. That happiness has introduced a extra eccentric and colourful actuality to the closets and psyches of a complete era, to not point out the influence that Dangerous Bunny and his fellow reggaetoneros, J Balvin and Maluma, have had on designer runways.

This 12 months, what introduced Dangerous Bunny pleasure was coaching to grow to be a professional wrestler on WWE, the hypermasculine and deeply flamboyant spectacle watched by hundreds of thousands. Becoming a member of WWE was a childhood dream realized. The flashiness and showmanship of how the wrestlers seize the ropes, their facial expressions, the choreography — it was all absorbed by a younger Benito in Vega Baja. “I had the lucha libre [action figures], however I additionally had my very own character for when my brother and I wrestled on our mother and father’ mattress,” he remembers. “I had my entrance music and outfit — a jacket that I took from my dad and underwear that we painted and embellished. We’d play that for hours.” When Dangerous Bunny talks about The Undertaker, Triple H, and Booker T, his pitch rises, his speech accelerates, and I understand that becoming a member of WWE is way more than a childhood dream realized. “Really, wrestling has influenced me loads, and I’ve utilized that to my profession,” he says. “The type, the significance of getting a trademark transfer or phrase or look, and all the time remembering the component of shock. In wrestling, the followers love getting caught off guard. I wish to create that very same emotion with my music.”

For 3 months Dangerous Bunny stopped engaged on his music and moved to Kissimmee, Florida, the place he did two-a-days with a coach and went to the WWE health club to study the strikes. This was all main as much as his huge combat. “It was like I died and went to heaven,” he says. “I’ve by no means sat to observe a recording of one in every of my concert events. By no means. However my wrestling combat — I’ve watched it 100 occasions. For like every week, I might go to mattress watching it.”

Different performing tasks embody a visitor look on the Netflix unique collection Narcos: Mexico and the David Leitch movie Bullet Practice, with Brad Pitt, slated for a 2022 launch. “Now that man appears good,” says Dangerous Bunny of the 57-year-old Oscar-winner. “After I flip 30 I’m going to begin caring for my pores and skin and my face. Possibly I’ll begin doing a little small aesthetic issues or plant some extra hair on my head,” he muses. The reality is Dangerous Bunny will do no matter he rattling effectively pleases. Possibly the very best lesson to study from him is just not that gender norms exist to be shattered or that the youngsters really are alright; an important factor is to hacer lo que te da la gana — do no matter you need.

That night time, as my uncle and I stroll dwelling from dinner in Miramar, a neighborhood in San Juan that’s each hipster-y and steeped in historical past, we hear Dangerous Bunny’s “Si Veo a Tu Mama” (“If I See Your Mother”) coming from the second-floor terrace of a centuries-old dwelling. After I lookup, it’s not a raucous home celebration blazing up this Saturday night time. It’s an abuelita in her rocker, tapping her foot to the reggaetón beat.

Para leer este articulo en español, haz clic aquí.

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Photographed by: Camila Falquez

Trend stylist: Herin Choi

Hair: Ybelka Hurtado

Make-up: Frankie Boyd

Manicure: Chary Reyes and Carla M Negrón 

Manufacturing: Worldjunkies Inc. 

Photographed at: Casa Cubuy, Puerto Rico

High Picture: Louis Vuitton coat. Rick Owens from MATCHESFASHION high. The Pack pants. Mordekai brooch. Footwear, stylist’s personal. Jewellery, Dangerous Bunny’s personal.

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This story initially appeared in Attract’s November 2021 situation. Learn to subscribe right here.