SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico (AP) — In a small bookstore within the Caribbean’s largest mall, dozens of individuals gathered on a latest night for the launch of a slim dictionary. Its title is “The ABC of DtMF,” which is brief for “DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS,” the most recent album from Puerto Rico’s newest prodigious son, Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio, higher often called Unhealthy Bunny.
The principally older crowd flipped by the pages, looking for to know extra about Puerto Rico’s tradition, the locations, phrases and references in Unhealthy Bunny’s music.
The singer has elevated the worldwide profile of the island, a U.S. territory, to new heights, selling its conventional music, denouncing its gentrification and difficult its political standing.
It was an surprising alternative for an island that for years has cried out about its territorial standing, dwindling reasonably priced housing, excessive price of dwelling, power energy outages, medical exodus and fragile economic system. Pleas for change have been largely pushed apart, however Puerto Ricans are optimistic that Unhealthy Bunny’s new album and his sequence of 30 concert events that started Friday means they’ll lastly be heard.
“He’s going to bring change, and there’s a young generation who’s going to back him,” mentioned Luis Rosado, 57, who this week attended the dictionary launch on the urging of his son, who lives overseas.
‘They want my neighborhood’
Ten minutes earlier than the primary live performance on Friday, an enormous billboard on stage lit up with the phrases, “Puerto Rico is a colony since Christopher Columbus ‘discovered’ the island during his second trip to the New World in 1493.”
The group that crammed the 18,000-capacity coliseum whooped.
“This album has sparked a conversation around the world about our situation as a colony,” mentioned Andrea Figueroa, a 24-year-old skilled athlete who mentioned foreigners have began to ask her about Puerto Rico and its points, one thing she hopes may result in change.
These born on the island of three.2 million inhabitants are U.S. residents however can’t vote in U.S. presidential elections, and so they have one consultant in Congress with restricted voting powers.
Figueroa mentioned the album resonated together with her as a result of her father is one in every of hundreds pressured to depart the island searching for work because the economic system crumbled. It’s a sentiment Unhealthy Bunny sings about in “What happened to Hawaii,” with the lyric, “He didn’t want to go to Orlando, but the corrupt ones kicked him out.”
The tune faucets into concern that the Puerto Rican identification is eroding amid an inflow of individuals from the U.S. mainland, lots of them attracted by a 2012 regulation that enables People to maneuver to the island and pay no taxes on capital features in the event that they meet sure situations.
Lots of of People additionally snapped up properties in Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria struck the island as a strong Class 4 storm in 2017, forcing greater than 100,000 folks to depart.
“They want to take the river away from me and also the beach; they want my neighborhood and the grandma to leave,” Unhealthy Bunny sang on Friday as the group drowned out his voice.
The artist spent half of Friday’s live performance singing from the porch and roof of a standard Puerto Rican residence that served as a second stage, the place he wonders about its destiny aloud as a result of it’s been rented: “Do good people live there? Is it an Airbnb?”
The principally younger crowd booed loudly, flinching at their actuality on an island the place the housing worth index elevated by nearly 60% from 2018 to 2024 and the place short-term leases have surged from some 1,000 in 2014 to greater than 25,000 in 2023.
Nevertheless, they cheered upon seeing Los Angeles Lakers celebrity LeBron James emerge from the home as a shock visitor.
The tune hit Carmen Lourdes López Rivera particularly laborious. She is the vp of the Group Board Affiliation of La Perla, an impoverished group as soon as identified for being Puerto Rico’s greatest heroin distribution level.
Buyers with deep pockets have lengthy sought to purchase up the realm, which is perched on a hill with deep turquoise waters lapping beneath an enormous Sixteenth-century fort well-liked with vacationers.
“They have always said they want to kick us out of here,” she mentioned. “We’re going to fight for what belongs to us.”
Bomba, plena and a crested toad
The impact of Unhealthy Bunny’s album and concert events is already being felt.
Greater than 35,000 lodge nights have been booked throughout the usually sluggish summer time season, with the concert events anticipated to draw greater than 600,000 guests, generate greater than $186 million and create greater than 3,600 jobs, in keeping with authorities officers.
Past that, Unhealthy Bunny’s use of folkloric music like bomba and plena has revived curiosity in these musical traditions. Dozens of newcomers have requested courses and are looking for out academics, mentioned Jorge Gabriel López Olán, 28, an skilled drummer.
“And it’s very necessary, isn’t it? To understand where we come from and where our music and culture come from,” he mentioned.
On Friday, Unhealthy Bunny followers sported lengthy ruffled skirts historically worn to bop bomba, whereas others donned straw hats often called a “pava,” worn by “jíbaros,” Puerto Rican peasants. Musicians and dancers wore the identical outfits on the primary stage, which at one level even featured reside chickens.
Curiosity has surged to the purpose the place universities together with Princeton and Yale have launched programs on Unhealthy Bunny. Albert Laguna, a Yale professor, described Unhealthy Bunny’s residence as a strong transfer: “Instead of me going to the world, right, I’m going to start here.”
There may be even renewed curiosity within the Puerto Rican crested toad, the island’s sole indigenous toad species that’s underneath risk and was featured in a video as a part of Unhealthy Bunny’s latest album.
Not even two weeks had handed for the reason that album’s launch and folks already had been sending in photos to substantiate if they’d noticed the crested toad, mentioned Abel Vale Nieves with Residents of the Karst, an environmental nonprofit.
“It’s something we had not seen before,” he mentioned, including that the album introduced Puerto Rico’s actuality to the world: “A situation of complete disadvantage where we don’t have the right to a lot of things.”
“It creates interest in Puerto Rico’s historical situation, and I think it did so in a wonderful way,” he mentioned, including that the concert events will solely increase visibility of the island’s points. “It’s a beautiful opportunity.”
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Related Press music reporter Maria Sherman in New York contributed.
