En el calor del mundo: An Invitation to Bad Bunny's Island Experience
At the beginning there is darkness…then a silhouette appears at the bottom of the stage. It is sitting so close to the ground that it is quite difficult to distinguish the objects comprising what is likely a beach: palm trees, sand dune, the shore. This idyllic expression, relating to the sea furthers the imagery that complimented the debut of Bad Bunny’s chart-topping album Un verano sin tí. Beginning the spectacle sitting down on a beach chair almost seems—as with the album's accompanying visual media—like a call for stillness, a practice of grounding or inhabiting the moment. What the public is about to experience requires respect and an opening of the senses. The starting seconds of the first song, “Moscow Mule” (which also opens the album) are joined by screams: a sonic simile of flooding water overtaking the concert space. The song’s title, a cocktail that combines vodka and ginger beer, functions as the invitation to a party: the host invites you in and offers you a drink, setting the mood for the rest of the experience. Here, on a hot day in Houston, San Antonio, etc. Benito kicks off the show by inviting us to sit down with him and take a long sip of what he has to offer.
Stage design, lighting, and visuals all signal a deeply spatial imagination that the audience gets to tour through the set list. In one sequence early on in the set, we leave the beach and see the streets begin to flood. For those familiar with the island’s colonial status, the devastation of hurricanes Maria and now Fiona, and the ongoing pillaging of the island’s natural resources—especially the privatization of public beaches—these images cannot be ignored. As a recurring motif mirroring Puerto Rico’s distinctive built environment, they transport us from the beach to public spaces where we cross paths with the friends, family, and lovers who we miss throughout this prolonged and hot summer of an album. Besides: why be on the beach if you can’t bring anyone with you? What’s the point of it all if you’re left alone?
The same sequence leads into an underwater scene where our point of view shifts from a detached survey of the island’s landscape to an intimate dive as we follow a mermaid. This siren avatar for the album’s songs takes us to an Atlantis that looks a lot like the island we just left. Here it becomes clear that the stage design is more than an island aesthetic, but rather an articulation of a deeply spatial imaginary Bad Bunny has woven into the tour and concert going experience.
He calls out to the crowd—at least 40,000 fans—and reminds los latinos de Houston that he’s thankful for their attendance, their support, and importantly that “Houston apenas está empezando; ahora todes están en la playa” as the opening bars to “Neverita” play. In so doing, Minute Maid Park, the Alamodome, or any venue he plays transforms into a pan-Latine, explicitly queer and inclusive diasporic space: we may not all be returning to the same patria, but Bad Bunny’s songs all return to our desire to be together, and this comprises our shared beach utopia.
For “Tarot” hallways made up of the major arcana turn into the streets of what could be downtown San Juan. By the end of the concert, the screen is ablaze, the word “PARTY” scrawled in flames. As both direction and declaration, Bad Bunny’s message on his beach stage is to throw our hands up in the air, not out of desperation but out of the thrill of living.
But what (and where) is the space Bad Bunny invites us to? Following the logic of the concert title, we would be invited to the world’s “hottest” tour; the most extravagant music tour during a wave of record-breaking global temperatures, where the heat of the summer across the world intoxicates spectators one degree at a time to a soundscape of reggaeton, dembow, and merengue. There is also an invitation to explore what un verano sin tí means. One cannot help but think not only about the summer breakup, but about forced displacement. A summer without those who have migrated out of the archipelago. “Y ahora toca un verano sin ti / La 'toy pasando bien / No te voy a mentir,” sings Bad Bunny in the song that weaves together the album, the tour, and this moment in his career. In the concert’s repertoire, “Un verano sin tí” precedes an iconic moment: the mini touring of the floating palm around La playa pit. A spatial touring that evokes the geographies and transits of the diaspora, i.e. a floating island or a repeating island, in the words of Antonio Benítez Rojo. Furthermore, this transit contextualizes the form of pilgrimage this tour evokes for Latine and Latin American communities.
By the time the flames have gone out, we’re at the end of the show. Notably, the stage is dark again, but this time we see streaks of light meant to simulate rain. Without a beat dropping we hold our collective breath because we, the crowd, know this is “El Apagón.” The track’s fame is heightened by the music video, which doubles as a documentary that details the struggle of many Puerto Ricans to maintain their right to their neighborhoods, homes, and beaches in the face of primarily estadounidense gentrifiers who have taken advantage of the island’s colonial status and tax loopholes. The success of the concert and tour is in great part its ability to relocate so many people into the shared imaginary of the floating island: as club, as utopia, or what could be if we were reunited. The fact this tour begins with a Puerto Rican artist’s vision and commentary on his home’s imposed precarity, travels through the Americas, and ends in Mexico City—which is also suffering a housing crisis thanks to U.S. citizens who seem both ignorant and apathetic to the displacement their presence produces—is not lost on audiences. The closing songs of the concert represent a particularity that extends to the global, a call for a decent life or a life at ease in spaces that constantly battle the effects of colonial dispossession and exploitation. In doing this through the representation of the blackout, Bad Bunny crafts a special sacred practice of the space. See you on the beach.
Mónica B. Ocasio Vega is a PhD candidate in Iberian and Latin American Literatures and Cultures at UT Austin where she researches the culinary cultures of Cuba, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, and Puerto Rico. Her work has been featured on Intervenxions, Remezcla, and Gastronomica: The Journal for Food Studies. She currently curates the Instagram account quitamonieats, a project that centers on the importance of community-based knowledge production and recipe sharing.
Alhelí Harvey is a PhD candidate in Mexican American and Latina/o Studies at UT Austin where she researches Latinx cultural landscapes, U.S. Latinx and Mexican art and architecture, and literary urbanism. Her dissertation looks at the role of tourism and other industries in shaping the built environment in what is today, New Mexico. Her meditations on adobe can be found at Ramparts.