Then, in 2017, Hurricane Maria hit, and nine months later Bad Bunny released “Estamos Bien,” the defiant anthem of battered dreamers: And if tomorrow I die, I’m already used to living in the clouds. That was the year the United States Congress passed PROMESA, the law that subjected Puerto Rico to a pitiless payment plan for its debt crisis. He exploded onto the música urbana scene as Bad Bunny in 2016, when he was just 22, with the emo trap ballad “Soy Peor”: If I was a son of a bitch before, now I’m worse. Lately, though, the crisis seems like a historical period we can track, improbably, in relation to the career of Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio.
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To hear more audio stories from publishers like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android. In the long, low-grade crisis of life in the world’s oldest colony, what year is not cursed?
The fireworks I remember from Santurce hiss and pop in the break, but they can’t drown out the deep moan of our collective tropical depression: “ Maldito Año Nuevo,” he curses. Behind the beat, urban roosters crow at dawn while Bad Bunny stumbles home from a night of hard drinking. In the world of the song, Bad Bunny never left the old neighborhood, so there’s always the risk he might run into his ex’s mother and find himself asking after the girl who got away: Has she found someone new? Someone who makes her happy? The forced intimacy of island life means no street corner is anonymous. “Si Veo a Tu Mamá” is about the abject aftermath of a breakup. It was the sound of a homebound teenager with nothing but a cheap keyboard, learning to loop the love language of another time over a crispy trap track. It was “The Girl From Ipanema,” unmistakably, but in digital translation, getting us high - arrebataoooo, choirboy-style - on late-millennial nostalgia. Instead of immediately pounding us with perreo, the opening song, “Si Veo a Tu Mamá,” seduced us plaintively, with a well-worn bossa nova hook. “YHLQMDLG,” the album we’d been waiting for, was finally released on Leap Day - a mystical glitch in the time machine - but at first it didn’t seem to be the nonstop party we were promised. We reminded one another that Bad Bunny was supposed to drop a new album soon - any day now - and that it was sure to be back-to-back bangers. Instead, we filled our cups with pineapple juice and rum. We knew it could get worse, but we didn’t dare imagine how much. President Trump, meanwhile, threatened war with Iran, and Australia’s wildfires raged. I thought I saw a fiery meteor streak overhead - was I hallucinating? - but Twitter validated my apocalyptic vision. The government hoarded an enormous warehouse-full of emergency supplies, forcing displaced survivors to spend money they didn’t have at Walmart. The archipelago, still half-broken from the brutal assault of Hurricane Maria several years before, suffered through hundreds of unpredictable tremors - an “earthquake swarm” that left people homeless across the island’s southern region and knocked out power for the rest of us. January had been too punishing we needed a fresh start. All around Puerto Rico, people were celebrating a second New Year. 31, 2020, I could hear fireworks from my friend’s terrace in Santurce.