447. Bad Bunny, "X 100pre"

 

There's something I have alluded to before as we get this project well underway, and that's acknowledging my unfamiliarity, as a middle-aged white guy, with large swaths of current popular music, although I will say that I am way better off than most guys my age.  I regularly score in the 80% range in the Coachella lineup test, which simply asks how many Coachella bands you've heard of.  Now, a lot of guys my age have no idea who many or most of the Coachella artists are, save for the Legacy Act that typically closes the last night, but I actually like listening to new music.  Some of it, anyway.  

This is all a roundabout way of saying that until mid-2020 I had never even HEARD of Bad Bunny, which is unusual for me because I know who Lil Pump and Juice WRLD and 100 gecs are.  So some how Bad Bunny fit into that slice of music that was big enough to make an impact on the cultural zeitgeist but somehow totally evaded me.  

This did not stop me from enjoying this album, to some extent.  My immediate reference point was the Daddy Yankee album from a while back, since both are Puerto Rican rappers singing almost entirely in Spanish, but I think there's a lot more going on here.  There's some of the fast-rapping-over-a-trap-beat that you'd expect, of course, but then something like "Tenemos Que Hablar" that would only take a few tweaks to be a perfectly serviceable pop-punk song, or "Otra Noche en Miami," which has a powerful 80's synthpop backing vibe.  There's a lot going on here!

I am hobbled, of course, by my very limited knowledge of Spanish, so I don't understand a ton, or any, of the words, but I can say there were parts of this album that I genuinely enjoyed.  It'll be interesting to see where this album places the next time this list is revised in a few years.