Ramtin Arablui

It was 2020, during the height of the pandemic, hence the mask he was wearing.

And it was just four years after his first big hit in Puerto Rico, Soy Peor.

We'll get back to that song.

The year Karina first met Bad Bunny, he was the most dreamed artist in the world.

He has a sort of paradoxical combination of shyness and charisma that I think is palpable in his mode of performance and engaging the public.

But what I remember is his willingness to think out loud in a way that was surprising to me for a figure of his fame.

She calls Bad Bunny a modern-day jíbaro, roughly translated, a modern-day Puerto Rican farmer.

Jíbaros actually play a mythic role in Puerto Rico in the same way that cowboys function in the western frontier of the United States.

Real, but also larger than life.

And Bad Bunny is a little bit of both.

A star who many people see as representing the essence of Puerto Rico, and also just a guy from the countryside.

His hometown is called Vegabaja.

Vega Baja is a small town that's still in driving distance of San Juan or like where you could maybe commute in if you had a job there.

You know, he's not from Monte Monte, Monte Adentro, as we would say, like the kind of dramatic central mountains of Puerto Rico where, you know, it can be super off the grid.

People still don't have water and lights.

Vega Baja is not like that, but it's distant enough that kind of Jibarito culture would be fundamentally like who he is.

Benito Antonio Martinez Ocasio, a.k.a.

Bad Bunny, was born on March 10, 1994.

To a school teacher and a truck driver.

He had what he's described as an extremely typical childhood, you know.