Ramtin Arablui

I'm already accustomed to having my head in the clouds.

And to me, that combines in a really beautiful way some of the kind of nihilism or hopelessness I was talking about before with a kind of spiritual commitment to dreaming.

We get to see it really come through as a protest song in his very first appearance on American television, which is in 2018, almost exactly a year after Hurricane Maria.

Roughly two weeks after President Trump claimed he didn't believe thousands died in Puerto Rico due to Hurricane Maria.

He appears on The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon.

It's the first time that I think I heard Benito speak in English.

And he addresses President Trump directly in national television.

And in the background, we have this imagery of like the force of Hurricane Maria and devastation.

And then we get to these like images of like joy and happiness.

And I think that this really shows the kind of messaging that he's always been about, which is the highs and the lows.

Like Puerto Rico is beautiful and wonderful and full of pride and full of culture.

And also it's really messed up.

While Soy Peor had captured the mood of Puerto Rico by mere coincidence, Estamos Bien was catchy and intentional.

It was very organically taken up as an anthem.

It was everywhere.

I remember when it came out, it was absolutely everywhere.

Bad Bunny was growing as an artist.

And at the same time, he was singing and talking about what he and other Puerto Ricans his age were seeing and feeling.

Benito is the product of the crisis generation, which is a concept that I take from a colleague at the University of Puerto Rico, Mayra Vélez Serrano, in which she argues that for the past two generations, the only thing that these people have known growing up is crisis.

And as Bad Bunny's career continued to take off, topping the charts with Cardi B and J Balvin on I Like It, the crises kept coming for Puerto Rico.