Bad Bunny’s latest album, “Un Verano Sin Ti” came out last Friday and I didn’t plan to write about it, but I had a general feeling about its reviews that I couldn’t put into words. Then it clicked when I was reading this book of James Baldwin’s uncollected writings. There was a passage about the difficulty Black actors faced when performing for white audiences because such audiences weren’t familiar with Black life.
Baldwin wrote:
“The characters played by white actors, however untruthful they may essentially be, do depend on the accumulation of small, very carefully observed detail….But the characters played by Negro actors do not have even this advantage. White people do not know enough about Negro life to know which details to look for, or how to interpret such details as may have been forced on their attention.”
Most of the album’s reviews I’ve read lacked insight into the aspects of it that made the album truly stand out and showed that it was, as a Boricua told me, “a love letter to the island.”
I know they miss these aspects because I missed most too until the Twitter algorithm picked up on my interest in the album and began giving me tweets from people on the island talking about the colloquialisms and Puerto Rico-specific qualities of the album.
Bad Bunny told the New York Times that he “could have done a track with, who knows, Miley Cyrus or Katy Perry,”, referring to his first 2020 album, “YHLQMDLG.” “But no, I was making ‘Safaera’ with Ñengo Flow and Jowell y Randy. And I was putting the whole world onto underground from Puerto Rico, you know? That makes me feel proud of what I represent.”
Bad Bunny’s music is often an ode to Puerto Rico. His masterful skill might be making the specific into the universal, even crossing language barriers. While the album can be praised or reviewed without insight into all these qualities we’re not even aware of, I keep debating whether someone needs to have this specific insight to provide a just review.
I can’t say that people shouldn’t be allowed to review an album unless they know everything about what influenced it. Music and music journalism don’t need any more gatekeepers in that way. But we have to acknowledge that anything written about art like this album will be incomplete without such insight, and that lack of knowledge also makes any consumption of the art lacking, doing a disservice to the artist that produced it.
I remember when Childish Gambino’s “This Is America” won the 2019 Grammy for Record of the Year and Spanish speakers on Twitter grumbled about either never having heard the song or not seeing it as worthy of the award. Yet, the song and accompanying music video were specifically made for a U.S. audience that witnessed the racial struggles facing the country at that point in time.
Even if one disagreed with the song winning the award, most people in the U.S. could understand the reasoning why it won. But for those outside the U.S., it seems like a song that, purely on music and lyrics, didn’t merit the award, especially since it was not a popular song in the Spanish-speaking world.
This is what I believe Baldwin was getting at in that passage. When we don’t understand the details to look for in a performance, we effectively are viewing an incomplete performance that makes us diminish and fail to understand the full quality of the performer. That’s what many reviews of this album do for Bad Bunny. Yes, they’re still overly positive and his stature will only get bigger, if that’s even possible. But the true quality of the album can’t be appreciated unless we understand what to look for.
STILL, the reason I struggle to say we need this insight is because that is the exact argument people who understand music theory and have a trained musical background say when they gatekeep music. In such instances, my response is that music can still be enjoyed even if we miss the full range of skills of a performer. What I believe makes cases like Bad Bunny’s album different is that it’s based on culture instead of a training often rooted in privilege.
I will never tell someone they can’t enjoy Bad Bunny because they don’t understand him fully (that would disqualify me from enjoying his music as well) but I do have to note that there is something missing when we write reviews without a deeper understanding of the artist’s background and efforts, especially those rooted in race or culture. This is a great album that I’ve been listening to on repeat for a full week now, and I love unexpectedly hearing it blasting from cars or restaurants. I look forward to getting even more acquainted with this album this summer, even if I won’t fully understand every single aspect of it.