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Up on the highest slopes of pop stardom, albums are designed as mega-mansions. Songs after songs are added, like the multiplying rooms of a Beverly Hills behemoth. Drake’s latest offering, For All the Dogs, is a case in point: it has 23 tracks, many of which you suspect the triple A-list rapper will never set foot in again. One features his Puerto Rican contemporary Bad Bunny, who has now surprise-released his own supersized album, Nadie Sabe Lo Que Va a Pasar Mañana, which has 22 tracks and lasts 81 minutes.
The cynical rationale for these bloated monsters is streaming figures: the more songs an album has, the more streams it can gain. For the demiurges of digital music, such considerations matter. Bad Bunny has been the most streamed artist on Spotify every year since 2020, a Latin American challenger to the Anglosphere supremacy of Drake, Taylor Swift, Ed Sheeran et al. But big albums have another function too. Like a big house, they’re status symbols, a sign of blockbuster heft.
Nadie Sabe Lo Que Va a Pasar Mañana (“no one knows what’s going to happen tomorrow”) opens with Bad Bunny, aka Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio, brooding about being almost 30 and “the biggest star in the whole world”, delivered in Spanish, as almost all his lyrics are. His dilemma of where to go having reached the top is entirely solipsistic. Only he, in the echoing palace of his album, can answer it.
The music takes us back in time, away from the reggaeton that made him a superstar towards his origins in Latin trap. There’s an inventive use of a Charles Aznavour sample about youth in “Monaco” and guest rapper Young Miko makes a scene-stealing cameo in “Fina”. Bad Bunny’s low voice has a mesmerising singsong flow. But the world being described not only grows monotonous, it’s also obnoxious.
The singer has been lionised as a progressive figure in a macho musical culture for his bold fashion choices and condemnation of homophobia. But sexism, bordering on misogyny, runs through the album. Female bodies pile up in the songs, literally so in some of the more outré sexual scenarios, including liaisons in high-end brothels, sports cars, private jets and a Gucci fitting room.
This might be justified as an act of characterisation, as with the jaded pleasure-seeker played in songs by The Weeknd, but it’s a pretty thin example of it. And the violently pornographic language used by two guest Latin trap rappers — Bryant Myers and Luar La L — is actively objectionable. They inhabit the murky basement of Bad Bunny’s mega-mansion of an album. Visitor, beware.
★★☆☆☆
‘Nadie Sabe Lo Que Va a Pasar Mañana’ is released by Rimas