Bad Bunny Doesn’t Regret Anything About ‘El Apagon’
Bad Bunny (Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio) appeared on the cover of Time in March 2023. In the interview, he discussed “El Apagon,” perhaps his most political song. He made a comment about how he doesn’t feel as strongly now about one of the lines he wrote for the song. The internet reacted in a big way. Recently, the rapper has spoken out about the quotes that got taken out of context.
What Bad Bunny said in the Time interview
Martínez has always sung about Puerto Rican identity and Caribbean culture. In “El Apagon,” or “The Blackout,” the artist references the power outages that have been going on in Puerto Rico since Hurricane Maria. He also touches on the gentrification and displacement that happens on the island.
When he spoke to Time, he said he wrote the line: “Ahora todos quieren ser Latino, pero les falta sazon” (“Now everyone wants to be Latino, but they’re missing flavor”) because he felt frustrated that some artists seem to capitalize on their Latino identity only when it’s convenient for them. But then he said in the interview: “Now that feeling has passed me. It’s not like I feel like that right now.”
The quotes appeared all over the internet and social media with people voicing their disappointment in the rapper. At the same time, photos of Martínez and Kendall Jenner started popping up, and people had their opinions about that, too.
Bad Bunny’s response
At Coachella, Martínez said: “You won’t get to know the real me through a video on Instagram, an interview, or a TikTok. If you really want to get to know me, I invite you to my home,” which seemed to be a response to the recent opinions swirling around about the rapper online.
In a recent interview with Rolling Stone, Bad Bunny was hesitant to touch on his Time interview for fear that his comments would get misconstrued again.
“It’s a delicate issue,” he said. “That interview was taken out of context, so I’d hate for the same thing to happen with this one. But I’ll try to explain it: What I said was, like, people are funny — it’s funny and also frustrating to see how people really think they know about the lives of celebrities, of what they think, of what they do day to day. They think they know the story of your life, your interior thoughts, your romantic life, but, in reality, they don’t know at all.”
The rapper was confused to see the comments being made about his Time interview.
“When I saw [people saying] that I had regretted writing ‘El Apagon,’ it shocked me, like when did I ever say that in the interview? I would never say that in my f***ing life,” he said.
What Bad Bunny was accused of saying goes against everything “El Apagon” is about.
“It was a whole journey, like the process that began with something patriotic, and then the party and the messing around, and later the sentimental part, the conscience in it,” he said. “I always say that’s the life of people in Puerto Rico: We’re proud of being Puerto Rican, we love to celebrate and act like nothing matters, and then we clash against a reality that is often very painful.”
