Since at least the 11th century in Europe, when troubadour musicians crisscrossed the continent singing songs of love and chivalry, one thing has remained fairly consistent: The artist travels; the audience stays put. Of course, there have been exceptions, in which fans made pilgrimages to see their favorite musicians live. Thousands descended on Woodstock in 1969, and thousands more still attend Coachella and other festivals; surging numbers of people have also in recent years been participating in “concert tourism”—hopping flights to catch touring artists such as Taylor Swift in other cities, where tickets might be cheaper.
The Puerto Rican artist Bad Bunny’s residency in San Juan, titled “No me quiero ir de aquí” (“I don’t want to leave here”), though, felt like a fresh proposition: not a tour or festival, but an intentional invitation for fans to come directly to his doorstep for repeated performances in the same place. Bad Bunny plans to tour his latest album, Debí Tirar Más Fotos, starting later this year. (He’s notably skipping any concert dates in the continental United States, in part because of his worry that, with a high number of Latinos expected at his shows, “ICE could be outside,” as he put it in one interview.) But first, he decided to camp out at the El Choli arena in Puerto Rico for 10 weeks this summer, performing tracks from across his entire repertoire. Droves of fans visited Puerto Rico for the shows. Their decision to travel to the island feels different from, say, choosing to see Taylor Swift in Amsterdam or Bruno Mars on the Vegas Strip—choices that might be more about the concert itself than the location.
Combining a vacation and a Bad Bunny concert was an enticing opportunity for many devotees, who hoped to soak up the island that’s so central to his artistic identity. When I visited San Juan to see one of the shows last month, I spoke with attendees who’d flown in from locations such as Florida, New Jersey, and Ohio, as well as from other countries such as Colombia. I heard a common sentiment—that watching a musician in his own element, as he wanted them to, sounded like a one-of-a-kind escapade.
Call it a new brand of concert tourism: a hyper-immersive live-music experience on an artist’s home turf, akin to a pop-up shop on steroids. During the residency, fans could take pictures where Bad Bunny bagged groceries before finding fame. They could swim in the beaches he sings about, see the foliage from his latest album cover in full bloom, and go to a quasi-museum of Bad Bunny paraphernalia at a San Juan mall, replete with behind-the-scenes lore and exorbitantly priced merch.
Yet Bad Bunny’s decision to host his shows in San Juan also had an uneasy layer of irony baked into it. By dubbing the event “I don’t want to leave,” he also necessarily meant You all have to come here. This travel prerequisite entails complexity for a place like Puerto Rico, which is already struggling with water shortages, the aftermath of Hurricane Erin, and rising housing prices due in part to the development of luxury rentals for tourists. (Currently, tourism reportedly accounts for about 2 percent of Puerto Rico’s GDP, and real estate and rentals are the second-largest contributor to Puerto Rico’s economy, at 19 percent.) Puerto Rico is just one of many places—among them Hawaii, Portugal, and the Dominican Republic—that are caught in a tourism trade-off: weighing the economic benefits and jobs that the industry can bring against its possible threats to cultural preservation, the environment, and housing markets, among other concerns.
Bad Bunny is clearly aware of this tension. In his music, he often sings about tourism with a compassionate but critical eye, as in the song “Turista,” in which he compares a lover to a vacationer who “only saw the best of me, and not how I was suffering.” And although his residency drew in roughly 600,000 people from outside of Puerto Rico this summer, he reserved the first three weeks of shows exclusively for Puerto Rico residents. Concertgoers from outside the island could only attend later. (This week, he also announced a surprise final performance for tonight; only fans living in Puerto Rico can go in-person, although it will also be livestreamed worldwide.) That the residency offered a cultural getaway as an add-on experience for his fandom, however, reveals the trickiness of combining art with tourism.
The show I attended began when a torrential downpour ended. I arrived at El Choli early. People adjusted their pava hats and clip-on flor de maga flowers, Puerto Rican symbols that made up the evening’s implicit dress code. On the stage screens, a slideshow of facts about Puerto Rican history played—tidbits about Taíno historical figures like Agüeybaná and reminders of the island’s independence movement. The arena was thick with a sense of local pride; one writer for the Puerto Rican newspaper El Vocero described Bad Bunny’s show as the work of a modern-day saint, exorcising from the Puerto Rican collective body the demons of “cynicism, fear of the future, cultural apathy, and the toxic idea that what’s ours, what’s Puerto Rican, is less valuable.”
Puerto Ricans have had plenty of reasons to feel cynical in recent years. Hurricane María devastated the island in 2017, killing nearly 3,000 people there, and eight years later, some locals are still recovering. As a U.S. territory, the island lacks economic sovereignty. The island’s budget is managed by an unelected board that many Puerto Ricans have nicknamed “La Junta,” made up of seven people appointed and fired by the U.S. president at will. In 2023, almost 42 percent of Puerto Ricans lived below the federal poverty line. And, as Bad Bunny himself has often noted, a major concern for many Puerto Ricans is gentrification, fueled by tax incentives and the island’s reputation as a cryptocurrency haven that prioritizes foreign investors over locals. As wealthy individuals, including celebrities such as Logan Paul, move to the island or buy up properties to develop into Airbnbs, housing prices have soared; a family member of mine who lives in the region of Isabela told me that many of his Puerto Rican neighbors have relocated, their homes sold to mainland Americans.
Against this backdrop, numerous stories have interpreted Bad Bunny’s residency as a salve for Puerto Rico’s wounds, noting that the shows were expected to inject $250 million into the island’s economy. Yet one Puerto Rican couple from San Juan that I spoke with at the concert, Garvin Sierra and Odalis Gómez, were skeptical that this spending would be anything more than a temporary boon. The concerts would create an economic boost this summer, they conceded, but “this will later go away, and a void will return,” Sierra told me. Sierra also worried that the residency might merely encourage more people to move to the island, as some concertgoers have mused about doing in interviews. That could feed into Puerto Rico’s existing housing crisis, Sierra argued—especially if the current tax incentives remain.
The residency’s reliance on tourism poses more obvious potential issues. Any financial boom achieved through tourism could come with a caveat: One United Nations site reports that only about 20 percent of all tourism spending in the Caribbean actually stays in the region. Through a process known as “tourism leakage,” travelers’ dollars end up benefiting foreign-owned businesses such as airlines, short-term-rental owners, and major hotel chains more than locals. Many concertgoers also relied on Airbnbs, which sat awkwardly with the themes of Bad Bunny’s latest album: In his music video for “Turista,” for instance, the artist cleans up after a messy group of backpackers in what’s ostensibly a vacation rental. Of course, fans aren’t to blame for tourism’s potential drawbacks based on where they choose to sleep. (Full disclosure: I was able to stay at a relative’s apartment in San Juan for the concert, but had this option not been available, I likely would have stayed at a rental or hotel too.) Any critique of tourism might be better served by focusing on government policies rather than individual travelers. As Bad Bunny sings of a vacationer who’s turned a blind eye to the island’s troubles: “It wasn’t your place to heal them / You came to have a good time / And we had a good time.”
Meanwhile, at the concert, corporate sponsors also tried to get in on the Bad Bunny tourism economy, by seeming to Puerto Rico–fy themselves: T-Mobile handed out bandanas inscribed with moka pots, roosters, and a big pink T. A Wendy’s kiosk sold a Puerto Rican tripleta sandwich. In the El Choli bathrooms, Method, the self-proclaimed “exclusive body wash and hand wash sponsor” of the residency, dispensed “isla edition” soaps smelling of passionfruit and hibiscus. Some of this corporate funding does seem to be redirected to locals; Wendy’s, for one, is donating some profits to a Puerto Rican education program. Yet the way these big brands packaged and sold Puerto Rican food, music, and symbols carried with it a slightly empty, disingenuous air—the nuances of Caribbean culture distilled into a marketable aesthetic. (Bad Bunny’s show isn’t alone in this; cultural commodification is, to an extent, an inevitable part of any major concert, given steep costs and the blank-slate constraints of a stage. Beyoncé’s “Cowboy Carter” tour didn’t present a perfectly layered depiction of Texas, for example; its production design boiled southern life down to some touchstones—whiskey, chaps, a cowboy hat.)
That’s not to say that the concert felt hollow. It was an artistic achievement, rooted in cultural reclamation and appreciation—a more than three-hour romp through reggaeton, plena, and salsa rhythms. The set sentimentally evoked the Puerto Rican countryside in miniature: a verdant mountaintop, a flamboyán tree, a flat-roofed pink house. Throughout the residency, Bad Bunny gave other Puerto Rican artists their flowers, sharing the stage with performers such as the early-aughts reggaeton diva Ivy Queen and the hand-drum-pounding quartet Los Pleneros de la Cresta. The audience at the show I went to spanned generations: In the row in front of me, 20-somethings grinded against each other during Bad Bunny’s perreo numbers; to my side, a couple in their 70s danced salsa. Lights flashed and voices screamed along with “La Mudanza”: “Yo soy de P-fucking-R!” “It has united the culture and the country in many ways,” Sierra told me. “Right now, everyone feels very Boricua.”
Still, as a column in El Vocero put it, “there’s a difference between culture as celebration and culture as transformation.” Bad Bunny may sing about the island’s trials, but, the writer Pedro Blanco argued, “the real question isn’t what Benito does with his platform” (Bad Bunny’s real name is Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio); it’s “what we do with the energy that his music and spectacle generates.”
In the meantime, waves of fans continued to pour into San Juan’s airport as the summer waned. When I stepped out of El Choli after the show I attended, I could already see the next plane slicing through a cloudy sky, ready to deliver a fresh batch of admirers to Bad Bunny’s beloved Puerto Rico.
Great Job Valerie Trapp & the Team @ The Atlantic Source link for sharing this story.
