… That One Day Ends: Home & A Review of Bad Bunny’s ‘BAILE INoLVIDABLE’

To Yearn:

It is to wish you were there – somewhere, or wish you were with or without – something. Or even someone.

And to convey all of which in a song is perhaps assumed to be much easier of a task than it actually is. For the attempt, as well as the ambition to pursue it, is in fact easy to slip into one’s own size; natural, even.

But to perfect yearning, in any interpretation, is an art. 

Even more so, to meld your own yearning for something so individual as an artist into something that could be heard and yearned for by others as something universal? It is a mouthful, but dare it be said that it is absolutely revolutionary. 

And in taking in the artist themselves, it is no surprise that he is able to, being that Benito Antonio Martinez Ocasio – otherwise famously known as Bad Bunny – has such things as an innate revolution, and every bit and raw form of yearning running through his veins, and spilling out from his being in the form of an endless song that maintains throughout his tapestry of an album, ‘DeBi TiRaR MaS FOToS’, an equal sense of missing home and the absolution of the guilt that comes with it.

For one must never be ashamed to miss home. Not when home itself – and all that it once contained – is so hard and laborious to carry around with you, in a place and setting that is only where you live, and yet you wish to thrive in as you once did. 

Romantics – And one being alive and well:

Now, the entirety of the album is superb. Of that, there shall be no question.

But if we are to discuss home, and the art form of making yearning for it insatiably beautiful, one would surprisingly be led to a specific track that is not the namesake of the album itself.

Rather, it is the one that is – for no unknown reason at all – making the rounds in an immortalizing relevancy on social media, and on listening platforms everywhere since the declaration of his tour this past summer: ‘BAILE INoLVIDABLE’. 

Cultural, tropical, oceanic, and tragic like an island that would sooner be consumed by the sea that crowns it than be robbed of its heart and soul. All of the latter become so easily audible in so much as the first few seconds of the track itself. Especially in the first four; literally. Between 0:00 and 0:04, the slightest semblance of a synthesized whisper omits by itself just long enough for one tuned higher to hear what direction it is going in, and from thence joyously joins it.

Not just to a writer and ardent listener’s mind, but to anyone who they themselves practice the art of yearning something they no longer have, it harkens the act of someone singing a particular nostalgic tune to themselves, and someone not too far away from them – standing in lonesome ad in memories – hearing it, and immediately singing it back so that they may hear. 

So that they who started it may hear that they miss it, too. It is whatever it is that binds them to this tune: home. 

And such is a romantic gesture. And more so, in many ways. 

Romance itself, in this current climate, is so easily saturated in only one interpretation of itself, the one having to do with sensuality and coupling. 

Then along came Bad Bunny, who reintroduces another branch of its definition that is so classic, so old-school, and so heartbreakingly shared as a human experience. He, and what he yearns for in this particular track, is something that he is not only so painfully without, but there is an essence in that he had to leave it, thus having as a nostalgic foundation of both brass and drums an all-encompassing sadness that is physically unseen because of its medium, and technically without basis because of its geography…

Yet it is all so heavily felt.

He does not speak of a person – he wails to a place. One that he very well can go back to and see for himself if he so chooses; dip his hands into its loving, embracing waters that hug the shore, and cup a palmful of its white sand to keep. Puerto Rico is still there, after all. And by all means, he has both the budget and the luxury to go at any time he likes. 

But in the end, it is no longer whereupon, upon the completion of the day, he goes back and closes the door behind him, and thenceforth, once further treading, lays down and rests his head. 

And if, by the romantic standards that Bad Bunny expertly uses for better interpretation, we are to personify this feeling, he, as well as we who relate, can no longer lie down and have lying beside us the love we sleep so soundly alongside. They are no longer a simple armful away from being grabbed fervently by the waist and dancing the night away with. 

In ‘BAILE INoLVIDABLE’, where we are now is where we simply reside, and nothing more.

It shall never be where we have loved.

And ultimately, it shall never be home.

Conclusion:

All of the above, on our worst days for some, has the power to destroy us, so if not for music, missing what resembles the definition of what we love being seen, even from far away, but still so emphatically out of reach.

And so, in not letting it, Bad Bunny does what he has often proven he does best, and that is make home out of what it itself gave him – its sound. More so, its resonance. 

One that, mind you, can summon tears from those who may not have any ties to the island he yearns for with every ounce of his being. Nevertheless, they shed easily, and flow freely at the sound of the track’s intro, its chorus, and its revving up towards an inevitable end that only makes you pause it for but an instant, before rewinding it to play it back again.

For as long as the song plays, you are home.

Even if it is just for the 6 minutes and 7 seconds that it consists of. 

All the better to carry, and to revisit. Again and again. 

As if, maybe, one day it may feel as if we never left.