If you're young, Latino and slightly prone to melodramatics, you might be the kind of person who stays up for a midnight Bad Bunny album release.
In the streaming age, the now-familiar "surprise" Bad Bunny album drop has become an online rite of passage for his global fan base, which seems to grow exponentially with every record. With the May 6 release of "Un Verano Sin Ti," or "A Summer Without You," fans took to their phones and computers to communally revel in its 23 songs. A procession of Puerto Rican nostalgia, each track is a time capsule stowing memories of epic seaside parties and gone-but-not-forgotten flings, touched with a residual island saudade. "Bad Bunny will have you missing somebody who never existed," remarked fans on social media, who dressed their timelines with the most noteworthy lyrics and recorded themselves grooving along to their favorite tracks.
Even if you don't personally fit the aforementioned character sketch of a Bad Bunny fan, it's getting harder to circumvent the fanfare that surrounds the 27-year-old singer-MC, online and otherwise. In the days before he dropped "Un Verano," he was modeling custom Burberry at the Met Gala, dishing with Whoopi Goldberg on "The View" and promoting his lead role in the upcoming movie "El Muerto," in which he will play the first Latino superhero to lead a live-action Marvel film.
