Bad Bunny’s new album is musically and lyrically more somber than his previous work. More apocalyptic in its themes. Full of repentance. The recent disc, Nadie sabe lo que va a pasar mañana (2023), marks a contrast with the sex and sun of the previous Un verano sin ti (2022). Nadie sabe begins with a dazzling, symphonic intro, and then re-introduces the singer with the syllable most characteristic of his voice: ¡Ey!
This Ey is practically Bad Bunny’s registered trademark. A guiding thread, the Ey holds together the singer’s career and, perhaps, it even holds together our fractured world. At least, as Bad Bunny has said, he represents a “new religion.” And in a sense, the Ey is like the repetition of a mystical mantra. Its resonance is cosmic. It speaks to the crises of our times, and our capacity for joy and human even admits terror and suffering.
As innocent as the Ey may sometimes seem, it is the studied and operatic performance of a diva. With the Ey Bad Bunny is like a great soprano who begs her public for indulgence with the excuse that she has a sore throat. The Ey is a seductive game—inviting our sympathy, demanding our attention, pushing us away, imploring our forgiveness (though this is already given to the great prima dona).
The Ey, austere but paradoxically excessive, is polysemic, unrelenting. Sometimes it is excited and happy, sometimes enunciated with sorrow. In Nadie sabe, it is biblically prophetic, a cry in the desert, as in:
Pero yo no, yo les deseo buena suerte, sí, ajá
Ey, la gente tiene que dejar de ser tan estúpida y pensar
Here—especially in the “sí, ajá” and the Ey—the voice has almost withdrawn from communication, to the grunts of desperation.
Along with the Ey, the voice of Bad Bunny is marked by gasps and, strangest of all, by ingressive sounds. These are sounds made with the airstream flowing in, rather than through exhalation.
In some world languages, ingressive sounds are used to form words (like in Icelandic and several indigenous American languages). But in Spanish, ingressive sounds never form words. Very rare in Spanish, such sounds give Bad Bunny’s voice a unique texture.
These sounds are paralinguistic, non-lexical elements that do not necessarily carry meaning. Then, these sounds are not accessible to semantic interpretation. They cannot be read. And if interpretation is understood as penetrating into a word in order to find its meaning, then the voice of Bad Bunny is a macho performance that resists penetration.
Or, maybe the Ey is vulnerable. These sounds are beyond language, or after language: the voice as sculpture, as tongue. The voice as contact between mouth and ear. The voice as body, susceptible to wounding, to gasping with surprise or horror or delight.
In various instances, Bad Bunny’s moans are a glottal ingressive. This is a sound produced by pushing the glottis down, so that air pressure is greater outside of the body than inside. When the glottis is opened, the pressure differential forces air into the body. In this way, Bad Bunny’s voice expresses a corporeal receptivity to the outside world, an openness to penetration and communion.
As it turns out, the song “Ojitos Lindos” borrows from the great love poetry of Dante. The line by Bad Bunny “Iba por mi camino y me perdí,” comes from the opening verses of the Infierna, just as the line “mi mirada cambió cuando tus ojos vi” borrows from the transformative vision of the eyes of Beatrice in La Vita nuova. At the end of the Paraiso, Beatrice announces a vision of sin as redemptive—the medieval doctrine of the felix culpa—just as Bad Bunny proposes “Con tu alma es la que yo conecto / Tranquila, no tiene que ser perfecto, no / Aquí no existe el pecado / Y equivocarse es bonito.”
Almost theological in its aesthetics, the Ey tenderly brutalizes each song, like the Fall brings Salvation, as the wound of Christ unfolds into the Nietzschean abyss of post-modernity through cries that voluptuously mix medieval love poetry with social networks. For example, in Bad Bunny’s collaboration with Grupo Frontera in a cumbia norteña:
¡Ey! Hace tiempo no pensaba en ti
Borracho, a tu Insta me metí
Baby, ya yo sé que a ti te va bien
Que, de mí, tú no quieres saber, ey, ey
Viviendo en un infierno que yo mismo incendié
Jugando contigo como si fuese el diez
Siento que ya no estoy en tu corazón
Ahora estoy en tus piesRogándote
En el tequila ahogándome
The Ey, from the glotis, is from drowning in the modern world, as the throat is full yet with a thirst to be filled more, a self pathetically self-pitying, so that the Ey still connotes the pleasure of orgasm, but like an inverse ejaculation, the bodily expression of a new order of impenetrable masculinity that chokes on its own phallus, afraid of the apocalypse but begging for the Final Judgment to come.
A.W. Strouse, Ph.D., is the author of Form and Foreskin: Medieval Narratives of Circumcision (Fordham University Press) and Gender Trouble Couplets (punctum). Strouse is currently writing a book about the LBGTQ+ history of Mexico City’s subway system. www.awstrouse.com @putotitlan
Check out A.W. Strouse’s essay on Mother Cabrini and immigration and “Papal Encyclicals for Gentrifiers” from the zine. And more more on Bad Bunny, check out our pieces on Bad Bunny as postmodern prophet, Bad Bunny and consumerism, review of YHLQMDLG, and our podcast on Bad Bunny and religion.
Please consider signing up for a paid subscription to this page for more riveting content. If you’re new to Cracks in Pomo, check out the About page or read up on our Essentials. Also check out our podcast on Spotify, Apple, and YouTube and follow us on Instagram and Twitter.
MASA tortilla chips by Ancient Crunch is offering our followers 10% off their order with the promo code CRACKSINPOSTMODERNITY. Click here to redeem.
photos taken in the West Village.