“The bigger he gets, the more local he seems.” The pervasive pop of Bad Bunny. Plus:

Kelefa Sanneh 
A staff writer who covers music, culture, and politics.

The most exciting music tour of the year was not a tour at all, but a residency. For thirty nights this summer, Bad Bunny held court in his native Puerto Rico, performing for nearly twenty thousand people per show at the José Miguel Agrelot Coliseum, the island’s largest indoor venue. During the final show, this past Sunday, the special guests included Travis Scott, the hip-hop star, who in just about any other room would have been the main attraction. Part of what’s so astonishing about Bad Bunny is the way he has bent the laws of popular music around him. He is a Spanish-language performer who has become a mainstream star in the United States, and far beyond. In August, his song “DtMF” was the first track of the year to reach a billion Spotify streams. He is arguably the defining musician of this era, and certainly one of the most popular.

I saw the show on a rainy night in August, surrounded by locals and visitors, all of whom seemed to know all the lyrics, whether or not they spoke the language. In 2016, when Bad Bunny first emerged, he was identified with a style known as Latin trap, a woozy and thudding hybrid that owes something to American hip-hop. But his voice is tuneful and unexpectedly solemn, which provides a pleasing contrast with the infectious rhythms he loves. This year, Bad Bunny released “DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS” (“I Should Have Taken More Photos”), which is full of tracks that gesture back to salsa and other more traditional Puerto Rican sounds. The show was packed with local gestures and references, and it gained some of its power from the fact that it was site-specific: if you wanted to see it, you had to travel—by Tren Urbano, by car, or by airplane—to an arena in San Juan.

On Monday, Bad Bunny made his residency a bit less exclusive: he announced one more show, this Saturday night, to be streamed live on Prime Video and Twitch. In November, he plans to embark on a world tour, with dates scheduled in Europe and the Americas, but not in the United States. (He recently suggested that he was worried that if he played a show on the U.S. mainland, “fucking ICE could be outside.”) These days, it hardly seems to matter where he plays: Bad Bunny’s music is everywhere, and he knows that his fans will find him, wherever he is.

Tyler Robinson’s message, in killing Charlie Kirk, remains muddled, but the alleged shooter seems to have been steeped in the internet culture that values nihilistic in-jokes. Kirk, too, was someone who understood the power of that culture, using viral sound bites and incendiary podcast monologues to wield it. “The self-perpetuating cycle of online radicalization continues unbroken,” Kyle Chayka writes, “with harrowing consequences for all sides of the political spectrum.”Read the story »

Read: In Marisa Meltzer’s “It Girl,” Jane Birkin—who was an early icon of street style—emerges as a glamorous, self-interrogating personality.

Watch: “The Whole Shootin’ Match,” directed by Eagle Pennell, is the “mood-rich” movie from 1978 that inspired Robert Redford to found the Sundance Institute.

Listen: “Am I the Drama?,” Cardi B’s new album, is out on Friday. Will it contain the same wisdom, openheartedness, and bombastic excellence as “Invasion of Privacy”?

P.S. Hilaria Baldwin, the yoga instructor turned reality-TV star, made her “Dancing with the Stars” début last night. Seems like a strong opportunity for more of that trademark “forced merriment,” as Naomi Fry has put it. 💃

Hannah Jocelyn contributed to today’s edition.