So the Puerto Rican provocateur Bad Bunny has done it. He has sold out Queen’s Jubilee Park, a venue named for a monarch who presided over an empire now reduced to a footnote in the careers of global pop stars. History, it seems, is a process of relentless vulgarisation.
Where once the park might have echoed with the solemn strains of ‘God Save the Queen’, it now throbs with reggaeton beats and the adulation of 60,000 screaming fans. This is not a criticism. It is an observation on the speed of cultural decay.
The Victorians, who built the original structures on this site for the Great Exhibition, would be baffled that their temple to industry and progress now hosts a man whose lyrics celebrate hedonism and transgression. But then, the Victorians also suppressed their own desires. Today, we celebrate them.
Bad Bunny is merely the latest in a long line of artists who embody the spirit of their age: restless, irreverent, and utterly commercial. His music is a fusion of Latin rhythms and trap, a hybrid that mirrors the multicultural chaos of modern London. And yet, there is something nostalgic about this spectacle.
It reminds me of the Roman circuses, where the masses were distracted by bread and games. Here, the bread is overpriced stadium beer, and the games are a man in a leather harness gyrating to a beat that owes more to Jamaican dancehall than anything British. The sell-out status is a testament to the power of globalised pop culture.
It is also a reminder that we have lost any sense of the sacred. The park, named for a queen who embodied duty and restraint, is now a temple to Dionysian excess. But perhaps that is as it should be.
The Victorians are dead. The empire is gone. And Bad Bunny is the new emperor, crowned not by birthright but by streaming numbers.
Long may he reign.
