Back when Bad Bunny was pushing tracks on Soundcloud and Eladio Carrión was still a comedian on Vine (RIP to that app), the two had a chance encounter that changed both of their careers forever. It was the moment that brought them into each other’s lives not only as eventual collaborators (hello, “Kemba Walker“) but as champions of each other’s work. And it had a particularly major outcome for Benito: It got his music to Noah Assad — a.k.a his current manager and record label owner at Rimas Entertainment. All that, just from running into Eladio Carrión outside of school.
When Rolling Stone issued a feature on Bad Bunny’s savvy manager late last year, there was a brief mention of how “Assad came across Bad Bunny’s music through a friend in 2016.” Little did we know that friend was fellow Boricua trapero Eladio Carrión. According to a new interview between the Sauce Boyz rapper and Puerto Rican comedian and personality Chente Ydrach, it all happened one day in Puerto Rico when Eladio was on his way to enroll in college classes. He was giving it one more shot at becoming an “engineer, or something,” he says, before giving up on the whole university thing altogether. But then he ran into Benito.
Benito recognized the up-and-coming trapero and jokingly offered, “Don’t study here. Don’t [bother] paying for it. I wasted my time here.” Eladio didn’t take the hint right then and there (he admits he only ended up staying enrolled for another two weeks), but he did stick around to talk with Bad Bunny just long enough for the young Soundcloud star to plug his music.
“He showed me his song,” Eladio explains, “It was only on Soundcloud for maybe 30, 25 days,” yet it had a ton of views. Add that to the fact that when Eladio finally heard an early, self-produced version of Bad Bunny’s “Diles,” he really knew Benito was on to something. “This is the hardest song I’ve heard this year,” he remembers thinking.
So much so, the rapper — who at that point was already working with Rimas Entertainment’s Noah Assad — couldn’t let it go without showing the track to Noah himself. Once he got to the studio, he put his manager on to Bad Bunny. And well, the rest is history.
You can watch the full interview below.