Buena Vida Lyrics in English by Natti Natasha, Daddy Yankee
Buena Vida sounds like a party song, and then you actually read the lyrics. Natti Natasha and Daddy Yankee are playing drug bosses here, bragging about an empire that runs on the sky, the ground and everything in between.
Natti opens with planes and trains: "Arriba de las nubes va un avión con mi merca" (above the clouds goes a plane with my merchandise) and "Debajo de la tierra corre un tren con mi merca" (under the ground runs a train with my merchandise). Merca is short for mercancía (goods), and here it is slang for drugs. So when she sings "Del cielo cae mi nieve" (my snow falls from the sky), the snow is not weather. It is cocaine.
The chorus is the hook you will be singing: "Buena vida, me quiero dar buena vida, aunque me cueste la vida" (good life, I want to give myself a good life, even if it costs me my life). Darse buena vida means to treat yourself to the good life, and the play on vida twice in one line is the whole point: luxury now, the price later.
Daddy Yankee's verse is blunt. He is a quilero, someone who moves drugs by the kilo, and he says "Mi nómina está en los políticos y la policía" (my payroll includes the politicians and the police). Then come mansions, boats, planes and mariachis, and a closing line that is surprisingly bleak: "Muere uno pero nacen cien al año" (one dies but a hundred are born every year). It is a song about the fantasy, with the cost written right into the chorus.
