Bad Bunny ❤️ PR

Puerto Rico spent New Year’s Eve in darkness. On December 31, the archipelago’s notoriously unreliable power grid broke down, cutting off electricity to 1.2 million residents—or nearly 90 percent of the clients that rely on the reviled Canadian-American company Luma Energy to light and charge their lives. At midnight, most of the island was making do with candles and starlight. 

Such outages are nothing new to Puerto Rico. The grid has been in woeful disrepair since Hurricane María in 2017, owing largely to U.S. government mismanagement and the feckless vagaries of privatization. It was around the same time that Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio, a onetime grocery bagger with a very good SoundCloud account, began earning wider acclaim as the people’s hero Bad Bunny. He was not just a voice representing a young generation of Puerto Ricans who’d become more galvanized by the circumstances of colonization, but a man on the ground who began his illustrious career by providing generators to his neighborhood in Vega Baja, and capturing the collective melancholy and resilience in songs like 2018’s dreamy “Estamos Bien” and 2022’s bold “El Apagón.” 

Debí Tirar Más Fotos, Bad Bunny’s sixth and most comprehensively strident album about his home, arrived just a week after the New Year’s blackout (on Víspera de Reyes, no less). Its release also came just a few days after a drunk white woman from Missouri allegedly set fire to a bar in the touristy town of Cabo Rojo, on Puerto Rico’s southwest coast, leveling three businesses. These incidents throw some of the treacherous circumstances underpinning Debí Tirar Más Fotos into sharp context. Whereas Conejo’s more recent work—and global superstardom—led some to speculate that he had put aside his anticolonial megaphone in the face of more widespread (Anglo) acclaim, this album makes no bones about where he stands: in total devotion to his motherland. 

Debí Tirar Más Fotos is a wise, purposeful, and textured love letter to Puerto Rico’s indigenous and homegrown musical styles as well as a direct treatise for its cultural and environmental preservation. Rich with live instrumentation from bands both traditional and experimental, and percussion that beats with the rhythm of the coquís, the record is a powerful statement against the predatory transformation of Bad Bunny’s Borinquen, and a fully realized artistic message that Puerto Rico’s history will defiantly inform its future. As if to underscore all that, on YouTube, each song is accompanied by a written-out history lesson—about the 1898 U.S. invasion, for instance, or the current economic crisis—which Bad Bunny developed alongside University of Wisconsin professor Jorell Meléndez-Badillo. The effect is a supplementary curriculum that furthers the star’s mass teach-in on Puerto Rican music at Coachella in 2023.

If you were gazing upon the surface, you might be inclined to think this album is mostly about lost love: The emo-sounding meta-narrative in the regally synthed reggatón tracks “Kloufrens” and “Ketu Tecré,” and the twinkling plena standout “Dtmf,” might inspire fan speculation about his former paramours Gabriela Berlingeri and Kendall Jenner. (And perhaps these songs are that, too; it’s a real gas—and maybe fan service—when he sings about the woman who colonized him on “Kloufrens.”) But its foundations in salsa, plena, bomba, música típica, and other culturally lionesque genres make it clear that this is an album-length metaphor about Puerto Rico itself. The most important metatext is the way this record realizes a tug-of-war between the dazzlement of international fame and the pull of returning home. On “Café con Ron,” a transcendent take on plena with the Puerto Rican quartet Los Pleneros de la Cresta, Benito is woozy, drunk, stumbling across the mountainside and ready to rumble; by “Pitorro de Coco,” he puts a subwoofer-jangling take on música jíbara, the sound of the rural poor and working class, as he cries into his rum on Christmas. In the end, he can’t help but come back home.

Bad Bunny’s vision includes the diaspora, too. The album opens with “Nuevayol,” a salsa homage to NYC—and more specifically, Toñita’s Caribbean Social Club in Los Sures de Williamsburg, Brooklyn, the last standing Puerto Rican social club in an infamously gentrified neighborhood whose Latine population has declined over the last 20 years. (His cross-promotion with Google Maps dropped coordinates at proprietor Maria Antonia Cay’s beloved holdout, which celebrated its 50th anniversary last summer.) Interpolating El Gran Combo’s 1975 salsa classic “Un Verano el Nueva York” into a mesmerizing house and dembow thump, he pays homage to the here-and-there folks, the swathes of Puerto Ricans and Dominicans from that generation who moved to the States and never left out of necessity but still dream of home. The song serves as a depressing reminder that the Puerto Rican Day Parade—and therefore New York summer—is still six months away. When it comes, though, boy, this thing is gonna rip through subwoofers throughout the city and beyond.  

Debí Tirar Más Fotos signals a relieving transition away from the occasional monotony of Bad Bunny’s rap-heavy 2023 album Nadie Sabe Lo Que Va a Pasar Mañana. Whereas that record felt like a side effect of his intrepid lifestyle in Hollywood, on Más Fotos, he has fully relocated his massive creativity, making music as surprising and beautiful as when he first began experimenting with classic sounds in the late 2010s. He takes full advantage of his international clout, calling upon go-to producers like Taíny and Mag while extending a hand to lesser-renowned Puerto Rican upstarts like the Santurce singer RaiNao and the Isabela band Chuwi. And their collaborations are voluminous; on “Weltita,” with Chuwi, a synth wavers kaleidoscopically over guiro, timbales, and pure subbass, while Bad Bunny sings doe-eyed about being enamored by a pretty girl at the beach. Chuwi’s Loren Torres has an equally powerful voice, imbuing a kicky song about summer love with a certain political dimension—a practice of freedom on a stretch of land that has not been annexed by a mega-resort. 

Benito is more explicit about this sentiment on the sorrowful dirge “Lo Que Pasó a Hawaii,” where he embraces the lower register of Tego Calderón and the melodic direction of the jíbaro legend Ramito to profess a warning about a rapidly gentrifying land and its colonized people:

Quieren quitarme el río y también la playa
Quieren el barrio mío y que abuelita se vaya
No, no suelte' la bandera ni olvide' el lelolai
Que no quiero que hagan contigo lo que le pasó a Hawái. 

They want to take the river, the beach, your grandma’s neighborhood, your flag, your joy. Don’t let them do to you what they did to Hawaii. The song drops the heart like airborne turbulence—it’s both a terrifyingly sad cautionary tale and recognition from one of the biggest stars in the world that what imperial forces do to colonized peoples is universal. Benito sings with the weight of the world, maybe the weight of all the people of Borinquen, looking forth with a furrowed brow; he and producer Taíny stop the track midway through to let the crow of el campo get in a cockle-doodle-doo. The clock is ticking.

It’s a blessing and a blast to hear this version of Conejo Malo again, whether he’s pontificating on the corrupt center of power or pushing back against his intrusive thoughts in the club. Debí Tirar Mas Fotos finds him exploring a cornucopia of creative new avenues with the depth of a man who’s found his center. By turning his attention back to his heart—the beating heart of Puerto Rico—he’s rediscovered what truly matters to him, down to the album cover’s white plastic beach chairs perched atop the scruffy grass. That love, and the fight required to protect it, will set a person free.