Bad Bunny’s Album is Talking About Us, Whether You Like It or Not

Bad Bunny’s “DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS” has been embraced as a love letter to Puerto Rico. As a work of genre-blending genius, wielding the power of many media. As a hand held out to the elders and an invitation to hear odes to their youth, to the island they knew in the trumpet’s resounding pride and the drums’ resilient beat. As a political shout, echoing the profound lineage of rhythmic resistance and poetic protest. As a convening call for all Puerto Ricans — that they may never stop struggling for sovereignty.

Bad Bunny’s status as an international talent has brought many interpretations to this record. Songs like “DtMF” have become global anthems of nostalgia, regret, and loss, echoing throughout the digital world. Creators attach the meanings that most resonate with them — and that capacity for songs to touch us all differently is essential to music.

But there is something strangely unsettling about listening to Bad Bunny’s poignant lament of the callous, predatory erasure of Puerto Rico’s cultural landscape — set over TikTok montages of American odes to senior year or indulgent vacations of the past. Here, I begin to wonder whether we are missing the point.

The well-meaning TikTok trend obscures the song’s politics. In no uncertain terms, Bad Bunny is serenading San Juan, which is under the threat of rapid cultural degradation. The real-estate investments, tax breaks, and whims of American businessmen and tourists are sinking their teeth into the city.

In 2012, drowning in debt, Puerto Rico authorized tax breaks, granted to foreign investors who became residents of the island and lived six months of the year there. Buying up blocks in droves, these foreign investors — primarily affluent Americans — are hiking up prices and driving local people out of their own neighborhoods with unparalleled entitlement.

Samuel Sánchez Tirado, a Rincón resident, told The New York Times that unwanted visitors regularly approach his home, waving blank checks for his seaside property. With no regard for Tirado’s ancestry or lineage, these investors see only a vacation rental to be sold at triple the price to people who will not appreciate the cultural profundity of this neighborhood. Throughout the album, in songs like “LO QUE LE PASÓ A HAWAii,” Bad Bunny urges Puerto Ricans like Tirado to cling tightly to the pillars of their culture, resisting the violent entanglement of gentrification and corruption.

The album forces critics to engage with it as a kind of protest. NPR’s “Unpacking Bad Bunny's personal and political ‘DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS’” and The New York Times’s “Bad Bunny Talks Coming Back Home on His ‘Most Puerto Rican’ Album Yet” refuse to separate this album from its rallying call for sovereignty in Puerto Rico. The prevailing discourse surrounding the album is largely concerned with a big-picture critique of cultural erasure in Puerto Rico: focusing on taxation, America’s one percent, and greedy corporations. But American critics never go so far as to contemplate our personal place, as American individuals and music consumers, within Bad Bunny’s cutting exhortation of Puerto Rico’s Americanization.

In the same way that we extract from the Caribbean — not missing its cultural significance entirely but treating it as though constructed for our entertainment pleasure — we’ve discriminately extracted parts of this album that pacify us and bring us comfort. And we’ve swept over the rest in a hazy escape of rhythmic appreciation and absolving intellectualization.

In a live sketch, comedian Angelo Colina illustrates this phenomenon rather gracefully. During a night out in Puerto Rico, Bad Bunny’s decidedly political song, “El Apagón,” is blaring. The final lyrics echo, “Que se vayan ellos. Que se vayan ellos. Lo que me pertenece a mí. Se lo quedan ellos. Que se vayan ellos.” Let them go. Let them go. What is mine, they’ll keep for themselves. Let them go.

Colina, amused, watches as these gringos bob and sway with wilful ignorance, escapist bliss, and, maybe, a touch of anxious shame. Colina does not contend that they should’ve left the club, nor that they were completely unaware of the song’s lyrics. In fact, he says that Americans know how to pretend when they know Spanish and when they don’t. But to know what the words say isn’t necessarily to understand them, let alone what they mean for you. Ultimately, it is their strange capacity to separate themselves from the song’s lyrics that Cortino marvels at and teases.

Perhaps this is how we are listening to this album and how we are engaging with the Caribbean. When we witness great political art, it’s easy to reason that our act of witness somehow absolves us of implication — as though acknowledging your privilege, and intellectualizing it, is the same as interrogating it.

Bad Bunny’s album is not just about large-scale contributors to cultural degradation in Puerto Rico., Iit is also about how we, as individuals, conceptualize the Caribbean.

At times, it is about how Americans need to step back; about how Puerto Ricans are entitled to an abundant cultural heritage that is their responsibility to love and protect. At times, it is about how we travel — the expectations we set for the Caribbean culture to suit our needs. We are curious about its history, but only to the extent that we can intellectualize it. We expect anglophone cashiers, quesitos sin queso, and blocks overrun entirely with tourists. We take so quickly from the Caribbean as our beloved vacation destination, with little to no regard for what is lost in our wake. We escape to it, as a hazy, idyllic, paradise where entertainment and pleasure precede critical thought and care.

And perhaps we’ve treated Bad Bunny’s album with the same expectations — picking and choosing what we resonate with, and leaving behind the personal reflection that he calls us all to take part in. Listening to Bad Bunny for the allure of its rhythm, just like going to Puerto Rico for vacation, is not inherently wrong.

The trouble sets in when we reduce Bad Bunny — and Puerto Rico — to our escapist playground, heedlessly paving over the cultural wealth and local autonomy that is fundamental to the archipelago. Translating Bad Bunny’s lyrics isn’t enough. You must look at your life as it relates to the Caribbean, instead of imagining the album as the soundtrack to your life.

—Magazine writer Anya Sesay can be reached at anya.sesay@thecrimson.com. Her column “The Islands That Shape Us” explores how our personal relationships with the Caribbean are entangled with its cultural erasure.