Debí Tirar Más Fotos Review: Bad Bunny Phoned Home

Bad Bunny at a 2019 rally calling for the resignation of then-Puerto Rican Governor Ricardo Rossello.
Photo: Eric Rojas/AFP via Getty Images

Last month, Puerto Rican superstar Bad Bunny navigated a holiday season flurry of activity, including a giveaway for disadvantaged youth in his hometown, as most of his country was plunged into darkness for several hours. The blackout threatened to fuel the year’s suboptimal last night, chronicled in his latest single, “Pitorro de Coco,” a wistful recollection of a sour New Year’s Eve spent sipping coconut rum with his grandfather. The lights came back on with enough time to party, as the artist does in the music video that landed that afternoon. But it was another setback in an unpleasant season: Still recovering from the devastation of Hurricane Maria in 2017, Puerto Rico had endured the insult of being called a “floating island of garbage” on stage at the Republican National Convention by comic Tony Hinchcliffe . Bad Bunny responded on Instagram, sharing a short film about his island’s triumphs. He has carried himself more like the country’s ambassador than a chart sensation ever since, meeting the challenge of a new year haunted by a troubling deluge of deportations with detailed accounts of what other Americans bring to the table.

Debí Tirar Má’s picturesstudio album “Pitorro” and the wistful late-fall lead single “El Clúb,” as foretold, is a densely layered tribute to the people, culture and defiant spirit of Puerto Rico. The burden of the celebration is not only a climate of xenophobia in a United States that still impedes progress on the island via century-old legislative puppet wires, but also the disconnect Bad Bunny experienced after spending chunks of 2024 in Los Angeles. As one of the most listened to artists on the planet and a child who cried the first time his parents announced a trip to the US, Bad Bunny lives in tension between the local he sees in the mirror and the man-about-town you must be competing in the Spotify heavyweight class. (His upcoming residency at San Juan’s Coliseo de Puerto Rico reinforces his priorities.) pictures capitalizing on Bad Bunny’s visibility and imbuing the art with home decor, as promoting the music so often prompts him to leave. Casual onlookers come away with sketches of a host of musical traditions peppering Puerto Rico’s past and present, while those in the know enjoy both wistful songwriting and a maze of references to their loved ones musicfood and snake.

Bad Bunny albums have often reveled in their own puckish flavor, deftly threading sounds: 2022’s exquisite “Después de la playa” Un Verano Sin Ti swung on a dime from synth jam to merengue workout. “Yo Visto Así” from the 2020s El Último Tour Del Mundo for sale cool latin trap with grunge drops. Instead of expressing how many scenes Bad Bunny can squeeze into, pictures highlights abundance at home. Stylish diversions divert your attention from one point of Puerto Rico culture and travel to another. Reggaeton and dembow hybrid “Nuevayol” kicks off the album by paying homage to New York’s half-million-strong Boricua community, while salsa icons Andy Montañez and El Gran Combo de Puerto Rico’s “Un Verano en Nueva York” transform into a shout-out basement party . Willie Colon. “Café Con Ron” sees Bad Bunny join Los Pleneros de la Cresta – Central Mountain Range-born purveyors of the plena, a history, polyrhythmic hand drum music and dance tradition – for an ode to rum and mountain coffee. By inviting the listener to the line in verse two, it touches on the plight of the native Taíno people who camped there when the Spanish conquistadors landed and colonial subjugation began.

pictures often thinking and speaking on two levels, working towards the artist’s vision of “reggaeton jíbaro” – a marriage between the glossy programmed music of the metropolitans and the more bucolic sounds that precede it – or sprinkling his signature fixations on romances that brew and indulge in a secondary dusting of hometown pride and political intrigue. “Ron” presents as a memory of a party and a hangover, before suggesting that culture actually spreads from the center of the island most visited for the port cities. “Bokete,” a dripping ballad that suddenly sprouts stately salsa production, compares an ex to a pothole, suggesting a widespread infrastructural decay that continues to plague the American commonwealth.

Bad Bunny wants to close the gaps between Puerto Rico’s musical heritage and the art that dominates modern streaming charts.
Photo: Eric Rojas

The album is a breathtaking balancing act, a series of history lessons hidden inside airtight reggaeton, synth-pop and folk songs. It smokes its predecessor, the 2023’s Nadie Sabe Lo Que Va a Pasar Manana — another time-travel exercise where Bad Bunny chased its own tail by carefully recreating the reckless cool of his SoundCloud era — because it feels much more invested in the stories it tells. The disgruntled machismo of Nadie seemed to exhaust the man who mocked haters and hanging. The intergenerational persistence and creativity was central throughout pictures provide stronger performance; even when browsing over familiar turf, the music moves in a spirit of honoring innovators and fruitful exchange of ideas among today’s luminaries. The album fills its commercial bases with a stream of shiny La Paciencia and Tainy team-ups like “Perfumito Nuevo,” “Eoo” and “Ketu Tecré,” where new crushes are fawned over and bad breakups mourned, while a line of descent from earlier reggaeton and Latin hip-hop hits to today is established. “Veldá” brings in Carolina singers Omar Courtz and Dei V for a flirtatious club track, whose snippet of 2002 Plan B kiss-off “No Voy a Esperar Por Ti” takes the hat off to veteran producer DJ Blass and rappers Chencho and Maldy and stars from reggaeton’s aughts crossover.

The big mainstream pieces often bring guests: “Perfumito” shines in part thanks to the soothing vocal tone and unabashed echo of San Juan singer RaiNao, who rejects Bunny’s authoritative baritone as the song’s paramours circle each other. “Baile Inolvidable,” a spiritual successor to “Después de la Playa” in its slow transition from anxious synths to subdued salsa, features students from San Juan’s Escuela Libre de Música. The talent showcase seems to come from the same place as the decision to record most of the album locally. Bad Bunny wants to close the gaps between Puerto Rico’s musical heritage and the art that dominates modern streaming charts, because this holistic view of past and present is necessary to advance a vision of the future.

The soft, reflective songs that populate the last quadrant of pictures scanning as statements of purpose. The title track’s somber desire for more memories of deceased loved ones to look back on explains the attention to the documentation of culture in the lyrics and the YouTube visualization tools, which include passages of Professor and Puerto Rico: A National History author Jorell Meléndez Badillo. Oppression consumes and rewrites these stories. pictures is an act of remembering what came before: “La Mudanza” interrupts the story of Bad Bunny’s parents’ romance to announce that he carries a flag everywhere he goes because people are dead for the right, referring to the brutal 1948 Gag Law that tried to quiet the incessant undercurrent of nationalist urges for liberation. Cataloging both vitality and injustice highlights a people’s endurance, but also longs for a change in their living conditions. pictures comes to a head in the shockingly straightforward “Lo Que le Pasó a Hawaii.” The trail suggests that securing statehood for Puerto Rico may mean not only the dissolution of draconian laws that have hampered the local economy and long-delayed access to constitutional rights denied to “unincorporated territories” in the United States. but also the development of real goods and interventions of White Lotus-type sign. The boy who hated to leave the island has become a man who does not want to see its coastline bought and sold again, old lands passing through new hands as they have for hundreds of years.

It’s a prickly position: A popular musician with cross-continental influence is subtly undermining a political push that goes back decades, suggesting that the solution to a lingering and appalling second-class citizenship is really not to play ball for a spot at the table. This is where you see a glimpse of the brash character from the last album. The take-it-or-leave-it message is reflected in the sense that Bad Bunny doesn’t care how much of this goes over someone’s head, whether you picked up on the dialectical flourishes of the track titles or simply the shimmer to “Café” wonders who “Ron” could be. The album is steeped in enough beautiful love songs for listeners to indulge in the dirge of lost connections in “Turista” and “Inolvidable” or become entangled in the deeper question of how to respect and defend an individual identity in the 21st century. when everything is for sale. The mindset mirrors the successful heavy-handed musicology of Beyoncé’s latest work, as Bad Bunny uses, devoured by the masses. pictures to ensure his patrons have a meal they will never forget.