“DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS,” the latest album by Puerto Rican artist Bad Bunny, promotes reconnection to cultural and familial roots, using art as a means to bring generations together and educate the world about Puerto Rico’s rich but afflicted history, protesting against corruption, cultural extinction and gentrification.
Through personal reflection, spending time with his family and collaboration with Puerto Rican artists and cultural icons, Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio, known as Bad Bunny, combined the emotional with the educational in the creation of his song lyrics, visuals, music videos, YouTube visualizers and even a short film for the album.
“This is opening many topics of conversation,” Bad Bunny said about the album on a recent podcast with Chente Ydrach. “Uniting families, generations, people from other countries … that are reconnecting with their own culture of their country… a lot of education too … it’s good that people who might not understand [Puerto Rican history and current events] have the opportunity to educate themselves and understand.”
A Brief History of Puerto Rico As Told By Bad Bunny and Collaborators
“DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS,” or “I should’ve taken more photos,” was released on Jan. 5 of this year — the eve of Three Kings Day, a cherished holiday in Puerto Rico.
For each of the 17 tracks on the album, Bad Bunny worked with Jorell Meléndez-Badillo, a historian of Puerto Rico, Latin America and the Caribbean to create visualizers. In the form of short slideshows, the visualizers offer historical context to the present situation in Puerto Rico, displayed with tracks playing in the background and alongside clips of the house featured in the album’s accompanying short film.
“Bad Bunny wanted historical narratives to accompany the visualizer,” Meléndez-Badillo said in an interview with Tone Madison.“One of the things that he has said publicly on Puerto Rican television in the last couple of days, is how Puerto Rican history is unknown to many here in Puerto Rico. And so although it is amplifying Puerto Rico’s history for those outside of Puerto Rico and for non-Puerto Ricans, he really wanted Puerto Ricans to read about their own history.”
The visualizers detailed Puerto Rico’s history from 1508 to the present, covering subjects including colonization and invasion by the United States, labor exploitation by wealthy Americans for agricultural cultivation, recruitment of Puerto Ricans for military aid, struggles for independence and subsequent repression, state violence and surveillance, to name a few.
These historical issues pervade the present moment in Puerto Rico, as detailed in the music video for “El Apagón,” or “the blackout” in English. Bad Bunny released the song in 2022, which doubled as a short documentary created in collaboration with Puerto Rican investigative journalist Bianca Graulau.
The video detailed shocking statistics and interviews regarding topics including the clandestine privatization of public beaches, corruption amongst government officials — including the Department of Education, which has closed around 45% of public schools between 2011 and 2021— and the shady Canadian-American energy company, LUMA. The company has made numerous broken promises to improve the situation of power outages. Such outages have left millions without electricity and have led to “students that do their assignments in the dark, damaged belongings, and people who can’t connect their medical equipment at home.”
The video overlaid Graulau’s reporting with song lyrics including, “I don’t want to leave here, Let them go / What belongs to me, they’ll keep it to themselves / This is my beach, this is my sun / This is my land, this is me.”
“Art can’t be decontextualized from the moment it’s produced,” Meléndez-Badillo said in an interview with Teen Vogue. “There’s no way to escape Puerto Rico’s colonial reality, where we deal with blackouts, displacement, and the appropriation of our historical memory daily. Like a committed Puerto Rican, Bad Bunny is using his platform to amplify the conversations taking place in Puerto Rico.”
Symbolic and Lyrical Resistance in “DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS”
In addition to the visualizers, Bad Bunny co-wrote and co-directed a short film, which he posted on YouTube shortly before the album was released, starring the renowned Jacobo Morales, a household name on the island who is widely considered to be the “most influential filmmaker” in Puerto Rico’s history.
The tear-jerking film introduces Morales as an old man reflecting on his life, nostalgic for what Puerto Rico once was but fighting to preserve the island’s memory, culture, and community amidst increasing gentrification, introducing a message that appears on merchandise for the album: “Seguimos Aquí,” or “We’re Still Here.”
The film also introduces the album’s mascot, Concho, a Puerto Rican crested toad (sapo concho), which is the only species of toad endemic to Puerto Rico.
The toad is facing extinction.
Habitat loss from coastal urbanization and the effects of climate change, rising temperatures and changing weather patterns make it harder for the species to reproduce. These factors have rendered many species of amphibians endemic to Puerto Rico endangered, according to the album’s visualizer for “LO QUE LE PASÓ A HAWAii” and National Geographic.
Featured in the short film, music video for the track “EL CLúB,” and Spotify visualizers are the sky-blue version of the Puerto Rican flag, created in 1895 by exiled pro-independence revolutionaries in New York following the failed insurrection against the Spanish government in 1868, according to the visualizer for the first track on the album, “NUEVAYoL.” The flag was criminalized by a Gag Law in 1948 for 11 years in an attempt to stifle the independence movement before being converted to the darker American blue version, but continues to be a symbol of pro-independence resistance and sovereignty, flown proudly across Puerto Rico and the United States.
The album’s cover and music video for “PIToRRO DE COCO” feature white plastic Monobloc chairs, a staple of working class families across the globe and representative of Puerto Rican families living on and off the island. To some, these chairs symbolize nostalgia for home — for moments of connection and laughter during family gatherings, sharing food and music, according to Maya Brown and Zoya Wazir at NBC.
The empty chairs on the album cover could signify the people “who have left their homelands, the empty chair [becoming] a poignant reminder of what was left behind — the home, the family or even a part of their identity,” said Erika Pradillo, 32, a Miami resident of Cuban and Spanish heritage.
The album’s most political song, “LO QUE LE PASÓ A HAWAii,” discusses the effects of modern colonization in Puerto Rico, with increasing rates of wealthy Americans moving to the island because of the Ley 22, a law exempting U.S. citizens from paying capital gains taxes on “investments in stocks, cryptocurrency, and real estate” according to Graulau. These tax breaks incentivize Americans to invest in properties in Puerto Rico, converting low-income housing into luxury vacation rentals and buying out local resident-oriented business owners to open establishments catering to tourism.
The song brings attention to the suffering of those forced to leave the island they consider home, including the lyrics (translated): “You hear the jíbaro crying, another one who’s left / He didn’t want to leave to Orlando, but thе corrupt ones pushed him out…Thеy want to take my river and my beach too / They want my neighborhood and grandma to leave / No, don’t let go of the flag nor forget the lelolai / ‘Cause I don’t want them to do to you what happened to Hawaii…No one here wanted to leave, and those who left dream of returning.”
Puerto Rico has experienced rapid aging — the population of working-age Puerto Rican adults declining by more than 700,000 between 2013 and 2023 in a mass diaspora. Many are forced to migrate to the mainland because of inflated costs of living, lack of economic and educational opportunities, and uptakes in climate change related concerns including hurricanes, earthquakes, and droughts, according to an article from NBC.
In another song on the album, “TURiSTA,” or “tourist,” Bad Bunny subliminally references the surface-level experience tourists have of Puerto Rico, isolated from the conflicts — past and present — that the island faces.
The lyrics translate to, “In my life, you were a tourist / You only saw the best of me / and not how I was suffering / You left without knowing the reason for my wounds… And it wasn’t your place to heal them / you came to have a good time.”
The album references Puerto Rico’s severe issue of power blackouts, which have plagued the island for years, in “PIToRRO DE COCO,” which includes the lyric, “you left like the light.” He highlights this again in the Spotify visualizer for the track “EoO,” depicting Concho the toad relaxing in his room with light and in the air of a fan, before the fan and lights shut off and he frustratedly kicks it over.
Bad Bunny has mentioned this issue in previous songs, including “El Apagón” in 2022 and, more recently, in his 2024 single “Una Velita,” or “a little candle,” released on the seven-year anniversary of Hurricane María, which ravaged the island in 2017.
The song includes the lyrics (translated): “Obviously, the light will go out, God knows it will never rеturn / The bridge they took so long to build, thе river has grown and will break it / A couple of songs saved on my phone for when the signal goes out… Remember that we’re all from here, it’s up to the people to save the people / Don’t send me anything from the government, those bastards will hide it / They’re going out on the streets just for photos, they can all go to hell / Five thousand were left to die, and that we’ll never forget / The palm tree they want to use to hang the country, one of these days we’ll take it down.”
The song was released in anticipation of the 2024 U.S. presidential and gubernatorial elections, reminding Puerto Ricans of the devastation of the hurricanes, which destroyed Puerto Rico’s power grid and left residents without electricity for up to 328 days, becoming the longest blackout ever recorded in the United States, according to ABC.
The aftermath of the hurricane exposed “years of underfunding, mismanagement, and the Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority’s $9 billion debt crisis, which had led to its bankruptcy just months before the storm.” according to an article in HuffPost, quoting Reuters and the Puerto Rico Fiscal Agency and Financial Advisor Authority.
Art and Music are Not the Only Ways that Bad Bunny has Raised Awareness of Issues Puerto Rico is facing.
In the months leading up to the 2024 elections, Bad Bunny vocalized his support for Democratic candidate Kamala Harris and Juan Dalmau Ramírez, a third-party candidate of the Puerto Rican Independence Party on social media and at a rally this past November, giving a heartfelt speech encouraging Puerto Ricans to vote.
Bad Bunny used his wealth and influence to support Dalmau’s campaign for governor this past year, “spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on dozens of political billboards and TV ads,” as well as “publishing a page-long letter in Puerto Rico’s biggest island-wide newspaper,” according to NBC.
In the wake of comedian Tony Hinchcliffe describing Puerto Rico as “a floating island of garbage” at a Trump rally in late October of 2024, Bad Bunny responded with an eight-minute video compilation which he posted on his Instagram, celebrating Puerto Rican culture and nature, which he captioned “garbage.”
During Election Day, Bad Bunny took to the polls, appearing in public at the 2024 Puerto Rican governmental elections without security and dressed in patriotic colors. His message: “listen to your heart.”
Bad Bunny has historically encouraged voting participation and voiced his political opinions across his platforms. In July of 2019, Bad Bunny paused his Europe tour to protest alongside his people against former governor Ricardo Rosselló — who had been recently exposed for illegal, corrupt, and scandalous activities in nearly 900 pages of leaked messages — joined by other Puerto Rican artists and celebrities including Daddy Yankee, Residente, MLB baseball player Carlos Delgado, Olympic medalist Jaime Espinal, and actress Karla Monroig.
In 2018, Bad Bunny established his non-profit, the Good Bunny Foundation, with a mission to “encourage children and young people from low-income sectors in Puerto Rico to develop their skills in music, arts, and sports.” The effort has worked to orchestrate gift giving events, a golf tournament fundraiser, youth summer programs, and more.
The “most Puerto Rican album ever,” An Emotional Homage to Home and Family
“DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS” showcased a unique sound, melding old and new artists and genres to connect generations and create a modern time capsule of the music of Puerto Rico.
Paying tribute to Puerto Rican music history, the album integrates traditional Puerto Rican genres of salsa, plena, bomba, and jíbarro as well as old school dembow and reggaetón, sampling songs by Puerto Rican artists from the 1970s to the 2000s, including El Gran Combo De Puerto Rico, Chuíto El De Bayamon, Hector & Tito, and Plan B.
Bad Bunny forgoed his usual collaboration with “huge stars” to work only with young up and coming Puerto Rican artists on the album, including features from students from La Escuela Libre de Música (Los Sobrinos), RaiNao, Chuwi, Omar Courtz, Dei V and Los Pleneros de la Cresta.
“To me, they create magic,” said Bad Bunny in an interview with Apple Music. “The best part of this project was… [to] meet these people, all of them very humble, very talented, very passionate, and it felt good that I could relate more with them than any other huge stars that I met before.”
Bad Bunny often talks about the significance of Puerto Rico to him, having grown up and spent most of his life there, reflecting the more nostalgic and emotional songs on the album about reconnecting to cultural roots and remembering family history and loved ones.
One of the most popular songs on the album, “DtMF,” which hit number one on Billboard Global 200, started a global trend on social media of people posting memories with loved ones, reconnecting with their family histories and cultures, and remembering the good times with friends, partners, and family who are far away or who have passed. Hundreds of thousands of sentimental videos play with the lyrics, “I should’ve taken more pictures when I had you / I should’ve given you more kisses and hugs whenever I could / Ayy, I hope my people never move away” in the background.
Bad Bunny described “BAILE INoLVIDABLE” [Unforgettable Dance]– his favorite song on the album and something he had in his mind for two years– as “a dream come true” in an interview with Apple Music. The song’s music video features Bad Bunny– and an older version of himself played by Jacobo Morales– learning to dance salsa and remembering the woman who taught him to dance, echoing a message Morales delivered in the album’s short film: “Mientras uno está vivo/Uno debe amar lo más que pueda” or (“While one is alive/You must love as much as you can”).
In January, Bad Bunny announced his first residency, No Me Quiero Ir de Aquí– I don’t want to leave here– to take place at the Coliseo de Puerto Rico for a total of 30 dates from July 11 to Sept. 14, of which every date is sold out. The first nine of these dates are for Puerto Rican residents only through “island-wide in-person” ticket sales, according to Billboard.
Since it was released, “DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS” has hit many milestones, including charting as number one on the Billboard 200 for three consecutive weeks, with each of its 17 tracks charting on and continuing to hold positions on the Billboard Hot 100.
Bad Bunny is often spotted on the island and in New York City, the two locations in which he recorded his recent album. Most recently, he was spotted at a Residente concert in December by the barricades alongside other fans in San Juan, a surprise subway performance in New York City with Jimmy Fallon in January, and taking over as a guest anchor and interviewee on the Puerto Rican news broadcast NotiCentro.
“Like 130 years of being part of the United States and we’re still Puerto Rican, we remain having our culture, our way of speaking,” Bad Bunny said in an interview with Apple Music. “I really feel proud about my people, about my country, about my culture and about how [we are] resistant. And people that did it before, people who inspire the new generation to keep fighting and keep protecting, preserving who we are.”
