Bad Bunny’s “DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS” scans PR’s magic jukebox: NPR

Just as salsa hits live and die by the tightness of Coro’s call-and-response, Bad Bunny’s artistic power lives and dies by the tightness of his connection to his homeland. His reception in Puerto Rico is like a conservatory for receptions abroad. Much of his global charisma comes from the palpable chemistry between this megastar and a people on the move and under siege. These days, he’s exhausted from touring and alienated by the rigors of fame far from home. If Bad Bunny’s sign is money, no new zodiac sign could save him from a Saturn return, even his most enlightened interpretation of that metaphor. He is 30 years old this year and has been in the music industry for 10 years. No, Olvido, please tell me. But Benito’s personal growing pains have political inevitability, and our boy was just campaigning last year with La Alianza, an intergenerational coalition opposed to Puerto Rico’s statehood party. Ta. When he showed up to vote, he wore a light blue shirt (Azur Clarito, the colors of the independence flag), high-waisted red pants, and shades reminiscent of salsa legend Hector Laveau. I saw the sign.

Bad Bunny has always been a scholar of Caribbean music, but until now he has focused primarily on celebrating the cultural importance of the urban music of his generation. In DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOTOS, he goes beyond millennial nostalgia to recognize deeper patterns in the traditional music of his islands. This also includes diaspora spiritual republics. “When you hear the lyrics, when you hear the story,” Bad Bunny told Popcast. “It comes full circle and we realize that we are living the same thing.” Some forms of repetition (hurricanes, rural land grabbing, loss of immigration) can feel like a colonial curse, while others (mango season, kissing, Christmas carols) are a sign of survival. providing the only sustainable structure. Benito repeats Tokar as he sings to Loren in “Huertita.”

Tradition has never become a mere shell. In the 1970s, salceros were populists dedicated to perpetuating West African rhythms such as Puerto Rican homemade bomba and plena. But they’ve also carried out discrete experiments with jazz and psychedelia, crafting hand-crafted songs for dance floor hits with themes of Third World liberation, black power, and the harshness of desire and betrayal. He collected drums. As the last remaining giants of their generation retire from the stage, it’s our turn to preserve the music they supported and make it resonate in today’s venues. “I’ve been waiting for salsa to come back,” Bad Bunny told Benicio del Toro in Interview Magazine a year ago. “Someone young will turn salsa into something modern and cool.” But as Toni Morrison once advised, a true artist must make art that they aspire to.

DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS begins with a bang, mixing El Gran Combo’s “Un Verano En Nueva York” into a stuttering debou. Although Dominicans now outnumber Nuyoricans uptown, we’re good friends, and Bad Bunny returns to straight-up salsa on “Baile Inolvidable.” “— Easily the most streamed song in the world last week. Bad Bunny said he came up with the mournful synth line first, then the muscular horns. With a slap of the skin, his aimless vocals acquire religion and tighten his sad-boy seductions into the colo we can use: Te/I Ensenaste in Viral. He will never have the supple virtuosity of, say, Cheo Feliciano, but he shares the deep range of the emblematic salcero, sonido del ultramar. , it’s strangely moving to hear him stretch the limits of his voice and feel his talent for moving between rhythm and humor, a dancefloor mecca that transcends generations.

Before the album was released, a fake tracklist was circulated that included the song “El Sol de Eddie Palmieri”. I highly doubted his team would let it leak, but it did make me fantasize about a collaboration with my favorite old school salsero. Instead, Bad Bunny bet on salsa’s future by working with young graduates (some of them teenagers) at San Juan’s public conservatory. His playful improvisations dramatize the Caribbean continuum between sonero’s patter, décima, toast, rap and reggaeton’s dame lo que quiero. To my ears, all of this bittersweetness is the basis of our music, an invitation to name and call out this collective. Aprieta, chamaquito, he said, followed by a gentle piano solo from Sebastian Torres. That’s really nice. Please try again. This live interaction explains the process behind this project and how Bad Bunny has made most of their previous records: on the go, communicating with collaborators via WhatsApp. It shows an implicit contrast between the fragmentary method of making. He’s a genius troubadour of these displacements — think of the distended drag between parts A and B of “La Romana” — but I think this new album’s throwback tracks are I think the reason that dematerialization is so high on the chart is because it reminds us of what we’ve lost by ceding shared space to digital. Now we’re back in the studio, tripping over tangles of wires and spitting into microphones. We return to the garden, where Titi trades beer for Giro and begins scratching that unscratchable itch.

The politics of Bad Bunny’s presence explodes into high spirits with his collaboration with Los Planeros de la Cresta, “Café Con Lon.” On the surface, General Assembly celebrates a night of razzle-dazzle, beckoning listeners along misty, winding roads to mountain hamlets where friends wait to drink and dance. This theme recalls Palmieri’s classic salsa “Vamonos par monte” (1971). Again, we are reminded of the maroon people who took refuge in jungles and caves. There, indigenous petroglyphs mark sacred stones, and it is also where survivors of Hurricane Maria recently awaited. It can take months, or even years, for water to be restored. When Bad Bunny sings about burning rubber and smoking around hairpin bends and getting lost in the dark, he’s trying to stay connected to his loved ones and the land itself. It’s a song about the risks and effort required. If the beach is a zone for tourists’ easy enjoyment and plunder, the mountains protect the “true norms” of Puerto Rican culture, “estan arriba en el monte los codigos de verda.” I am. He expands on the metaphor of the anti-national bolero “Lo Que Le Paso a Hawaii,” saying, “Inside the greenery, you can still breathe/The clouds grow closer and you can talk to God.” can.”

Across the album’s 17 songs, Bad Bunny and his collaborators pay homage to the pastoral poetics of music festivals. The waves bubble like champagne. But for me these images resonate most deeply when contrasted with the archipelago’s decaying infrastructure and Weiben’s urban poetics of reluctant immigration. “Stay on the journey / No one will applaud when you land.” His talent as a lyricist has leveled up to his talent as a producer. He always had a special feeling for moments of harmonious resonance between genres. On “Lo Que Pasó A Hawaiian,” Luis Saenz’s prickly cuatro trades in a menacing electric bass riff, while menace turns to mischief on “EoO.” These transitions are both musical and emotional, perpetuating and sometimes attempting to heal generational ruptures. My 60-year-old cousin emailed me to say he wasn’t a Bad Bunny fan, but he loved Pitro de Coco. I wonder if they recognize, at least subconsciously, the bass line of Willie Colon’s “Aires de Navidad.” Bad Bunny specifically aimed for an album that “you could play at a family party and your uncle might say, ‘I know that sample.'”

A few notes on dissonance: Many Puerto Ricans adore Bad Bunny, and many continue to criticize him, but no one is allowed to ignore this phenomenon. This is an expression of his extraordinary commercial power, as well as the raucous vigor of his creativity, the raucous vigor of the “café con lon” that is familiar to the most intimate corners of our epigenetics. I think it’s also a sign of hinting at rhythm. For my mother, a congressman’s call to “drink a gallon” was a sign of the violence of alcoholism in our family: a suicidal car crash, a battered wife, a dead body found on a park bench. It glorifies humiliation and ruins her taste for fun. For his friend Felix, celebrating Bad Bunny’s transformation into folklore — “a scholarly paper by people who don’t even say good morning” — is a celebration of the subculture of the black Barillios of San Juan, where he and his friends once visited. It risks wiping out the fun. Back in the days when reggaeton was still widely vilified, when all you had to do was slap an album and that was it, “Run your Hot Wheels to the rhythm of the track.”

As with “Debí Tirar Más Fotos,” part of the pathos of the Platanar-posed shots comes from the evocation of our repressed memories, negative memories that cannot necessarily be mobilized for a new nationalism. It’s coming. As Bad Bunny knows all too well, flashes of disaster and celebrity can be equally dizzying, and some of us are astonished by our own culture’s internal conflicts to be worthy of the cover of Empire Rags. Some people are tired of quieting down. He’s used his platform to get out the vote, launch a massive public education campaign about Puerto Rico’s history of exploitation and resistance, feature local indie bands, and, yes, change traditional genres. It’s thrilling to see it given a new lease of life. But this wasn’t his only or even primary way of connecting with listeners. The trapelo, which began with the lament of “Soy Peor,” now worse because of you, evokes the latent acoustics of “El Jívaro Jolando” and the bruised, defiant trombone of Salsa. , deepening the channels through which our ugliest emotions flow. To get rid of the tears that choked my throat so I could sing.

In the last few days, my mother has changed her mind and acknowledged the creativity of Bad Bunny’s arrangements, and we have discovered how refreshing it is to be freed from popular poetry, the mysteries of the zeitgeist, and the rigid bourgeois progressives who monopolize popular interests. We had a rich exchange of opinions on whether this was the case. microphone. But if you’re not a fan, that’s fine, Piquea — what Puerto Rico lacks in political capital it makes up for in musical richness — Ramito, Rexac, Roena, Tito, Tego, Tiny, Ile. Not to mention unknown artists like my grandmother who left behind a San Juan radio show. She played los panchos and boleros for the paper box factories of Nueva Yor. Real geeks know that Bad Bunny is just a magical jukebox bop. I think he’s proud to know that too. But now, at neighborhood bars, local pleneros pick up panderos and chant, “Un la mañana café, por la tarde ron / Estamos en la corps, sal de tou. “Balcon,” he might shout a new refrain. When a song survives stardom and the rhythm sets its own record, you’ve succeeded.