While a bit semantically vague and increasingly emptied by fandoms eager to elevate their idols, the expression “cultural moment” is often used in social media and online communities to describe an entertainment product’s massive impact on people and culture. If you need a reference of what a “cultural moment” is, think of (or get to know) the phenomenon Bad Bunny created with albums like Un Verano Sin Ti (2022). Not only did it break streaming records and generate multiple hits, but the LP also became a brand. Coincidence or trend-setting, even the color orange that informed the record cover’s aesthetic and the house music from “El Apagón” became fashion and music trends in 2022, respectively.
Throughout his almost ten-year career, Bad Bunny has shown tremendous skill in crafting cultural moments and drawing fans into his universe. He can make his nostalgia, everyone else’s nostalgia, his party, everyone’s party, and turn his personal and cultural background as a Puerto Rican into a collective experience. When he sings about his homeland, he transports us directly into the heart of its culture. It resonates more strongly across the inter-Latin collective consciousness but captivates fans worldwide.
With DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS (2025), Bad Bunny is once again poised to create a cultural moment — or, better yet, an intercultural one with global audiences through identification but also problematization of dynamics forged by colonialism in the Americas. The Puerto Rican’s newest album is equal parts perreo and manifesto (to Bad Bunny, perreo is a form of manifesto, too).
DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS involves the audience in an exercise of otherness while exposing them to particular narratives of Puerto Rico and dialoguing with points of similarity with other cultures in the Latin American territory. Synergizing genres like salsa, plena, and dembow while also bringing back Bad Bunny’s characteristic reggaeton after the mostly trap-oriented Nadie Sabe Lo Que Va a Pasar Mañana (2023), the album wanders through varied beats and samples while Bad Bunny denounces the gentrification of Puerto Rico and the political and economic scourges inflicted by the US government and citizens.
The record’s ethos is shown in the first song, “NUEVAYoL”, which samples “Un Verano en Nueva York” by El Gran Combo De Puerto Rico. The title, a Caribbean slang for “New York”, inverts the dynamics of the prevailing US view of Puerto Rico, and it doesn’t stop there. Bad Bunny questions the label of “king of pop” given to him in 2023 by Forbes: “How is Bad Bunny going to be king of pop with reggaeton and dembow?” he sings. The rejection of the term “pop” speaks to more than just Bad Bunny’s pride in singing genres created in Latin America.
As “pop” music has been broadened and reinterpreted in recent years to encompass multiple genres, cultures, niches, and languages, it may have become more inclusive. However, placing diverse genres under the “pop” umbrella can also erase their particularities. It is as if, in the attempt for “pop” to represent the universal in music, it also runs the risk of being an instrument of erasure, forcing the newly included to be absorbed into the dominant pop culture system. As Lins Ribeiro (2008) puts it, “The monopoly of what is universal is a means of (re)producing global elites.” In “NUEVAYoL”, Bad Bunny keeps reggaeton and dembow as their own genres, thus setting the tone for the rest of the album.
Benito Ocasio (Bad Bunny’s birth name) is a trapper and singer wrought in a post-Drake world under an English stage name. However, Latin pride, and more specifically, Puerto Rican pride, has always permeated his music. He revered Puerto Rican resistance in his debut record with “Estamos Bien” in 2018. He shouted, “I’m from P fucking R” in “P FKN R” (2020). Even in a song filled with US pop culture references, such as “VOU 787” (2023), he made sure to sing, “I don’t speak in English, American”.
As Bad Bunny’s popularity grew, it seemed like his way of taking advantage of his platform as one of the most listened-to artists in the world (Latino or not) was to continue being himself, with his language, accent, and love for Puerto Rico. It was more recently that he began to do so by highlighting traditional Latin American genres, such as merengue in “Después de la playa” (2022).
This path has led him to some of DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS’ best tracks: the salsa “BAILE INoLVIDABLE” and the plena “CAFé CON RON”. Bad Bunny’s talent for this role as an intergenerational and intercultural Latin music messenger has never been so clear as in the latter. He blends in naturally with the percussion and choirs of guest features Los Pleneros de la Cresta.
That’s not to say that the entire record aims to be a lesson in Latin culture for the generations that only know reggaeton and Latin trap. The festive reggaeton that made Bad Bunny the star he is today also stands out in DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS, in tracks like “PERFuMITO NUEVO” (which follows the formula of 2022’s “Ojitos Lindos”, a duet with a female voice across a sweet melody and chord progression) and “KETU TeCRÉ”.
Another aspect the album thrives in is nostalgia. Bad Bunny is a master of it – one of his fans” favorites is precisely a song about a song that evokes memories, the metalinguistic “La canción” (a J. Balvin collaboration of 2019), which itself became a nostalgic song. Many of his previous records passed the test of time while also remaining associated with specific mementos. In DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS, and more specifically in “DtMF”, Bad Bunny plays with nostalgia in more ways than one.
The atmosphere in the intro of “DtMF” recalls the introductions of Bad Bunny’s past tracks like “Moscow Mule” or “Callaita”. A big part of the feelings evoked by Bad Bunny’s music can be credited to its mixing and overall sound engineering: it sets the scene sensorially and makes the songs recognizable in their first seconds. “DtMF” is no different. However, the whole song is an invitation to think of the past, too. “DtMF” is a plena with a call to treasure your loved ones while they’re still around, with Bad Bunny regretting not having taken enough pictures of those who are not.
In the context of DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS‘ overall message and the geographic reach of Bad Bunny’s music, this song shines for making listeners, whoever they’re from, embrace a personal feeling while dancing to a Puerto Rican genre. There is an invitation to interchange between the listeners’ “you” (as in my life, my memories, my loved ones) and the Puerto Ricans’ “us” (as in our people, our music. Bad Bunny is supported by a choir in the chorus, evoking a communal feel for the lyrics sung in the first person.
At the same time, when Bad Bunny sings, “I should have taken more photos of when I had you,” there’s an additional layer. While the lyrics may resonate on an individual level by appealing to memory, they also suggest a fear of losing a place’s memory and the remnants of what is or once was. Bad Bunny fears Puerto Rico may disappear, not geographically but in essence.
Another double meaning is in “TURiSTA”. If the album uses interculturalist language, the lyrics of “TURiSTA” almost critique multiculturalism’s lack of interest in deepening coexistence among cultures. As Sousa Ribeiro (2012) puts it, criticism of multiculturalism places it as something that “feeds a static conception of identity and, consequently, a perception of cultural diversity in which, like the pieces of a puzzle, the difference is only juxtaposed, and borders emerge, not as a space for encounter and hybridization, but as a line of demarcation between realities that do not interpenetrate.”
In “TURiSTA”, Bad Bunny sings about a lover who only knew the glamorous side of his life but not his pains and difficulties. On another level, he is alluding to tourists who visit Caribbean countries for the beauty of the beaches but do not care about local problems or American citizens who buy houses in Puerto Rico without caring that they promote social inequality by difficulting locals’ access to housing.
Beyond the subtext of “DtMF” and “TURiSTA”, the record’s most literal critique of Puerto Rico’s gentrification is in “LO QUE LE PASÓ A HAWAii”. Hawaii is an island that the United States took over and today represents a territory whose cultural identity and autonomy have been significantly impacted by processes of colonization, gentrification, and tourist exploitation. In this song, Bad Bunny warns of the risk that Puerto Rico shall have no other destiny: “They want to take away my river, and also the beach / They want my neighborhood and for your children to leave,” he intones over a minimalist instrumental made of Afro-Latin percussions and a gloomy chord progression.
Despite the melody and guitars seeming typical of an old-school salsa, the song has a slow tempo, and Bad Bunny sings it in a low register, expressing sadness and fear. There’s a beat pattern that ends abruptly, and it repeats throughout the whole track. It’s as if “LO QUE LE PASÓ A HAWAii” wants to explode into a pulsating salsa but holds back.
As the song ends and Bad Bunny is about to sing the lyric “I don’t want them to do to you what happened to Hawaii,” he doesn’t finish the sentence and the instrumental stops for a second. The interruption and silence suggest the fulfillment of the sad prophecy of the lyrics. The entire construction of “LO QUE LE PASÓ A HAWAii” is a metaphor for the suppression of the Puerto Rican identity that Bad Bunny sings about.
The harsh parallel between Puerto Rico and Hawaii, drawn by Bad Bunny, refers to the critical interculturality proposed by Catherine Walsh (2009), according to which “what matters is not only “recognizing, tolerating or incorporating what is different within the matrix and established structures” but also “imploding – from difference – the colonial structures of power as a challenge”.
More specifically about interculturality in Latin America, Walsh (2006) highlights that “it is linked to the geopolitics of space and place, to the historical and current struggles of Indigenous and black people and to the construction of social, cultural, political, ethical and epistemic projects, oriented towards social transformation and decolonization.” Despite containing specific commentary, DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS also reverberates to Latin Americans outside Puerto Rico.
Other elements of the record and its aesthetic reinforce an inter-Latin identity, such as the cover itself. It’s a simple shot of two empty plastic white chairs in front of banana trees in a backyard. The scenery feels familiar to many Latin Americans, especially Caribbeans, and speaks to the heart more through what (or who) is not present than for what is.
DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS is past and future-oriented at the same time. Bad Bunny uses nostalgia to spark a connection with the fans and denounce the risks of a future without the people or the culture they love. Intertwining individual and local particularity, Bad Bunny denounces that the places where beautiful memories are created can become just memories, too. If in “BAILE INoLVIDABLE” he sings “I can’t forget you / You taught me to love / You taught me to dance”, the album suggests that we can be taught to love and to dance not only by people in particular, but also by a place and its culture.
WORKS CITED
Ribeiro, António Sousa. Multiculturalismo, in Dicionário das crises e das alternativas. 2012.
Ribeiro, Gustavo Lins. Diversidade cultural enquanto discurso global. In Desigualdade & Diversidade: Revista de Ciências Sociais da Puc-Rio. 2008.
Walsh, Catherine. Interculturalidad crítica y educación intercultural. In Construyendo Interculturalidad Crítica. 2009.
Walsh, Catherine. Interculturalidad y colonialidad del poder. Un pensamiento y posicionamiento “otro” desde la diferencia colonial. In Interculturalidad, descolonización del estado y del conocimiento. 2006.