Bad Bunny ❤️ PR
The superstar finds freedom amid his homeland’s glories and struggles on ‘Debí Tirar Más Fotos.’
Puerto Rico spent New Year’s Eve in darkness. On December 31, the archipelago’s notoriously unreliable power grid broke down, cutting off electricity to 1.2 million residents—or nearly 90 percent of the clients that rely on the reviled Canadian-American company Luma Energy to light and charge their lives. At midnight, most of the island was making do with candles and starlight.
Such outages are nothing new to Puerto Rico. The grid has been in woeful disrepair since Hurricane María in 2017, owing largely to U.S. government mismanagement and the feckless vagaries of privatization. It was around the same time that Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio, a onetime grocery bagger with a very good SoundCloud account, began earning wider acclaim as the people’s hero Bad Bunny. He was not just a voice representing a young generation of Puerto Ricans who’d become more galvanized by the circumstances of colonization, but a man on the ground who began his illustrious career by providing generators to his neighborhood in Vega Baja, and capturing the collective melancholy and resilience in songs like 2018’s dreamy “Estamos Bien” and 2022’s bold “El Apagón.”
Debí Tirar Más Fotos, Bad Bunny’s sixth and most comprehensively strident album about his home, arrived just a week after the New Year’s blackout (on Víspera de Reyes, no less). Its release also came just a few days after a drunk white woman from Missouri allegedly set fire to a bar in the touristy town of Cabo Rojo, on Puerto Rico’s southwest coast, leveling three businesses. These incidents throw some of the treacherous circumstances underpinning Debí Tirar Más Fotos into sharp context. Whereas Conejo’s more recent work—and global superstardom—led some to speculate that he had put aside his anticolonial megaphone in the face of more widespread (Anglo) acclaim, this album makes no bones about where he stands: in total devotion to his motherland.
