There are certain truisms that are hard to resist when talking about an album like Debí Debí Tirar Más Fotos, Bad Bunny’s sixth. The most significant is that this is a collection of songs that pay homage to the history of Puerto Rico, the homeland of its architect, Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio, who, after several years away, longs to return home. But as the album opens up, its narrative becomes even clearer: This is an expansive tribute to the archiving and safeguarding of cultures that has been—and continues to be—done not just in Puerto Rico, but in all corners of the planet. (Its title translate to “I Should Have Taken More Photos.”) As Bad Bunny comes home, so do we all.
This is not the first time Benito has looked to the past, nor the first effort he has made to make his country proud: On 2024’s Una Velita, he reflected on the devastation wrought by Hurricane Maria in 2017 and Puerto Rico’s turbulent political climate. (Benito has been ardently political across the last year, campaigning for a pro-independence candidate in Puerto Rico’s gubernatorial elections.) But even before he became a global phenomenon, he mapped the journey of those who came before him onto his own pursuits: Between his 2018 debut, X 100pre, and Debí Tirar Más Fotos, lies a journey rooted in creative and political ancestry.
“Historical memory is an active and creative force,” Puerto Rican researcher Juan Flores once wrote in a celebrated essay, “not just a receptacle to store the dead weight of times past.” On Debí Tirar Más Fotos, Benito harnesses the Puerto Rican slang that has been subjugated by American colonialism, creating ambitious sonic hybrids that pulse with the expanse of his country’s genres (from salsa, jíbaro, bomba, and plena to reggaeton) and vernaculars. So, too, does the record embrace other voices: Tracks were released with visualizers that included writing by professor of Latin American and Carribbean history Jorell Meléndez-Badillo about Puerto Rico’s political revolutions and its greatest activists; and a bevy of innovative young Puerto Ricans provided the instrumentation in the salsa, jíbaro, bomba, and plena songs. The celebrated Caribbean public intellectual Arcadio Díaz-Quiñones referred to “the rupture of the historical continuity of the Puerto Rican community at the hands of official repression and cultural exclusion” as a kind of “broken memory,” and on Debí Tirar Más Fotos album, Benito endeavors to regenerate that memory.
Debí Tirar Más Fotos evokes a universal feeling: the yearning for the ancestral in an era that can feel rootless and hopeless. On “LO QUE LE PASÓ A HAWAii” (“What Happened to Hawaii”), he laments the displacement and colonial pressures on Hawaii, sharing his hopes that the same won’t happen to his beloved Puerto Rico.
Yet Debí Debí Tirar Más Fotos is also an album that reminds us that time does its work, and the reconstruction of memory and creation of new experiences will forge new frontiers. In order not to forget, it is not necessary to remember. In order not to forget, it is necessary to live.