REVIEW: There’s a lot to take in on Debí Tirar Más Fotos, a Spanish language album where the past, present and future of music exist simultaneously, like the five-dimensional tesseract of the movie Interstellar.
The past few years have proved that it’s not enough for musicians to celebrate their roots: the clearest expressions of self come when tending to the branches and leaves, too. Whether Beyoncé‘s last two acts, Kendrick Lamar’s latest LA star tour or Charli XCX’s party girl adventure, pop music’s standard-bearers know where they’re going and where they’ve been.
It’s a lesson Bad Bunny has taken to heart, or more likely, come to on his own, on Debí Tirar Más Fotos, the solo album the singer-rapper released Sunday with little of the protracted fanfare that accompanies most major albums. Maybe a rollout seemed unnecessary for a project as immediate and rewarding as this celebration of his homeland, Puerto Rico, from its quotidian pleasures to its lifetimes of musical heritage.
Debí Tirar Más Fotos is the most Puerto Rican album Bad Bunny has released, mostly dispensing with the cross-pollinations of trap, club and Latin music with which he made his name. Instead, he has made an album of reggaeton, salsa and plena full of reverential nods to the past and big-ups to his contemporaries, all with the ear for the future that has made him a crossover star on his own terms.
On this album, the terms are set immediately with NuevaYol, a jam that pays homage to a 70s' salsa hit, but supercharges it into a speaker smasher in two parts: first, a reggaeton reworking and then an accelerating outro that turns Bad Bunny’s voice into percussion powered by helium. Lyrically, the song is dedicated to summer days in New York, a spiritual cousin to his world-conquering album Un Verano Sin Ti.
Throughout Debí Tirar Más Fotos, the interpolations and quotations of both touchstones and deep cuts – such as the names, places and slang in his lyrics – are Bad Bunny’s Easter eggs for fellow puertorriquenos. (For anyone tripped up by the barriers of language or culture, Bad Bunny has a simple message: “I don’t care,” he crooned to the New York Times.) And in an album with songs that abruptly turn into different songs, the moments of hesitation, digital stutters and gnarly gear shifts demand that listeners let their minds buffer.
There’s a lot to take in on Debí Tirar Más Fotos, an album where the past, present and future of music exist simultaneously, like the five-dimensional tesseract of the movie Interstellar. Synthesisers ring out with melodies and arpeggios that sound like video game soundtracks; beats gallop with dembow and four-on-the-floor rhythms; the hand percussion of salsa roots songs in the Puerto Rican soil; Spanish guitars shimmer like light through the water.
Take the standout track Baile Inolvidable: Across its six minutes, Bad Bunny shows off both edges of his vocal range alongside horns that glisten so sharply that they sound digital before the song doubles down on salsa and dips into jazz. Not that everything is overwrought or overcomplicated. The bass line on EoO brings screwface menace to perreo, while Weltita is the kind of breezy groove that could keep revellers dancing all year.
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Advertise with NZME.The latter song is a collaboration with Chuwi, a Puerto Rican quartet with a similar everything-in-the-mofongo approach. On Weltita, Chuwi vocalist Lorén Torres counters his voice with a feminine quaver; on Perfumito Nuevo, urbano singer RaiNao holds up her end of a love-and-lost duet. Other collaborations reach for the call-and-response plena of Los Pleneros de la Cresta and the next-gen reggaeton of Omar Courtz & Dei V, a tradition of elevating Latino artists that Bad Bunny has embraced for much of his career.
While the collaborators add sizzle, Bad Bunny is still the steak. His various phrasings and flows detail Miami flings, unforgettable romances and the complexity of URL-to-IRL hook-ups (even if all the mentions of Tinder, Snapchat and the “green circles” of Instagram’s close friends might age like oat milk as the digital churn continues). But his lyrics aren’t all lovey-dovey kisses (and more) on the beach: Bad Bunny is a helpless romantic, and much of the album deals with missing your ex during the holidays (Pitorro de Coco) or in the club (El Club). The latter is particularly poignant, as he sings about being dead inside and ghosted by God to a fist-pumping soundtrack.
But the yearning for old love – and the album’s titular wish that he had taken more photographs – seems to be deeper than romance and more tied to his relationship with Puerto Rico. He calls one ex a “Turista” who didn’t see him at his worst and didn’t deserve his best, seemingly like a tourist who stays at a resort, blind to the reality deeper inland. Lo Que Le Pasó a Hawaii connects the histories of American colonisation and prays Puerto Rico will not be subjugated like Hawaii, and closer La Mudanza lays out his family history via a cappella rap.
Debí Tirar Más Fotos is an album about remembering the things that matter most. For Bad Bunny, as he explains on the title track, those things are reggaeton, salsa, bomba and plena: Puerto Rico via musical microcosm. The album ends with a promise: Nobody will force Bad Bunny from the island, the land where his grandfather was born. And if that’s too subtle a message, he closes with some Spanglish that even hack comics can understand: “Yo soy de P f***in’ R!”
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