reviews / 2025

BAD BUNNY - Debí tirar más fotos

Name: BAD BUNNY – Debí tirar más fotos
Item: Debí tirar más fotos
Rating: 5.5
Author: Federico Romagnoli

2025 (Rimas)

reggaeton

by Federico Romagnoli

5.5

On January 20th, Rolling Stone published an article titled “Bad Bunny Took Plena and Salsa Songs to No. 1. Here's Why It Matters”, written by Vanessa Díaz, a university professor specializing in Chicano and Latino culture.

The article argues that Bad Bunny's new album, titled “Debí tirar más fotos”, is on one hand shining a light on traditional Puerto Rican music, exposing it for the first time to a global audience, and on the other defending the island's culture, drawing attention to the problems afflicting it, from gentrification to forced emigration.

Unfortunately, the impression is that this theory was formulated by riding the wave of poptimism, the critical trend that has now definitively taken over and tends to exaggerate – when not inventing outright – the countercultural merits of artists who are fully embedded in the jet set and have no intention whatsoever of subverting the market rules that are suffocating independent music. It is no coincidence that the same article cites the lavish praise for the album from Maykol Sanchez of Spotify and Jerry Pullés of Apple Music: a music criticism publication, as Rolling Stone claims to be, should perhaps point out the slight conflict of interest represented by the fact that those trying to convince us of the merits of this music are precisely the people who work for the platforms that launched it with such fanfare. Instead, these statements are used as an argument in favor of the record.

Regarding the album's content, the article points out that the track “Dtmf” is a plena and that this marks the first time the genre, typical of Puerto Rican folklore, has reached the upper echelons of international charts: this is a half-truth. The track begins as an atmospheric reggaeton and introduces a rhythm traceable to the plena only at 0:50”: from that point on, the traditional elements increase, with the gradual entrance of string instruments and choruses. Considering that the lead vocal part, Bad Bunny's, stays true to his usual style throughout, passing the track off as a plena is a distortion, since it is actually a reggaeton with some elements of plena. This isn't about splitting hairs, because it's clear the track became a hit precisely because it's sung by Bad Bunny and because it fits the production characteristics of the reggaeton, and not for the rhythmic elements drawn from the plena: believing that this will bring media exposure to Puerto Rican folk music, unless it's picked up by other already well-known artists, is wishful thinking.

Even for other musical forms featured on the album, such as the salsa, Díaz's narrative is highly selective: "Nuevayol", for example, samples a long portion of "Un verano en Nueva York", a great classic of salsa released in 1975 by Gran Combo de Puerto Rico, which the professor doesn't mention at all. It's at the very least jarring that, after praising Bad Bunny's supposed courage in putting the salsa and the plena in the spotlight, one would forget one of the singer's main points of reference. Unfortunately, the impression is that the piece works backwards: the narrative's spotlight is entirely on Bad Bunny for his revivals, not on the quality of the material being revived, which is why citing Gran Combo, perhaps the most important Puerto Rican group in history, turns out to be entirely superfluous — if anything, it risks creating a stumbling block and making Bad Bunny look like someone recycling other people's music.

The only track that truly celebrates old Puerto Rican culture without shortcuts or mystification is “Baile inolvidable”, which is a salsa in every respect, with a classic arrangement not vulgarized by the influence of reggaeton, except in the brief introduction: even Bad Bunny makes an effort to sing in a manner more fitting to the genre, though he only partly succeeds, given his enormous technical limitations (which happens when you spend your entire career processed through autotune). That said, the track's mainly choral structure makes the problem easy to overlook, and the result is enjoyable.

Another thing Díaz seems to pretend not to notice is that the album, despite this handful of crossover touches, remains on the whole a rather orthodox reggaeton record: the most obvious blends with tradition are based on heavy sampling rather than original creations ("Pitorro de coco" rests almost entirely on ajírabagroove borrowed from "Si yo fuera alcalde" by Chuíto el de Bayamón, dating back to 1972), while tracks like "Voy a llevarte pa pr", "Perfumito nuevo" or "Eeo" rely entirely on the dembow typical of the genre and show no particular innovation in the arrangement.

Given that we're talking about a seventeen-track album, those few moments in which Bad Bunny, without resorting to sampling, remembers his homeland's rich heritage are not nearly enough to justify the over-the-top praise being heaped on the project these days.

The album's average score of 95 out of 100 on Metacritic — adding up ratings from magazines that, until now, have never shown any interest in Latin culture except for the names the music industry hands them, like Bad Bunny or Rosalía — is the perfect capstone to a tragicomic picture, as well as yet another distortion stemming from the imperialist attitude Anglophone criticism continues to hold toward everything outside itself.

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02/02/2025

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This article is an English translation of the original Italian text by Federico Romagnoli, published on OndaRock.it. It was translated with the help of artificial intelligence, under the editorial responsibility of OndaRock's editor-in-chief, Claudio Fabretti.

Read the original in Italian · About the English edition