Bad Bunny's politics of presence

Just as a salsa hit lives and dies by the tightness of the coro's call-and-response, Bad Bunny's artistic power lives and dies by the tightness of his connection to his homeland. His reception in Puerto Rico is a hothouse incubator for his reception abroad; much of his global charisma comes from the palpable chemistry between the megastar and a people on the move and under siege. Recently, he's been strung out by touring, alienated by the rigors of fame far from home. If Bad Bunny's sign is money, the new zodiac, even his cleverest takes on that trope have not saved him from his Saturn Return. He's 30 this year, marking a decade in the music industry: Hola, quién soy? No sé, se me olvidó. But Benito's personal growing pains have a political corollary, and our boy was so back last year campaigning with La Alianza, an intergenerational coalition opposing Puerto Rico's statehood party. When he showed up to vote, he wore a light blue shirt (azul clarito, the color of the independence flag), high-waisted red trousers and tinted shades like salsa legend Hécto Lavoe. I saw the sign.

Bad Bunny has always been a scholar of Caribbean music, but mostly, 'til now, working to honor the cultural significance of his generation's música urbana. On DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS, he moves beyond millennial nostalgia, perceiving deeper patterns in the traditional musics of his archipelago — including, crucially, the Spirit Republic of diaspora. "When you listen to the lyrics, when you listen to the stories," Bad Bunny told Popcast, you realize "it's a full circle, and we're living the same thing." Some forms of repetition (hurricanes, rural dispossession, the losses of migration) can feel like a colonial curse, while others (mango season, kisses, Christmas carols) provide the only sustainable structure for survival. As Benito sings to Lorén on "Weltita," en repeat te voy a tocar.

Tradition is never a dead letter. The salseros of the 1970s were left populists committed to the longue durée of West African rhythms, including Puerto Rico's homegrown bomba and plena. But they were also running diasporic experiments with jazz and psychedelia, assembling an arsenal of handmade drums for dance-floor hits about Third World liberation, Black Power and the rigors of lust and betrayal. As the last remaining giants of that generation step back from the stage, it's our turn to safeguard the music they sustained and make it resonate in the chamber of the present. "I've been waiting for salsa to have its resurgence," Bad Bunny told Benicio del Toro in Interview Magazine a year ago, "for someone young to turn salsa into something modern and cool." But as Toni Morrison once counseled, true artists must make the art they long for.

DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS opens with a bang, mixing El Gran Combo's "Un Verano En Nueva York" into a stuttering dembow: Dominicans now outnumber Nuyoricans uptown, but we sound good together, and Bad Bunny returns to straight-up salsa with "Baile Inolvidable" — briefly, last week, the most-streamed song in the world. Bad Bunny says he thought of the mournful synth line first, then the muscled horns. Finally, the unmistakable slap of skin-on-skin forces his aimless vocal to get religion, to tighten up his sadboy seduction into a coro we can use: me enseñaste a querer / me enseñaste a bailar. While he will never have the supple virtuosity of, say, Cheo Feliciano, he shares the iconic salsero's deep register, sonido del ultramar, and it's strangely moving to hear him stretch the limits of his voice, to feel his gift for rhythm and humor traverse the holy ground of the intergenerational dance floor.

Before the album dropped, a fake tracklist circulated that included a song called "El Sol de Eddie Palmieri," and though I strongly doubted his team would allow for a leak, I let myself fantasize about a collaboration with my favorite old school salsero. Instead, Bad Bunny worked with young graduates — some just teens — at San Juan's public conservatory, placing his bets on salsa's future. His playful ad-libs dramatize Caribbean continuity between the sonero's patter, décimas, toasting, the dame lo que quiero of rap and reggaeton. To my ear, these bittersweet nothings are the foundation of our music, exhortations that both name and conjure the collective. Aprieta, chamaquito, he says, before scatting back Sebastián Torres' tender piano solo. That sounds good as hell. Do it again. This live exchange offers implicit contrast between the process behind this project and how Bad Bunny made most of his previous records: on the road, in bits and pieces, communicating with collaborators via WhatsApp. He's a gifted bard of these displacements — consider the distended drag between parts A and B of "La Romana" — but I suspect this new album's throwback tracks are charting so high because they remind us what we've lost by conceding shared space to digital disembodiment. Now we're back in the studio, tripping over the tangle of wires and swapping spit at the mic. We're back in the yard where our titi trades her beer for a güiro and gets to scratching that unscratchable itch.

Bad Bunny's politics of presence explode into euphoria on "Café con Ron," his collaboration with Los Pleneros de la Cresta. On the surface, the plena celebrates a night of revelry, summoning the listener along misty, twisting roads to a mountain hamlet where his friends are waiting to drink and dance. The theme recalls Palmieri's classic salsa "Vámonos Pa'l Monte" (1971): Here, too, I think of maroons who sought refuge in jungles and caves, where indigenous petroglyphs mark sacred stones and where, more recently, survivors of Hurricane Maria waited months — years, in some cases — to have running water restored. When Bad Bunny sings about burning rubber and huffing smoke up hairpin turns, about losing his way home in the dark, he's singing about the risk and effort required to maintain contact with loved ones and the land itself. If the beaches are the zone of the tourist's easy pleasures and predations, the mountains guard the "true codes" of Puerto Rican culture: "están arriba en el monte los códigos de veldá." He extends the metaphor on the anti-statehood bolero "Lo Qué Le Pasó A Hawaii": "in the green interior, it's still possible to breathe / the clouds are closer and you can talk to God."

Across the album's seventeen songs, Bad Bunny and his collaborators pay homage to the pastoral poetics of música jíbara: your mouth tastes like starfruit; the waves foam like champagne. But these images resonate most deeply, for me, in counterpoint to the urban poetics of the archipelago's decayed infrastructure and the reluctant migrant's vaivén: stay on your trip / when you land no one will clap. His talent as lyricist is leveling up to his talent as producer; he's always had a special feel for moments of harmonic resonance between genres. On "Lo Que Pasó A Hawaii," Luis Saenz' tinkling cuatro trades riffs with a menacing electric bass before the menace turns to mischief on "EoO": Colonial extraction is a downer, so our Boricua Dr. Feelgood prescribes perreo. These transitions are emotional as much as musical, lingering over — sometimes attempting to heal — the ruptures between generations. My sixty-year-old cousin texts to say she's never been a fan of Bad Bunny, but she loves "Pitorro de Coco," and I wonder whether she recognizes, at least unconsciously, the bass line from Willie Colón's "Aires de Navidad." Bad Bunny was specifically striving for an album "you could put on at family parties, so your uncle might say, 'I know that sample.'"

A few notes on dissonance: Many Puerto Ricans worship Bad Bunny, and plenty continue to criticize him, but no one is permitted to ignore the phenomenon. This is a symptom of his singular commercial power — but also, I think, his creative force, the way the raucous vitality of "Café con Ron" insinuates a familiar rhythm into the most intimate corners of our epigenetics. For my mother, the plena's call to "drink a gallon" glamorizes the violence and abjection of our family's alcoholism — suicidal car crashes, battered wives, corpses found on park benches — spoiling her taste for fun. For my friend Félix, the celebration of Bad Bunny's folkloric turn — "academic monographs by people who wouldn't even tell you good morning" — runs the risk of erasing the subcultural pleasures of San Juan's Black barrios, where he and his friends used to "run Hot Wheels to the rhythm of the tracks" when reggaeton was still widely reviled, when an album was good if it slapped and that's that.

"Debí Tirar Más Fotos," yes, but some of the pathos of the posed shot on the platanal comes from the evocation of our repressed memories, the negatives that we don't always manage to mobilize in the service of a new nationalism. As Bad Bunny well knows, the FLASH of both disaster and celebrity can be equally blinding, and some of us are tired of quieting our culture's internal conflicts to get cute for the front pages of imperial rags. It's thrilling to see him activate his platform to get out the vote, to launch a massive public education campaign about Puerto Rico's history of exploitation and resistance, to tap local indie bands for features and, yes, to breathe new life into traditional genres. But this has never been his only, or even primary, mode of connection to his listeners. The trapero who began by lamenting "Soy Peor" — now I'm worse, because of you — cues up the latent acoustics of "el jíbaro llorando" and salsa's wounded, defiant trombones to deepen the channel through which our ugliest feelings might flow. To clear our throats of strangled tears so we can sing.

In the last few days, my mother changed her mind, conceding the creativity of Bad Bunny's arrangements, and we had a rich exchange about popular poetry, the mysteries of zeitgeist and how refreshing it is to have a break from uptight bourgeois progressives hogging the people's mic. But if you're not a fan, fine, pichea — what Puerto Rico lacks in political capital it compensates for with musical abundance: Ramito, Rexach, Roena, Tito, Tego, Tainy, iLÉ. To say nothing of unsung artists like my grandmother, who left behind a radio show in San Juan — she performed boleros with Los Panchos — for a paper box factory in NuevaYOL. Real heads know Bad Bunny's just another bop on our magic jukebox; he's proud, I'm sure, to know it too. But now at the neighborhood bar the local pleneros might pick up a pandero and call out a new refrain: en la mañana café, por la tarde ron / estamos en la calle, sal de tu balcón. You've made it when the song survives your stardom, when the rhythm inscribes its own record.