Global music superstar Bad Bunny’s latest project, DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS, has received rave reviews, as he weaves in Puerto Rico’s history, politics and the island’s diaspora throughout the album. That’s, in part, thanks to UW-Madison assistant professor of history, Jorell Meléndez-Badillo.
Meléndez-Badillo created brief written texts that accompany each Bad Bunny song. The visualizers, as they’re called, are short vignettes from across the island’s history. He spoke with WUWM's Jimmy Gutierrez about the process of collaborating with the music superstar and what history they wanted to share.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Jimmy Gutierrez: I feel like every Puerto Rican I know is a Bad Bunny fan, as well as the whole world at this point. What about Bad Bunny —the music, the artistry— appeals to you in both a historical way and a scholarly way?
Jorell Melendez-Badillo: I have this colleague Yarimar Bonilla who teaches at Princeton, and I read that she once said that Bad Bunny was like that primo, that cousin that made it. So everyone in Puerto Rico is proud of having that cousin that is on a global stage [and] there's a sense of Benito (Bad Bunny) belonging to us.
Now, on a more academic side, the Bad Bunny phenomenon is super interesting to me because I think there's a before and after Benito. He broke all the rules in the genre when he came out. Reggaeton was hyper masculine, macho, sort of aesthetic and then he started painting his nails, he sort of queered Reggaeton in a way.
Also, he got to this global platform speaking Spanish and not losing that. So, I think that Benito marks a turning point. In fact, my book Puerto Rico: A National History is a history of Puerto Rico from pre-Columbian times to Bad Bunny. And I have a chapter on [this] with Professor Santiago Ortiz called The Bad Bunny Enigma, and it's a bunch of scholars just trying to grapple with this question that you just posed, ‘What is it about Bad Bunny that is so fascinating,’ right?
Your work together covers 500 years of history, from pre-Columbian history to present day, and I want to kind of get into that collaborative process. How did that all come together and how did you all decide what history you would dig into?
So the mandate was basically that they wanted history to accompany the visualizers in YouTube. And so at first I thought it was niche sort of Puerto Rican history, unknown Puerto Rican history, but Benito came back and said, ‘You know, part of the problem is that any history of Puerto Rico is unknown even to Puerto Ricans.’ And so it was this balance of offering people a general history of the archipelago and its people and its diaspora, and more specific sort of themes and topics.
For me, having written a history of Puerto Rico from pre-Columbian times to Bad Bunny in 200 pages or less, [it] prepared me to write 17 visualizers of short narratives.
The first narrative —or the visualizer as they're called— that I would love to get into is the opening track, NUEVAYoL, which I'm looking at the numbers right now online and it has more than 38 million views. Will you ever write anything more popular as a history professor? Can I get you to read a little bit of it in Spanish and then translate a little bit of that in English? What message did you want to get across?
Absolutely. So, before I go into the lines, I just want to say that I really enjoyed that Benito put this song first in the record because I think it's a homage to that diasporic Puerto Rican and Caribbean culture in the states and abroad. And so the record doesn't start in San Juan or in Manatí or Vega Baja, it starts in the most Caribbean place in the world — in Nuevayol.
And so the visualizer is called La bandera Puertorriqueña.
Spanish: Mil ochocientos noventa y cinco a mil novecientos cincuenta y dos. Luego de varios siglos de colonización española…
So in this slide, what I wanted to do was to begin by saying that the first time that we are referred to in the colonial record is in a pejorative manner. The Spanish colonial officers were calling us bastards and how Puerto Ricans have always resignified the pejorative ways that people have addressed us.
And also to talk a little bit about the Puerto Rican flag itself and how it was not created in Manatí. It was actually created in New York City. It was unveiled in 1895 at the Cuban Revolutionary Party's committee, which had a Puerto Rico section, and so it signified the combined struggle for independence of Cuba and Puerto Rico. And although it was later incorporated by the Puerto Rican government, it was illegal for some time to have the Puerto Rican flag. It has a revolutionary origin and it has a diasporic origin as well.
The next song I would love for us to get into is the actual album title track, DeBí TiRAR MáS FOToS, which also has a short video. This is not an original thought, but it was a thought that I had while listening to the album—the evolution of Bad Bunny as an artist, the evolution of reggaeton, the incorporation of Afro-Caribbean instruments and sound.
I did not get to decide which text went with which song, but I think that the team did a wonderful and beautiful job merging them together. And this particular slide was something that Benito wanted. He wanted something about the history of plena and bomba, which are these two Afro-Caribbean rhythms. And how they are the basis of reggaeton.
Bomba and plena are two Afro-Caribbean rhythms that were understood as noise. They were actually policed and people were arrested or fined for playing bomba as close as last year. There was an incident in the southern part of Puerto Rico where the cops were called on people. So [the message is] how it became the basis of reggaeton and to also pay homage to the Afro-Caribbean dimension of reggaeton because Benito has talked about being a white Puerto Rican. But reggaeton in its essence is an Afro-Caribbean rhythm.
OK, so the last song that I would love for you to break down is my favorite song on the album —the song that I've had on repeat for a month—BAILE INoLVIDABLE. I'm guessing it's more than just a heartbreak song or a longing song.
I think it's a great song because although there’s salsa in the record from the get-go, and throughout the record, I think it was his attempt of paying tribute to that music that basically raised a lot of us in Puerto Rico.
And so in this particular slide, I was talking about the creation of the Commonwealth in Puerto Rico in 1952, which is the current political status that we have, but also talking about the agency of Puerto Ricans.
We were talking earlier about how we're often infantilized in the media and it goes all the way back to 1898 when the United States invaded Puerto Rico and they produced cartoons of Puerto Ricans as children, as, women in distress. And so it was a way of also talking about the agency that we've had throughout our history and that contrary to some beliefs, we're not docile. It's a history of indocility, the history of Puerto Rico.
Thinking about your work and Bad Bunny's work, and how those messages and history reach—or don’t reach—Boricuas in Wisconsin, I’m looking at some numbers. We have more than 65,000 Boricuas in the state. And I know we’ve touched on the fact that this history is largely unknown and inaccessible. For many, returning to the island just isn’t realistic. So what are the challenges of staying connected with what’s happening in Puerto Rico right now? And what does an album like this do to bridge that gap?
That is a question that a lot of scholars and non-scholars and Puerto Ricans have been thinking a lot about, precisely because there's more Puerto Ricans in the diaspora than in the archipelago.
And in my work, one of the ways that I've sought to address that is that when writing a general history of Puerto Rico, I incorporated the Puerto Rican diaspora as part of the narrative. Our general history books did not take into consideration the Puerto Rican diaspora.
I think that this record is doing something incredible by positioning itself in New York from the first song onwards because it's a nod about the importance of Caribbean and Latin culture, not only in the Caribbean and in Latin America, but also in the United States.
It doesn't mean that that struggle is less important than what's happening in Puerto Rico. What's happening in Puerto Rico is brutal. We go through power outages on an almost daily basis [and complete] lack of infrastructure.
This record offers a way of connecting with a sense of Puerto Ricanness — that sort of affirmation. I think that a record like this one seeks to bridge that gap and it just makes us proud of being who we are, but also acknowledging the challenges and difficulties of our people.
I’ve heard you call this album a snapshot of the present moment we’re in—which, if that’s the case, DeBí TiRAR MáS FOToS is the perfect album title. But if it is a snapshot, who is Bad Bunny leaving that snapshot for, and what does he want the island to look like in the future?
I think that in the last few years, Bad Bunny has become more aware of himself as a political actor and recognized his political agency. This is not new. The first time he appeared on national television, it was in the Tonight Show, and he used that stage to talk about a murder of a trans woman in Puerto Rico.
He used the platform he had in El Apagón that song that he dropped, and then all of a sudden you're watching the video and it becomes a documentary on gentrification, right? So it's not new that he's using his platform.
I think it's a snapshot because we are at a moment where we're being displaced. There's a wealthy class that's being attracted by the government through a series of incentives that makes Puerto Rico a tax haven for millionaires. We are at a moment where rapid gentrification is displacing communities in the island. We're losing our culture. And so I think that Benito is very aware of what's happening and is very vocal about it. I guess that the future that Benito wants is one where he and his people can stay in Puerto Rico if they still want it and have a decent living.
