Bad Bunny’s new album leans on a UW-Madison prof’s research | Music

Following Bad Bunny’s joyful Super Bowl halftime show featuring music from his Grammy Award-winning album, “DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS” (translated to “I should have taken more pictures”), we are re-posting this interview from February 2025.

A UW-Madison professor helped the artist, whose given name is Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio, with background history that informed the album. This story was originally posted on Feb. 27, 2025. 

Jorell A. Meléndez-Badillo promised his wife, child and therapist he’d leave his laptop at home.

But when Bad Bunny’s team DMed him on Christmas Eve while Meléndez-Badillo was on vacation in Europe, he had to take the call. The singer’s team wanted this University of Wisconsin-Madison historian and professor of Latin American and Caribbean history to contribute historical narratives to pair with his new album, “DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS” (translated to “I should have taken more pictures”).

Meléndez-Badillo wrote “Puerto Rico: A National History,” published by Princeton University Press in 2024.

“Part of (Benito’s) thinking was that Puerto Rican history is unknown,” Meléndez-Badillo said.

Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio, known by his stage name Bad Bunny, is one of the most popular musicians in the world. The three-time Grammy award-winning artist was born and raised in Puerto Rico, and his music has helped make Spanish-language rap mainstream. His 2022 album, “Un Verano Sin Ti,” is the most streamed album on Spotify.

Back in Europe without his computer, Meléndez-Badillo got to writing, recounting and synthesizing critical historical moments in Puerto Rican history. This is history not often taught in public schools in Puerto Rico, from the territory’s history of surveillance to the significance of the light blue on the original Puerto Rican flag, to pair with the album.

With “DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS,” Bad Bunny highlights the political realities of the territory while centering the island’s cultural richness and identity. His lyrics speak directly to the people of Puerto Rico while weaving together sonic influences from Afro-Caribbean styles like bomba and plena.

Meléndez-Badillo added even more context to the album. His handwritten notes would become the basis for the visualizers paired with each of the album’s 17 songs, essentially slide decks highlighting important moments or themes in Puerto Rican history.

Bad Bunny has called attention to how little Puerto Rican history is taught in schools. Meléndez-Badillo said that’s because Puerto Rico has been “a colonial possession since 1493.” Colonialism, he said, necessitates the erasure of history — and not knowing history means it’s harder to change the current reality. 

Bad Bunny’s album, said Meléndez-Badillo, speaks to “cultural, national affirmation in the face of displacement and the erasure of our culture.”

Meléndez-Badillo took The Cap Times through three songs from the new album and how the visualizers he created speak to the lyrics and tone of the songs they were paired with.

Track #1: “NUEVAYoL” and the history of the Puerto Rican flag

“DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS” starts in New York City, home to the largest Puerto Rican population outside the island. It opens with a sample from “Un Verano en Nueva York” released in 1975 by El Gran Combo de Puerto Rico.

“It recognizes the importance of diaspora, not only historically, but also sonically,” Meléndez-Badillo said, pulling musical influence from “old school salsa with dembow, which is a very Dominican sound.” The song is nostalgic and evokes a longing to hold onto cultural identity away from home.

With his historical narrative, which has been viewed on YouTube more than 40 million times, Meléndez-Badillo said he “wanted to highlight the solidarity among Caribbean peoples” by telling the story of the current Puerto Rican flag, the bandera Puertorriqueña. The bandera was unveiled in 1895 in New York alongside exiled members of the Cuban Revolutionary Party and represents “a revolutionary aspiration towards independence.”

Initially, the flag, with a blue equilateral triangle and five stripes alternating between red and white, used light blue. In 1952, when it was adopted as the official flag of Puerto Rico, Governor Luis Muñoz Marín changed it to a darker blue to match the U.S. flag. 

The flag with light blue, said Meléndez-Badillo, was outlawed for a time and still remains a symbol of resistance and pro-independence. This is the flag that shows up in Bad Bunny’s video for Track 10, “EL CLúB.” 

Track #14: “LO QUE LE PASÓ A HAWAii” and endangered species

This song, which translates to “what happened to Hawaii,” is a song about “displacement,” “cultural erasure” and “extraction.” Bad Bunny sings a somber, sparse song, allowing instruments like the guitar and the güiro — a hollow Puerto Rican percussion instrument with notches, played with a stick — to stand out.

The song warns against further colonization and gentrification: “Quieren quitarme el río y también la playa / Quieren el barrio mío y que abuelita se vaya,” he sings, which translates to “They want to take my river and my beach too / they want my neighborhood and to see my grandmother leave.”

Meléndez-Badillo helps connect this warning by talking about extinct and endangered animals, specifically the sapo concho, the only toad endemic to Puerto Rico. Along with climate change and habitat disruption, the sapo concho faced threats from another toad, introduced during the early days of American colonization, Meléndez-Badillo writes.

He said Bad Bunny was “very clear of how he was thinking about this analogy.” Concho, an animated toad, appears throughout the album, including a short film directed by Bad Bunny that tells the story of an older Puerto Rican resident reckoning with the horrors of gentrification and whitewashing of culture.

Track #17: “LA MuDANZA” and a generation in crisis

Meléndez-Badillo thinks this song is a fitting way to end the album. Bad Bunny uses classic salsa rhythms to contextualize himself within Puerto Rico’s history. Before the music starts, he recounts his parents’ histories and how they met. Throughout the song, he asserts his presence and connection to the island.

Meléndez-Badillo used this visualizer (the YouTube slideshow that accompanies the song) to discuss the issues facing Bad Bunny’s generation.

“Ever since 2006 in Puerto Rico, we have been undergoing a series of fiscal, social and political crises that … (have) marked a generation,” said Meléndez-Badillo. “The only thing that they know and they’ve lived through is crisis.”

Young people have seen fiscal collapse spurred by the repeal of Section 936, a provision that made the island a tax haven for companies, in 2006. They’ve endured mass school closures, the impact of Hurricane Maria in 2017, and lack of access to basics like electricity and water.  (During this conversation, Meléndez-Badillo said his grandmother, who lives in Aguadilla in the western part of Puerto Rico, hasn’t had access to water for three days). 

Meléndez-Badillo cites these as reasons for why young people have left. Yet “LA MuDANZA” is about defiance and the reclamation of an identity and space that has always belonged to Puerto Ricans. 

“No one’s taking me from here. This is the land that my grandfather was born in,” Meléndez-Badillo said, roughly translating some of the song’s last lines. Bad Bunny finishes the song — and the album — by repeating, “Yo soy de P fuckin’ R.”