JUANA SUMMERS, HOST:
Bad Bunny has multiple Grammy Awards, record streaming numbers and is generally one of the world's biggest pop stars. But no matter how famous he gets, the focus of his music always comes back to Puerto Rico, where he was born and raised. And his new record is being called his most Puerto Rican and most political album yet.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "BAILE INOLVIDABLE")
BAD BUNNY: (Singing in Spanish).
SUMMERS: Alt Latino's Anamaria Sayre has been listening to the new Bad Bunny album since it was released on Sunday and joins us now. Hie there.
ANAMARIA SAYRE, BYLINE: Hey, Juana.
SUMMERS: Ana, let me start by asking you this. Tell me how you hear Puerto Rico on this album.
SAYRE: You know, Juana, it's hard to find a moment on "Debi Tirar Mas Fotos" that doesn't feel distinctly Puerto Rican. What he's effectively doing is using this album to do a survey of Puerto Rican music past and present. He's pulling on traditional sounds like the jarabe, which is folk music from the campo, historic Afro Puerto Rican bomba y plena protest music and Nuyorican diasporic salsa.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "BAILE INOLVIDABLE")
BAD BUNNY: (Singing in Spanish).
SAYRE: He then seamlessly marries that with dembow and reggaeton, the music that made him famous, and other contemporary Puerto Rican sounds. Beyond that, he's spotlighting new talent on the island. Some of his songs are so stylistically distinct and representative of the most contemporary, exciting sounds on the island, it almost feels as though he's featured on the music. And, really, giving up space like that - there's nothing more quintessentially Puerto Rican to me than that.
SUMMERS: And the sounds that we hear - is he using them to make political statements about Puerto Rico?
SAYRE: You know, Puerto Rico just had some really historic elections in November. A third-party candidate got a huge amount of support from across the island, and a lot of people are saying that musicians, including Bad Bunny, had a lot to do with that. Bad Bunny has now gone and released a record that pretty overtly expresses some of these same political opinions. Take the song "Lo Que Le Paso A Hawaii."
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "LO QUE LE PASO A HAWAII")
BAD BUNNY: (Singing in Spanish).
SAYRE: In this song, he's expressing an anti-statehood stance, basically warning Puerto Ricans what could happen if they go the way of statehood, like Hawaii. There's an urgency to the Puerto Rican pride he's expressing, and you can hear it in every second of the record.
SUMMERS: Do you think there's any sort of risk for Bad Bunny as a pop star to making an album like this one, which is so culturally specific?
SAYRE: You know, while the challenges and pain he's exploring are specifically dire in Puerto Rico, they really are widely felt across Latin America. Take the song "Turista."
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "TURISTA")
BAD BUNNY: (Singing in Spanish).
SAYRE: He's obviously referring to tourism, which is a major challenge on the island right now, but using this conceit of a jilted lover, expressing the pains of the island through the perspective of a heartbroken person. Now, this is a device that is used in Latin music all over the place, so it's something that a lot of people can relate to, both conceptually, with international gentrification on the rise, and musically.
SUMMERS: Ana, what do you think this album tells us about Bad Bunny at this specific moment in his career?
SAYRE: Bad Bunny has always been celebrated for being politically vocal. His last record was actually a moment of reprieve from that. He spent more time talking about the struggles of fame in a way that had some people questioning whether he still wanted to be so political. In this record, he claims he's not being political. He's just talking about things he cares about. But in "Debi Tirar Mas Fotos," he's a grown-up Bad Bunny. He's reflective, thinking about the passage of time and where he fits into the story of his island. It's clear that in the time he did spend away, he realized that nothing matters more than Puerto Rico.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "DEBI TIRAR MAS FOTOS")
BAD BUNNY: (Singing in Spanish).
SUMMERS: That's NPR's Anamaria Sayre, a host of Alt Latino. Thank you so much.
SAYRE: Thank you.
(SOUNDBITE OF BAD BUNNY SONG, "DEBI TIRAR MAS FOTOS") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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