How Bad Bunny Turned a Toad Into a Figurehead

The Atlantic

2 days ago

At the Brookfield Zoo, near Chicago, sloshing inside bags of oxygen and water, thousands of tadpoles await their transformation into what the Chicago Tribune has already dubbed 'celebrity amphibians.' A few months ago, the sapo concho was bound for extinction. The native Puerto Rican toad has long been endangered on the island thanks to habitat loss and invasive species. Yet fame, then fortune, found the concho: In January, Bad Bunny released his latest album, Debí Tirar Más Fotos, as well as a short film of the same name, both of which feature a cartoon concho. After the record's chart-topping release, the Puerto Rican Crested Toad Conservancy received donations toward funding a new breeding center on the island; the Brookfield Zoo's long-standing conservation efforts also got a media boost. And the concho found fans across the world—especially among people who see its plight as analogous to their own, and who have latched on to it as a symbol of resilience.
Along with its toad envoy, Bad Bunny's sprawling DTMF project has, as a whole, become anthemic for those facing displacement worldwide. The track 'Lo Que Le Pasó a Hawaii' ('What Happened to Hawaii'), for one, is a prophetic lamentation in which Bad Bunny urges Puerto Rico not to end up like Hawaii, referencing the cultural erosion and gentrification that has accompanied Hawaiian statehood; the song has been covered and close-read not just by Puerto Ricans but also by native Hawaiians, Dominicans, Costa Ricans, and Ecuadorians, who note their land's parallel struggles. 'DTMF'—the album's nostalgic title track, which features the chorus 'I should've taken more pictures when I had you'—has been called the 'unofficial anthem of the Palestinian people' and the 'soundtrack for Gaza's visual archive ' by some journalists, having been used on social media to accompany videos of life in Gaza and Lebanon taken before the events of October 7. ('I hope my people never move away,' sings a discordant crew of voices on 'DTMF,' sounding like an otherworldly band of ancestors.)
But the 13-minute Debí Tirar Más Fotos short film, which Bad Bunny co-wrote and co-directed with the filmmaker Arí Maniel Cruz Suárez, is the DTMF project's most poignant discussion of displacement. It speaks to the cultural erasure that threatens dispossessed people everywhere, the feeling of slowly losing a homeland—comparable to the ache of phantom limb. Bad Bunny's film brings this concept—often discussed using dry academic jargon—to life in a particularly inventive way: He throws viewers into a sensory-deprivation-tank model of Puerto Rico, in which the sounds and sights that define its culture seem to be going extinct. Debí Tirar Más Fotos proposes that, when Puerto Rican politicians respond insufficiently and callously to ecological disasters and cater to outside investors more than locals—as Bad Bunny has often noted they do—the island loses what makes it Puerto Rico: its music, its culture, its people.
The film highlights this tension through an allegory of an old man and a toad. The characters are more symbolic than specific, the kind of stand-ins that displaced people anywhere might relate to. The man (played by Jacobo Morales) is seemingly one of the few Puerto Ricans left in his nameless neighborhood; he is listed in the credits only as 'Señor.' His friend Concho is an anthropomorphic version of the endangered amphibian. Together, the film suggests, the two represent the Puerto Ricans, human and nonhuman, who are being ousted from the island by, among other factors, poor governance and social inequality.
Displacement isn't a new subject for Bad Bunny: The artist's 2022 song 'El Apagón' features the chorus 'What belongs to me, they'll keep it to themselves,' followed by 'This is my beach, this is my sun / This is my land, this is me.' His music video for the track took the form of a 22-minute documentary by the journalist Bianca Graulau; it was packed with reporting on how tax breaks have made it easy for investors to buy up properties, outprice locals, and develop luxury rentals across Puerto Rico. These critiques are undergirded by Bad Bunny's long-standing devotion to the island, which has been amplified in recent appearances he's made to promote his latest record. Take the Puerto Rican flag he projected onto Saturday Night Live 's stage in May during a performance, or his upcoming summer residency in San Juan, aptly titled 'No Me Quiero Ir de Aquí' ('I Don't Want to Leave Here').
The Debí Tirar Más Fotos short film, though, excels at depicting cultural upheaval: Instead of relying on headlines, as in the 'El Apagón' music video, Bad Bunny slips viewers into an off-kilter dreamscape—a Puerto Rico with barely any Puerto Ricans. Señor and Concho's community looks like a deserted Epcot version of the island. The empty streets are awash in pastel hues. When Señor strolls to the local bakery to get a treat, he encounters only a pair of young English speakers consulting their phones for directions and a grilling, football-playing family with drawling southern accents, whose patriarch gives Señor a 'get off my lawn' stare. The café exudes a watered-down Caribbean vibe—it's called the Flamboyán Bakery, after Puerto Rico's renowned flame tree, and quickly sells out of its vegan spin-off of the quesito pastry. Its menu is in English, and we seldom hear Spanish spoken among its employees and clientele. When Señor tries to pay in cash, he's told that the store is a 'cashless environment.' All of this may leave the viewer feeling disoriented: Is this really Puerto Rico?
There's also nary a reggaeton or salsa tune in the film's first act, which may add to the confusion. Only English-language country and emo-rock songs float out of the homes Señor passes. Not until the old man returns home from the pricey café, two-thirds into the film, do the longing plucks of a bolero song start to play (a snippet of 'Turista,' off Debí Tirar Mas Fotos). It scores a small, more classical portrait of Caribbean life; Señor places a moka pot on a gas stove, cuts up bread, and pours his cafecito into a little green cup. After a long, uncanny absence—and among the overall strangeness of the town—the bolero riffs land on the viewer like an emotive tidal wave, flooding the largely muted streets with sound. At the bakery, Señor seemed uncomfortable, forced to speak halting English; at home, with his daily tasks scored by swooning traditional tunes, he looks at ease once again. His house becomes an oasis of local Puerto Rican music in a neighborhood that appears to be quickly forgetting its culture.
This scarce use of Caribbean music feels intentional: One of the effects of gentrification, Bad Bunny proposes, is silence. Throughout the DTMF album, Bad Bunny laments how many Puerto Ricans have been forced to leave the island amid financial struggles and environmental disasters such as Hurricane Maria; this is most notable on 'Lo Que Le Pasó a Hawaii,' in which he notes that 'no one here wanted to leave, and those who left dream of returning.' (As of 2018, more Puerto Ricans live outside Puerto Rico than on the island; the same is true of native Hawaiians and Palestinians in their respective lands.) The DTMF short film makes their absence palpable. 'Did you hear that? That music!' the old man says to Concho, when a red sedan drives by their front porch playing reggaeton (Bad Bunny's 'Eoo'). The old man is moved. 'You barely see that anymore,' he says of the car moseying past. 'I miss hearing the young people hanging out, the motorcycles—the sound of the neighborhood.' Señor and Concho, it seems, live in a community that has turned its volume down, now that most of its Puerto Rican inhabitants have left.
Yet Bad Bunny offers up one possible way for Puerto Ricans both on and off the island—and any group facing similar trials—to resist the cultural erasure that can accompany displacement. The proposal: to joyfully tout their music and traditional symbols. It's an idea that's threaded through the DTMF album, which is full of imperative lyrics such as ' Don't let go of the flag nor forget the le-lo-lai ' (a lyrical scat often used in jíbaro music, a folk genre that originated in the Puerto Rican countryside). The accompanying film ends on a similar note, as Concho and Señor, the everymen of the island, model a moment of cultural pride. Concho suggests that his friend shake up the neighborhood's ghostly quiet; why not drive around blaring some perreo bops?
The old man entertains this idea, though only as a daydream. In his mind's eye, he sees himself behind the wheel of a Jeep, the windows down. He's blasting Bad Bunny's song 'Veldá' throughout the hilly, vacant streets. It's a triumphant, defiant vignette—an assertion that, as the old man tells Concho, ' seguimos aquí.' We're still here.