To my daughter Daniela Isabel, my son Gustavo Andrés, and my nephew Gabriel Armando Mora Quintero.
To my isabelina and moroveña families—all this rediscovered emotion.
You ask where I’m from?
Where am I headed?
I come from the land of sweetness,
Where am I headed? I’ll spread joy.
The rich, soulful flavor
that Puerto Rico can give,
Lolelolai, Lolelolai, lolelola.
Héctor Lavoe, “Paradise of Sweetness”
To immerse oneself in the enjoyment of a musical scene, an image, or a voice is one of many possible ways to engage with the narratives and sonic sequences that shape a musical genre. Listening there with persistence, returning regularly to that space, transports practices and could offer a training for enjoyment that each generation re-edits without need of templates or rubrics. This aural situation is also a way of pausing and inhabiting such musicality, though at times, this acoustic pause might resemble a delicate hovering or a sensory suspension. With the hindsight granted by lived time, this dwelling and passing, this experience of moving through a genre, reveals itself in memory as a “school.” Not a school in the sense of formatting, disciplinary alignment, or the pedagogical framing of subjects—fill in the blanks and choose the best answer, boy—but rather scholḗ, as the ancients called it. School as free time, as a space of leisure and time released from labors for the enjoyment of life. School as a threshold of suspended times, as flotations, refuge for idling and for styling materials, a workshop of instants where employment vanishes and styles become possible. School as a zone of exploration of techniques to unbind oneself from waged everydayness, even from the political predictability of hackneyed answers or cliched “resistances.” Here one speaks of school as formation in practices, often fleeting, that de-subordinate us from that modern vassalage called being employed. This musical and sensorial school is, moreover, a relation with the time of listening to that musicality, a formative listening in a tradition that is also a space of experimentation (experience and investigation) with the time of passions, with time itself, and with the passage of images; A space of experimentation where historicity displays its moments as forms, as plateaus, hills, or coastlines.
To attend a genre involves engagement with another kind of institutionality—one now built into the fabric of emotions, shaped by images and materials not formalized by State knowledge, will to power, or conventional political spaces and meanings, whether left or right. A genre—even some musical groups—becomes a school: El Gran Combo de Puerto Rico is “The University of salsa”, and Tommy Olivencia’s Primerísima orchestra was named “Little School”. There, one claims to be from the “old school”; here, another declares they’re from the “new school and killing it.”
Bad Bunny is, without a doubt, “El mejor de la nueva/ porque [se crio] en la vieja escuela” (“The best of the new one/ ’cause he was raised in the old school.” (LA MuDANZA). And the vieja escuela is celebrating and rolling strong with DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS (DtMF, Rimas Entertainment 2025), the most recent studio album—with live musicians—by Puerto Rican singer, songwriter, reggaetonero, and producer Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio. Released worldwide on January 5, 2025, the eve of Día de Reyes, at the time of writing these lines the album is already a global phenomenon with more than 1 billion streams. In the words of Billboard magazine: “One week after Bad Bunny achieved the first number 1 from his new album DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS on Billboard’s Hot Latin Songs chart, the Puerto Rican adds another milestone, as ‘DtMF’ climbs from No. 5 to No. 1 on the January 25 list, marking his sixteenth No. 1 to date.” On January 24, the plena “DtMF” was the most streamed song in the world on Spotify, with more than 10.8 million plays, and by February 3, 2025, it had already reached 7 395 845 streams.
DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS is “dedicated to all Puerto Ricans across the world” (back cover). For many, it embodies a moment of awe and euphoria, the poetic and imaginal potential of fiesta and mudanza (movement/moving out of house/town, change) intrinsic to the Puerto Rican archipelago now reanimated in Martínez Ocasio’s songs. The “Canción festiva para ser llorada” (“Festive Song to Be Wept”), once heard by Puerto Rico’s foremost poet Luis Palés Matos nearly a century ago, is reprinted in the musicality of Martínez Ocasio and reveals what it has always been: a space of signification and poetic sense for the existential traffic of the Caribbean. There, now in Martínez Ocasio’s album, this poetics undergoes a transformation that the vegabajeño singer has been developing for some time.
The poetic intelligence of the monolingual—who, by mastering their language, transforms into sensible matter the linguistic multiplicity inherent in every language—finds its confirmation in Martínez Ocasio’s Spanish. With this language, unintelligible to some, “mistreated,” as others say, and a source of ridicule for certain Latin Americans and Spanish speakers, Martínez Ocasio charts the emotive-archipelagic here of a P FKN R where more photos should have been taken. And he does this not far from Celia Cruz’s refusal to record in English (since her “English is not very good looking”). Bad Bunny’s musical tongue aligns with the absence of salsa hits in English across the discographies of Héctor Lavoe, Ismael Rivera, and the classic Fania All Stars catalog. His language cleaves to the gloriously antinomic verse of Pedro Pietri in his legendary poem Puerto Rican Obituary: “AQUÍ Se habla Español all the time” (Pietri, 1977). Jacques Derrida, too, rises here to make his torque felt: “1. One never speaks more than one language. 2. One never speaks a single language” (Derrida, 1997). The latitudes and longitudes of Martínez Ocasio’s slang, through which he situates the “location”—whether his home, the place “where they made the kid,” or the latest spot for jangueo—compose the imaginal dimension where one can exercise that retrospective desire to have captured and held the moment of love and friendship. This “here” is simultaneously Puerto Rico, a poetic act of Martínez Ocasio, the place where Concho, the native toad of the island, endangered, says, “Estamo’ aquí. (We still here)” (Concho is the poetic animal of the album, accompanying the “visuals” of each song, and a character in the short film of the same name, co-written and co-directed by Martínez Ocasio and Arí Maniel Cruz Suárez.) Moreover, with this release, Martínez Ocasio declares his anachronistic desire to take more photos of others, of the beauty of his community, threatened by yet another displacement—please, amid disaster, no more selfies.
A moment of agitation, of embolle (goosebumps running down me), because Benito—yes, Benito, as he prefers to be called and as he wishes to be remembered (he damn near could’ve been named Bendito, for fuck’s sake)—has, in just a matter of days, unleashed in Puerto Rico something that collapsed institutions of learning and knowledge, academic and institutional discourses both inside and outside the island, and political parties as well as leftist or pro-independence organizations have been unable to achieve for decades: a concrete, flavorful conversation about the existential conditions of the Puerto Rican community. Above all, it is a conversation about those in the archipelago who endure the colonial condition of being an unincorporated territory of the United States in the early twenty-first century, about the aftershocks of Hurricane María (2017), the uprising of the Summer of 2019, and the prolonged implosion of the Estado Libre Asociado de Puerto Rico (Free Associated State), administered since 2016 by a Fiscal Control Board under the Puerto Rico Oversight, Management, and Economic Stability Act (PROMESA). A law and a Board —neither ever voted in by a single Puerto Rican)— tasked with “restructuring” Puerto Rico’s debt and “achieving fiscal responsibility.” Enacted under President Barack Obama, this law has aimed to “clean up” an unsustainable burden of over $70 billion in debt and more than $55 billion in unfunded pension liabilities, at a time when Puerto Rico has no legal or financial mechanism to restructure obligations and stabilize government finances. Within this complex—and often painful— context, DtMF has sparked a curiosity and passion for Puerto Rican history and musicality inseparable from his fronteo:
If I die tomorrow, I hope y’all never forget my face
And drop one of my tracks the day they bring Hostos
In the coffin, the light blue flag
And let ‘em know it was always me, always been Benito
Tryna top me? Man, you crazy
Nah, bro, you crazy. “LA MuDANZA”
For some, these are also times of amazement, tenderness, and fragile hope. In the times we find ourselves, Benito champions a duty pulled from the shadows, devoted to documenting —through music-as-photography— what truly matters and make a world possible. The album’s title and its flagship track, DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS (I Should’ve Taken More Photos), are not mere nostalgic episode but the sonic enactment of a desire to be present in spaces under threat, the here or there of expropriation and displacement. The album’s multimedia artistry (including an upcoming artist residency in Puerto Rico), deliberately crafted with Puerto Rican genres and rhythms, is not a nostalgic exercise but a sabrosa counterattack against the extractive logics of expulsion and dispossession that define contemporary Puerto Rican life. Logics that sweep across the planet in their devastation, reaching far beyond the social and political experience of Puerto Ricans.
Benito wishes he had taken more photos, because he longed to be present in the territory itself, in the very instant when cherished places and bonds (querencias) secreted their marvel, their pendejá, making life, world, and ricura (lusciousness) palpable across the islands. So, he tells his corillo (fam), “echen pacá” (“come over here”), and snaps the shot. Ultimately, it is an invitation to inhabit the time—the right now—of Puerto Rican things and passions, which the world today makes its own. In the images, through the water and earth of those deepers longings emerging from darkness, along what Palés Matos called “la encendida calle antillana” (“the burning Antillean street”), swims—no, shatters—a gleaming dolphin named Benito.
Calle Sol, calle Luna, I’m in the darkest night
I don’t sing reggae, but I am culture
Of Borinquén, PR, perfect archipelago
The whole world knows my dialect now, my slang
I don’t’t give a fuck about what you don’t give a shit about
Here, they killed people for raising the flag
So now I carry it everywhere, motherfucker, what?
(Ha) (“LA MuDANZA”)
In DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS, here and now are interchangeable parts of a quest to sonically carve space for immediacy—to surrender to the significant in that very instant. The photo-song would hold and preserve the certainty of having been there.
Now then, DTMF is a work both owed and devoted to the responsibility of entering a world in which mudanza (movement/moving out, change) in all its senses, has been equally possibility and rupture—the very historical potential that goads the singer with this long-forgotten duty, revealing at last what he once held in his hands.:
I should’ve taken more photos when I held you
Should’ve given more kisses, more hugs when I could
Hope my people never have to move away
And if I get drunk tonight, I hope they carry me home (“DtMF”)
Nobody here wanted to leave—
and those who did? They dream of coming back.
If my turn ever came, oh, how it would tear me up.
Another jíbara standing her ground,
refusing to give in.
She didn’t want to go either—
and she stayed on the island.
[Chorus]
They want to take my river and my beach too.
They wanna take my barrio, make your kids move through.
No—don’t drop the flag, don’t forget the lelolai,
I don’t want them doing to you what they did to Hawaii. (“LO QUE LE PASÓ A HAWAii”)
The rooster sheds its feathers, the crab its shell; one carries an extra set of clothes, just in case—and so they move, they leave, they have gone; inhabitants first, and later Puerto Ricans en masse, ever since the Spanish colonial era. The images and unraveling, the journeys and transformations magnetized by la mudanza—the word, the image, and the historical experience—are the ethical heart of the album, whose resonances ignite the emotional and poetic tremors it has set off across the planet. The album is full of journeys and displacements, departures, strolls, little detours; even relationships, characters, and erotic “encounters” evoke images of transit, stay, or tourism: “From Arecibo to Ponce/ from Fajardo to Rincón. It’s the voice of a whole neighborhood/ from Almirante to Frontón” (“CAFé CON RON”); “Hey, hey, you’re a pothole in PR / that’s why I dodge you” (“BOKéTE”). Even more, la mudanza is the engine room driving Benito’s responsibility to be present in his own time, giving sound to a photographic desire that is, unmistakably, a yearning for the image of that time and the emotion that defines it.
Thus, the tracks “NUEVAyOL” (which opens the album), “DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS,” “BAILE INoLVIDABLE,” “LO QUE LE PASÓ A HAWAii,” “CAFÉ CON RON,” “EoO,” and “LA MuDANZA” (the closing track) are the sonic cordillera for poetic action, the potens of mudanza summoned by the artist from Vega Baja his use and mutation of old-school sonority. Whether it’s the plenera, the old school of música jíbara, the old school of salsa, or the old school of reggaetón, Benito’s engine never hesitates to fuse all that musical diversity with quick-fire repetitions and stutters, with voices folded in, with echoes from the countryside, or with the voceteo (car-stereo blasting) of today, among other textures.
Up in the hills today it breaks loose,
from sunrise ‘til the sun disappears.
The hills are alive with the break,
tires screeching, smoke pouring—turn it louder, let it roar.
Up here, the mountain shakes,
come climb, come feel the torque kick your chest wide open
(come up here so you can see).
We keep rising, always rising,
never dropping, never down.
Climb with me into the mountain—
this night, I stay right here.
[…]
Down below! (Down below!)
Down below! (Down below!)
There’s nothing I need, nothing I’ve lost.
The codes—the real codes, the true ones—
they live up here!
Up here in the mountain’s breath! (Climb up here so you can see!) (“CAFé CON RON”)
Sorry —Benito does not engage in maroonage. This album is no act of maroonage, in any sense, in any meaning, at any level. In this space, there is no flight, no escape, no palenque, papa. The album itself—even as an entrepreneurial project—and the spectacularity that sustains it are not divorced from the hegemony of capital, nor does the album feature hymns or genuflections typical of that political congregation that mistakes declamation for radical proposition. In any case, up in the hills, there emerges the desire to separate from a world in ruin, to be with family, and to protect the corillo and the party— “since you never know if we have much time left.” So, it doesn’t matter if you’re up in the hills or heading down to Santurce. DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS places Puerto Rico’s rural, coastal, and urban sounds at the center of the global music scene, and above all, he insists on what he has been doing since earlier albums: leading us into that childhood room, where a solitary boy never tires of listening to music, never tires of feeling the company of his toys and favorite images. This is where Concho is now. In that very space, you hear the cry of saxophonist Eddie “La Bala” Pérez of El Gran Combo de Puerto Rico (RIP). It’s the listening space where the subject Bad Bunny was formed; there, he absorbed the old school, and from that chamber of resonances, he interacts with and produces his artistic desire. Likewise, Benito revitalizes the “going up to the hills” that the great Eddie Palmieri and Ismael Quintana gifted us (“Vámonos pal monte,” 1978), while also bringing the intimacy of the neighborhood to the emblematic space of Puerto Rico’s “great migration” in the mid-20th century: New York. New York feels just around the corner.
This multiplicity —the avatar of the here and now— is where the old school and the countryside provide the codes for another arrival into the world, another full plunge into “the things that matters / Ey, for perreo, salsa, bomba y plena / Check mine out, see how it sounds” (“DtMF”). Moments of joy and grace unfolds in this musical mudanza, where Benito “begins” knowing full well his musicality has been emerging for centuries. Who could not be moved upon hearing the echoes and rhythmic patterns of bomba and plena? Who would not shiver at the reassembled sonority of salsa—the genre in its emergent moment, at the height of its international reach, in the voice and body of Héctor Lavoe, Willie Colón, Ismael Rivera, El Gran Combo de Puerto Rico, Frankie Ruiz, and others? There, one senses the echoes of the Lamento borincano, the trace of the immense Chuito from Bayamón, the guitars of the Trío Vegabajeño, the piano humming of Papo Lucca and his Sonora Ponceña…
All this lineage, this vieja escuela, turns the gear for Benito’s experiment with dembow, trap, and reggaetón, or vice versa. And here comes Benito, he’s here now, haloed by trombones and panderos, alongside some of the indispensable of the old school, still alice among us, quick to greet him, proud as ever:
My people in the Bronx know what’s up
Riding the high through Washington Heights.
Willie Colón, they call me ‘El Malo,’ hey,
Years keep rolling, and I’m still hitting hard (“NUEVAYoL”)
Who could have imagined—the sonic and poetic transformation of the salsa machine, “the evolution” of the genre, as Willie Colón said— taking shape in Bad Bunny’s music? And him, carrying forward Tego Calderón’s salsa passion?
DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS is a global musical-artistic phenomenon because it engages with the logics and emotions of forced displacement and expropriations—including those of meaning and value—that define contemporary existence. That is the album’s true “language,” a tonality that resonates even with those who don’t speak Benito’s Boricua slang but listen to it and revel in it comoé (“as it should be”). Bad Bunny is today the Caribbean’s top-selling composer—because his songs carry the weight of emotions tied to expulsion, to the expropriation of experience and meaning. Even intimate, the personal, the subjective—everything that stirs the uproar of our times— pulses through his music. If “Puerto Ricanness,” as shaped by Benito amounted to nothing more than a heritage, a patrimony whose mysteries or meanings could be accessed only by Boricuas, a kind of master key to understand and perform the historicity of Puerto Ricanness itself—then the moment and phenomenon of Bad Bunny would be comprehensible and consumable only by purebred Boricua, true-blooded Puerto Ricans (ha).
Mudanza is always possible—an open, ever-present possibility—and heading up to the monte or hitting the road to vacilar offers no guarantee that the move won’t come again. Faced with this truth, he photographs his dreams or transforms them into songs. What was “what happened to Hawaii” years before and after its annexation by the U.S.? Through which historical processes of expropriation and colonialization was the original community reduced to a minority and stripped of their archipelago? Benito does not only work with mudanza as an experience of displacement and expulsion from one’s place of residence; moving or hustling through a mudanza to make ends meet (buscársela) is also the event that allows him to be born and to know the land of his father and mother. During a mudanza, in Almirante, Benito’s father meets his mother; and they later lived in Morovis, “donde hicieron al nene” (“where they made the kid”).
One day Tonito invited him out for a moving job (mudanza)
To hustle a little, earn a couple bucks—it hels a bit, for something
Thank God he wasn’t busy that day
‘Cause during that mudanza he met Lysi
The youngest of three, raised by Doña Juanita
Since her mom and dad left when she was little
She promised to graduate before getting married—and kept her word
In December ‘92, she married Tito
Before moving to Almirante where they first met
They lived in Morovis, where they made the kid
Who would later be seen the first time in Bayamón
A round of applause for Mommy and Daddy, because truly they crushed it. (“LA MuDANZA”)
Inseparable from his devotion to Puerto Rican genres and rhythms is Benito’s amorous, erotic discourse, haunted by past breakups and ruptures he never overcomes. The ex- haunts him—neither the jodedera, the clout, nor the capital of the one “que más le mete” can exorcise her. Even this has shifted in meaning in current times, becoming a core part of the genre’s hook and gesture. The collapse of contemporary intimacy, the radical solitude amid the frenzy of marketable, platform-driven or algorithmically self-presentations—where connectivity has become the ultimate symptom— and the affirmation through negation of a new kind of seclusion, in which anxiety serves as the surname of metastasizing visibility.
I’m leaving now. Benito is the contemporary (Agamben) composer par excellence in these times, an era when U.S. inaugurates a deliberately authoritarian and racist state. Today, Benito stands as the living Puerto Rican poet of greatest social and cultural impact. I can already hear the prettifications and simplifications, the rips of clothing, the dismissals and the idealizations. For some time know, more than a few academics have been stirring their projects—framing, always framing—, because they can’t go up and down the stairs without a theoretical frame, shadowing the reading of Benito’s musicality, with their respective archival ailments, their identitarian talismans, patriotic posturing, disciplinary branding, or plain envy. Go ahead, invent something there.
It remains to be seen—or rather, heard— what the effects and reverberation of this material and historical project, not merely symbolic or rhetorical, will be in the days to come. At least Benito puts his money where his mouth is: he not only works with young, non-established Puerto Rican artists and musicians, but also produces and directs a short film and launches an unprecedented residency at San Juan’s Coliseo José Miguel Agrelot Coliseum (El Choliseo). Originally scheduled from July 11–August 24, the residency now has eight additional dates through September 14, and at the time of writing, every show is sold-out.
On the night of January 15, 2025, Benito stood before El Boricua, close to the university campus in the town Río Piedras—a skeleton of its former self, a ghost of what it once was. At times nervous, wearing flip-flops, a rope for a belt, and a T-shirt featuring Héctor Lavoe, Tito Puente, Frankie Ruiz, and Ismael Rivera, Benito declared that plena was the number-one genre in the world at that moment, while also arranging and singing some of his past in salsa style. Joyful and backed by an extraordinary brass section, he enacted what it means to belong to the house—and to be at home.
You’re listening to music from Puerto Rico, cabrón /
We grew up on this, singing along /
In the projects, in the neighborhoods /
From the ‘90s to the 2000s-forever /
And I’m rolling with the G.O.A.T., Tainy /
I don’t even gotta brag,—y’all already know. (“EoO”)
Thank you, cabrón.
January 15–February 7, 2025, | Silver Spring, Maryland
