on the mourning within "dtmf"
On Sunday, I spent my day with Bad Bunny.
Or, more precisely, the looping livestream replay of the final concert of his San Juan residency, Una Más, which played on Amazon Prime all day–in between commercials of Bad Bunny in his CK underwear, shampoo (or body wash, idk), and Amazon extolling its response during natural disasters, including hurricane Maria, which devastated the island in September 2017.
Una Más took place on its anniversary eight years later, as both a testament to the resilience of Boricuas, but also as a reminder of the inept response to the aftermath. Some households were left without electricity for almost a year, and Puerto Ricans to this day still face high electricity prices and frequent rolling blackouts.
As Naomi Klein details in the Intercept, post-Maria has followed the playbook of the shock doctrine, as the wealthy buy up land and attempt to transform the island into another Miami, a playground for the rich (and crypto-rich) while everyday locals are left with the choice of working in service to them or leaving their homeland to find more promising prospects.
It's against this backdrop that Bad Bunny released Debí Tirar Más Fotos, an album that blends mourning past relationships with the history of Puerto Rico, through its musical traditions of not just reggaeton but also jibaro, plena, bomba, and salsa. And, even over eight months after its release, the opening notes of the title track evoke a swelling of tears–something that also happened the first, second, and fourth time I watched the livestream.
Listeners took to the song, which translates to "I should have taken more photos," immediately, using it as a container to commemorate loved ones. The impact extended beyond Puerto Ricans, as many joked online that they were crying even as they didn't understand the words. You wouldn't necessarily assume a song that includes a request for nudes would be used to remember abuelitas, but the lens Bad Bunny uses–appreciating the Caribbean sunset, reflecting on a crush, getting drunk, hoping his loved ones never leave the island–captures a vibe beyond the specific narrative.
The song provided an outlet for grief, and for myself it transported me back to the winter of 2018, when I lost both my grandmothers and my aunt within a 12-week span. My first real experience with loss, the most shocking part might have been how quickly the world rushes you to move on. For example, if you live in Ontario, the government website shares that: "Most employees have the right to take up to two days of unpaid job-protected leave each calendar year because of the death of certain family members."
Most of us are so unprepared for grieving, whichever side of it we're on, and I found myself grasping in the darkness. I mourned in private, except for the occasional Instagram post, but to be honest the replies of hearts didn't help. Even knowing this, I've replied to posts of mourning with the same hearts, understanding this is where we are. I once reached out to someone grieving, offering to listen whenever they needed, and they more-or-less stopped talking to me, the rawness of the emotion too difficult to process.
Unequipped to face loss, we end up turning to platitudes, such as "time heals all," unfortunately to mixed effect. After my series of losses I dove into literature on loss, trauma, and grieving, and the idea that we heal with enough time is actually not true. Just as you might imagine two days each calendar year is certainly insufficient, the idea that you can just passively heal into closure, like the gradual airing out a musty house, is mostly convenient for those who want you to be over it already.
In fact, the idea of closure is another myth. This makes sense when we give it careful consideration, and let me draw on, of all things, a Marvel show: WandaVision in 2021 broke open hearts with the line, "What is grief, if not love persevering?" While the feeling of closure can be well-meaning–who wants to be endlessly in pain?–if we can see that missing someone is a hallmark of our love for them, then there can be no such thing as closure if we continue to love them. Instead, Pauline Boss advises that we must find meaning in the loss: and so, instead of closing off that part of ourselves, we transform it into our future.
Debí Tirar Más Fotos, and the residency, feel like an effort to find meaning in the heartbreak. The use of bomba, also found in Rauw Alejandro's gorgeous "Carita Linda," harkens to the island's history, when Spanish colonizers brought African slaves and decimated the Indigenous population, only for the musical genre of bomba to rise as a form of resistance. The use of jibaro music and references to folk tales ("Jacinto!") nods to the exploitative and violent treatment by the United States since invading the island in 1898.
Throughout the residency, Bad Bunny has brought out Puerto Rican performers, and in sharing the spotlight with younger acts and giving flower to legacy ones, he underscored the act of remembering. Rather than allowing the facile concept that time would heal all, Bad Bunny tried to use his platform to evoke the past to invigorate Puerto Ricans with who they are, who they have always been, and who they could be.
I left the residency on all day, almost like a meditation. Each time "DTMF" came on, I stopped what I was doing to give it my full attention. I thought about the losses felt in 2017, which truthfully I hadn't known much about until I met my boyfriend (who grew up in a small town adjacent to Bad Bunny's). I thought about how the personal losses seven years ago changed me–and I openly felt sad in a way I rarely feel permission for.
And then, I laughed as the residency ended and transitioned to Benito's thirsty Calvin Klein ad–porfa, me envíe' nudes–surely the prologue to some future crush of his that will inspire a new batch of songs.