The debí of Bad Bunny’s 2025 album DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS registers a debt with the past. This debt is addressed through intertexts and samples of salsa, bomba, plena, and jíbaro mixed with dembow, reggaeton, perreo, and trap (Rodriguez 2025). The opening track “NUEVAYoL,” for example, includes an extended sample of El Gran Combo’s salsa tune “Un verano en Nueva York” (1975), a reference to Newyorican salsero Willie Colón, and a brief fragment (the grito “Nueva York”) from Andrés Jiménez’s recording of “Mamá, Borinquen me llama” (Lopez 2025). That song, originally recorded by Rafael Hernández in 1929, was based on Virgilio Dávila’s 1916 poem “Nostalgia” (Dávila 1970, 340–41). Indebted to the sampling practices codified in New York hip hop, “NUEVAYoL” is a sonic palimpsest, part of a “love letter to Puerto Rico” from an artist who had for the past few years resided away from his homeland (Flores 2025).[1]
Nostalgia, the longing to return home and the suffering resulting from the inability to do so, is a common trope in the cultural production of Caribbean communities living in the United States (Boym 2008, xiii; Brown-Rose 2009). In Bad Bunny’s work, nostalgia—for his own past and for an idealized version of Puerto Rico’s past—has been identified as a dominant feature (Madera, Varas-Díaz, and Aráujo 2025; Ortiz and Meléndez-Badillo 2025; Bruno and Veloria 2025). But DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS also records another kind of debt. The preterit debí marks a subjunctive engagement with the past: “quisiera haber tirado más fotos.”[2] The subjunctive is a grammatical mood introducing uncertainty, hypothesis, possibility, or desire. It pertains to the realm of events that “have not happened yet,” which, as Samuel Delany (2011, 11) notes, “include past events as well as future ones.” Where nostalgia is grounded in a past place, the subjunctive implies futurity, even when referring to the past.
In relation to the present, nostalgia and subjunctivity are temporal borderlands, “vague and undetermined places created by the emotional residue of an unnatural boundary” (Anzaldúa 2007, 25). Gloria Anzaldúa (2007, 25) describes the borderland as both “dividing line” and “constant state of transition,” implying change in time as well as place. How does DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS inhabit this borderland? To what degree does it deliver the subjunctive promise of its title: not only the nostalgia of photographs (no doubt also a critique of the tourist selfie), but the subjunctive urgency of the photos that were not taken, what has not happened yet? Answering these questions requires returning to some of the album’s sonic pasts. There are many, but space only allows for brief engagement with two: hip hop and salsa.[3] My hypothesis is that the border between nostalgia and subjunctivity, which I believe is one definition for yearning, constitutes a crucial space for evaluating the cultural and political expediency of Caribbean popular music (Yúdice 2003, 9).[4]
Carolyn Fornoff identifies “subjunctive aesthetics” in recent cultural responses to climate change and environmental crisis. Attentive to the ways subjunctive modes of expression in contemporary Mexico affirm a right to the future amidst its apparent foreclosure by extractivist policies and impending climate catastrophe, Fornoff (2024, 6–8) suggests that the subjunctive records “a state of subordination” vis-à-vis external economic and climatic forces. This subordinate quality of subjunctive aesthetics derives from the subjunctive’s grammatical positionality (in Spanish) as part of a subordinate clause (Fornoff 2024, 5–6). In other words, the imaginative potential of the subjunctive (to represent the world otherwise) emerges under duress, subordinate to and in contestation of other human and nonhuman actors. Hurricanes, sea level rise, and apagones have made clear the Caribbean archipelago’s vulnerability to climate crisis.[5] Perhaps unsurprisingly, subjunctive aesthetics resonate throughout the music, literature, and visual arts produced in the Caribbean in recent decades, for example, the prevalence of ecologically focused science fiction and art in Cuba, the recourse to virtual reality in novels and albums by Dominican writer and musician Rita Indiana, or calls to plant trees in response to deforestation by Haitian rap group Barikad Crew.[6]
In my book Break and Flow, I proposed that the subjunctive constitutes one mode of engagement in a shared poetics of yearning evinced by hip hop artists in the Americas (to whom Bad Bunny is also indebted). In rap songs released in Cuba, Brazil, and Haiti between the early 1990s and the late 2010s, artists express a utopian impulse to inhabit the world otherwise. The content of their utopia varies widely, from party excess and superação to calls for revolución (Hankin 2023a, 21). What unites these artists is not the arrival but the yearning itself, what Brazilian rapper GOG (2004) calls “o direito de sonhar.” Black feminist scholars and activists have deployed yearning as a praxis of survival creating a sense of “home” that contests the susceptibility of utopian thought to capitalist reification (hooks 1999, 27; Pignarre and Stengers 2011, 48–49). Yearning can overlap with nostalgia (longing for the past) but also, crucially, points toward the “thing that is not yet here” (Muñoz 2009, 26). In a Black feminist key, futurity is “not a question of ‘hope’” but an imperative of tense: “Black feminist futurity is a performance of a future that hasn’t happened yet but must … a politics of prefiguration that involves living the future now” (Campt 2017, 17). The archive I constructed for Break and Flow ends approximately where Bad Bunny begins, in 2017. How does Bad Bunny’s debt with his and Puerto Rico’s (musical) past resonate with this tradition of yearning in the Caribbean, the “sometimes paralyzing force of a yearning for history” (Glissant 1989, 84)?
In countries such as Haiti and Cuba, where the specter of revolution and its unfulfilled promises continually resurfaces in daily life, futurity entails a subjunctive engagement with the past. Artists make demands concerning their future by returning to and partially reanimating occulted histories of resistance, participating in what Édouard Glissant (1989, 93) called the “the struggle against a single History.” This approach is subjunctive not only because it reinterprets dominant historical narratives, but also because the ability to reimagine the past (and hence the future) is subordinate to “previous understandings, which are themselves premised on the distribution of archival power” (Trouillot 1995, 55).
There is perhaps a formal resemblance between subjunctive subordination and the process of creolization in the French Caribbean, where an oppressed language/culture emerges out of necessity within and against the colonial language/culture. Forged under conditions of slavery, Creoles flattened French vowels and adapted predominantly French vocabulary into African syntax (Robertshaw 2024). In the Hispanophone Caribbean, although creolization did not develop into fully formed Creoles, Afro-Hispanic modes of speech used by bozales (enslaved people born in Africa) strongly influenced spoken and written Spanish, commonly in parody (Lipski 2001). Given their subordination to the dominant language, Creoles are a “forced poetics”; yet in their partial unintelligibility to the colonizer, they become a “counterpoetics” of resistance (Glissant 1989, 121). Perhaps Bad Bunny’s stylized phonetic transcriptions of (African-influenced) Puerto Rican Spanish and idiosyncratic use of capital and lower-case letters in the album and song titles practice a certain creolization, while also rendering the album’s poetics concrete.[7]
Haitian Kreyòl, which Glissant (1989, 19–20) heard as the most fully developed Creole, marks the past and past subjunctive with te, from the imperfect of the French être. Within and against était, te allows a speaker to engage with the past in multiple ways at the same time or, more precisely, in multiple times at the same place.[8] Fantom’s rap song “Si Desalin te la” (If Dessalines were here; 2017), for example, intones a subjunctive history of Jean-Jacques Dessalines, the military general who led the successful defeat of French forces culminating in the founding of Haiti. Conceived and executed by formerly enslaved people, the Haitian Revolution created the hemisphere’s first independent country to abolish slavery and guarantee freedom to all citizens, an act that radically challenged Enlightenment ontology (Trouillot 1995; Nesbitt 2008). As such, it was received as an “excessive event” and largely “silenced” from the historical record, a phenomenon that I continue to observe when I teach units about Haiti in courses on Caribbean culture (Fischer 2004, 4; Trouillot 1995).
As Michel-Rolph Trouillot (1995, 105) argues, while US and Western European historiography largely effaces Haiti’s history, Haitian historiography tends to perpetuate a noncritical narrative of great men that ignores, for example, revolutionary leaders’ maintenance of large-scale plantation monoculture and even, in some cases, slavery. “Si Desalin te la” inhabits the border between silence and noncritical celebration by defending the Revolution’s triumphs while emphasizing what has not happened yet. The song’s lyrics imagine a world in which Dessalines, who briefly served as emperor, had not been betrayed and assassinated by rival Alexandre Pétion. Constructed around the subjunctive refrain “if Dessalines were here,” an alternative present emerges through a series of counterfactuals: “Si Desalin te la / M garanti w prezidan pa tap men sòl” (If Dessalines were here / I guarantee you the president wouldn’t be corrupt) (Fantom and Solis 2017). Intercalated with gospel oos that seem to summon the spirit of Ogou Desalin, the lyrics resolve Haiti’s present in a past subjunctive.[9]
Saidiya Hartman (2008; 2020, 228) rehearses a subjunctive historiography to narrate past events and actors that are underrepresented or invisible in the historical record (in particular, queer people and women of color). Insisting on the impossible presence of Dessalines, Fantom’s subjunctive history of Haiti “amplifies the impossibility of its telling” (Hartman 2008, 11). By doing so, rather than projecting a utopia, the song “dwells in its yearning and reminds Haitians that they can imagine future redemption only by reanimating the past” (Hankin 2023a, 31). Yet while the song makes use of the collective subject nou (which can mean either a plural you or a we), its subjunctive yearning relies on Dessalines as a singular, quasi-messianic figure. This messianism mediates between the past subjunctive and the Black feminist “future real conditional or that which will have had to happen” (Campt 2017, 17).
Hip hop emerged at the intersection of “social alienation, prophetic imagination, and yearning” (Rose 1994, 21). Prophetic imagination commonly takes on a messianic quality, from album covers casting the artist as a Christ-like figure to the signifying tradition of boasting or self-aggrandizement, another of Bad Bunny’s (2023) debts: “Estás equivoca’o si crees que estoy en mi momento / eso no ha llega’o.”[10] Haitian rapper Wendyyy (2018) articulates similar sentiments in an album entitled King rete king (the king remains the king). At the same time, he mobilizes messianism as remembrance: “M vin raplè w valè w … Premye pèp nwa k libere, wi se sa k idantite w” (I’ve come to remind you of your value … First free Black people, that’s what identifies you).
In the Judeo-Christian tradition, the coming of the Messiah opens a caesura or “zone of absolute indiscernibility” between this world and the future world, between the heedance of a call and the delivery to the promised land (Agamben 2005, 25). Transposed onto the Marxian tradition, Giorgio Agamben (2005, 35–36) argues, messianic time captures the break between linear time and revolutionary time, manifested aesthetically as an “as if,” that is, as a subjunctive. For Walter Benjamin, this gap—a dialectical convergence of past and present resulting in a revolutionary leap toward a communist future—is occupied not by a Messiah sent from heaven but by the “weak” messianic force of oppressed humanity (Löwy 2016, 33). Rap yearnings aim to transform subjunctive possibility into messianic necessity.
Haitian rapper Princess EUD (2017) rhymes “m voye tèt grenn nan lòt dimansyon / m prezante Ayiti nan bon kondisyon” (I commit kinky hair to another dimension / I present Haiti in a good condition). One of the most common markers of Blackness in the Americas, hair is also among the most fungible phenotypes and commonly put to the service of ideologies of whitening, e.g., social pressures to straighten hair (Gonzalez 1984, 234; hooks 1989, 382; Candelario 2007, 253). EUD uses her kinky hair as a metonymy for racist tropes directed at Haiti and Haitians. By resignifying “bad hair” and pejorative narratives of Haiti’s “bad condition,” she opens a lòt dimansyon (another dimension). Again, however, this subjunctive lòt dimansyon remains subordinate to—within and against—the historical conditions to which it responds. This is perhaps what Benjamin (2007, 255; Löwy 2016, 42) meant when he described the image of the past “flashing up in a moment of danger” to provide a “spark of hope,” prior to its appropriation by the ruling class.
Constructed on the spark of hope of Cuba’s as-yet incomplete independence, the Cuban Revolution of 1959 introduced a new calendar beginning with year zero and numbering each consecutive year to ensure its indefinite continuation. Even as public protest reached unprecedented levels in the summer of 2021, the revolutionary government retained a “monopoly over time’s meaning” (Buck-Morss 2000, 60).[11] Since the early 1990s, Cubans had confronted a “special period” of extreme scarcity precipitated by the collapse of the Soviet Union. As the government invested in tourism, exacerbating racial hierarchies that privileged lighter-skinned Cubans, the revolution’s promise of radical equality became increasingly untenable (García 2011, 29–31; De la Fuente 2001, 317–34). My dear friend and collaborator Malcoms “Justicia,” a pioneer Cuban rapper and producer who tragically died in 2020, used the metaphor of insomnia to capture the temporality of waiting characteristic of Cuba’s special period (Whitfield 2008, 137). His 2015 song “La ciudad no duerme” critiques increasing inequality, degrading infrastructure, and waning political consciousness, announcing the end of the Cuban Revolution. At one point, however, the endless cycle of sleeplessness dissolves into a revolutionary call to wake up:
Los universitarios pa’ la calle con ideas de otra revolución
No nos quitan la alegría y la satisfacción de ponernos de pie
Vamos a hacer lo que hizo Fidel
La Revolución se está acabando, es lógico
Y tiene que empezar otra vez. (Malcoms Justicia 2015)
In foretelling the Revolution’s end, Malcoms returns to its beginning, articulating a subjunctive, messianic call to oppressed humanity that is paradoxically subordinate to the same revolutionary time it seeks to undermine.
In the summer of 2019, thousands of Puerto Ricans took to the streets to demand the resignation of Governor Ricardo Rosselló over corruption charges and perceived violation of “core values” (García-Quijano and Lloréns 2019). Among the high-profile protesters was Bad Bunny, who has expressed public support for the independence movement, while also rejecting the messianic call of politicized art: “A mí no me exija’, Bad Bunny no e’ alcalde” (Arroyo 2025; Bad Bunny 2023). Where, then, does Bad Bunny’s nostalgia lead? If, as I have argued, a subjunctive engagement with the past produces a corollary debt with the future, how is this future debt addressed? On the other side of a global pandemic and teetering ever closer to humanity’s three existential threats (environmental catastrophe, nuclear proliferation, and the decline of democracy), what remains of yearning?[12]
Bad Bunny’s nostalgia perhaps serves to “conjure a space of collective memory and possibilities for the future” (Bruno and Veloria 2025, 149). Alternatively, it can project an “idealized and uncritical past” that elides socioeconomic, political, and racial divisions, becoming a “pop history of Puerto Rico” designed “with one thing in mind: to elicit applause” (Ortiz and Meléndez-Badillo 2025, 45; Madera, Varas-Díaz, and Aráujo 2025, 11). While Bad Bunny’s musical sampling clearly inserts the artist into a musical genealogy, Sarah Bruno and Elyse Veloria (2025, 144–48) hear his engagement with Puerto Rico’s musical past as a citational practice indebted to the signifying tradition of Black referentiality, which fails to credit the labor of the Black artists upon which his music is based.[13] Inspired by Jamaican sound system culture, sampling—recycling and recontextualizing already existing fragments of sound—was developed by New York hip hop DJs in the 1970s, becoming the basic technique of music creation in rap (as well as reggaeton). Described as “a conscious preoccupation with artistic continuity and connection to Black cultural roots,” sampling makes hip hop into “an analogy engine … powered by analogical chains” (Smitherman 1997, 15–16; Eshun 1998, 27). By engaging with history through analogy, sampling creates a sonic subjunctive, a sound that is like the past (hence subordinate to it) but also separate from it. Then Bad Bunny’s sample of El Gran Combo doubles as a subjunctive history.
In 1975, El Gran Combo opened for the Fania All-Stars in a salsa concert in Yankee Stadium that ended with a riot by the audience (Neyra 2020, 35). Ren Ellis Neyra (2020, 42) reads this riot in dialogue with Hector Lavoe’s “Mi gente” (which was performed at the concert) as an instance of “unruly audition” borne “not out of displeasure but out of excess of taste for uprising.” The possibility (or necessity) of the riot contained within salsa’s invocation of pleasure partially derives from its apostrophizing tendency: “the lyrics call to you, the listener, or an apostrophic placeholder summons you, using the familiar tú form of intimate address: salsa sings for your pleasure” (Neyra 2020, 29). Salsa’s expediency, to return to George Yúdice’s (2003) term, resides at least partially in this summoning or call to pleasure/riot.
Of the multiple Puerto Rican genres sampled in DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS, salsa feels among the most prominent, not only in sound but also because nearly every song is constructed around an apostrophic tú, most commonly a presumptive female dance partner or ex, but sometimes also a tourist-gentrifier or even Puerto Rico itself (Bad Bunny 2025c; 2025b). Apostrophe, as Jonathan Culler (2015, 8, 216) has argued, constitutes a form of “triangulated address” grounded in the “magical transformation” of ritual. By ostensibly addressing an absent person or entity, the poet/singer addresses the reader/listener, a process that is materialized acoustically in the sample, where the invocation of an absent sound summons and transforms it in the listener’s ear.
In “BAILE INoLVIDABLE,” salsa is no longer merely conjured as a sample: Bad Bunny recorded this salsa tune with musicians from the Escuela Libre de Música in Puerto Rico (Lopez 2025). While the lyrics again apostrophize a presumptive former dance partner, the addressee also becomes the baile itself (“Y fuiste tú mi baile inolvidable”). Within the temporality of “una fiesta que un día termina” resides the possibility of another world: “En otra vida, en otro mundo podrá ser” (Bad Bunny 2025a). The apostrophe’s transformative potential renders this other world audible as a collective possibility (albeit filtered through the trope of unrequited love). Although “a we does not form in this song … a possible plurality extends out of the song’s temporality into a future” (Neyra 2020, 40). Thus, whether or not Bad Bunny’s sampling practice engages in nonreciprocal citation, the sonic nostalgia evinced in the samples is shared and renewed by his listeners (or their parents and grandparents). Perhaps one of the “limits of [Bad Bunny’s] nostalgia” is the degree to which his engagement with the past is (also) subjunctive (Ortiz and Meléndez-Badillo 2025). That is, whether Bad Bunny’s debt registers responsibility as well as regret; whether the analogy chain of salsa and hip hop leads backward or forward (or somewhere else) into the sonic borderland between nostalgia and subjunctivity.