Bad Bunny Fears Puerto Rico Will Become the New Hawaii. He’s Not Alone.

• Bad Bunny’s new album, “Debir Tirar Mas Fotos,” dropped earlier this month.
• It features traditional folk music from Puerto Rico, where the artist is from.
• The lyrics touch on the gentrification of Puerto Rico and draw a stark parallel with Hawaii.

Pristine sandy beaches, lush green rainforests, and azure waters that stretch as far as the eye can see.

To some, Hawaii is a paradise — but Bad Bunny has a different view.

His new album “Debir Tirar Mas Fotos,” or “I Should’ve Taken More Photos,” notched up more than 150 million streams in its first week of release this month, overtaking Taylor Swift on Billboard’s Top 200. He’s been one of the most-streamed artists on platforms such as Spotify for several years.

Infused with traditional Puerto Rican folk music like plena, salsa, and bomba and featuring independent artists from the island like Los Pleneros de la Cresta and Chuwi, “Debir Tirar Mas Fotos” is an homage to Puerto Rico. It shows that Bunny no longer has to “lean on reggaeton” to dominate the charts, Nuria Net, a Latin music and culture journalist, told Business Insider.

But aside from the catchy rhythms and Bunny’s viral moments promoting the album on TV chat shows, “concern pervades this entire record,” Petra Rivera-Rideau, associate professor of American studies and co-creator of the Bad Bunny Syllabus, told BI.

It’s most obvious on track 14, “Lo Que Pasó a Hawaii,” which translates to “What happened to Hawaii” — a song reflecting growing concern among some Puerto Ricans that their island is in danger of suffering the same overdevelopment as Hawaii.

A symbol of displacement

Those who grew up in Puerto Rico say it wasn’t uncommon to hear Hawaii mentioned in debates around statehood — a question the island has wrestled with for more than a century.

Like Hawaii, Puerto Rico was annexed to the US in the late 19th century. While the former went on to become a fully-fledged state, the latter remains a territory with limited voting privileges.

“There was a tendency of comparing,” said Daniel Nevárez Araújo, a professor at the University of Puerto Rico in Rio Piedras and coauthor of “The Bad Bunny Enigma: Culture, Resistance, and Uncertainty,” recalling his childhood.

For those in favor of statehood, Hawaii was often held up as a “model example of what Puerto Rico should be — progress and fully American,” Net said.

But the comparison has become more complicated in recent years, Illeana Rodriquez-Silva, an associate professor of Latin American and Caribbean history at the University of Washington-Seattle, told BI.

She said a wave of affluent settlers from the US mainland came in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria, which destroyed tens of thousands of homes in 2017 and forced about 130,000 people to relocate.

Lured by tax breaks that sought to help Puerto Rico bring in investment and entrepreneurship, they bought up property and land, Rodriguez-Silva said.

“That’s when I started hearing, ‘we’re going be like Hawaii,'” she said. “And what they are referring to is this moment in the late 19th century where US white elites were able to come in and actually start taking land” in Hawaii, she added.

Just as some Hawaiians lament tourists treating their islands like theme parks and increasing the cost of living, Puerto Ricans started feeling the impact of gentrification, Nevárez Araújo said.

“If you look at Rincon, Aguada, even Mayagüez, Aguadilla, there’s a massive exodus of expats coming here buying properties,” he said. “Everyone else can’t afford to go to the grocery store.”

Nevárez Araújo said Bad Bunny is vocalizing concerns that the island is “slowly being emptied out” and becoming a place that’s “not for Puerto Ricans.”

Tempered optimism

On “Lo Que Pasó a Hawaii,” Bunny calls on Puerto Ricans to retain their flag and not forget their roots.

It’s a stark warning, but in “subverting the narrative” that the island should aspire to be like Hawaii, Net said it offers hope and pride to Puerto Ricans who have grappled with a “nagging feeling that nothing we do is ever good enough.”

Rivera-Rideau said the song also captures the political spirit of a new generation of Puerto Ricans, who, like Bunny, grew up seeing the island’s problems mount and now want change.

“His concerns about electricity and infrastructure, gentrification, tourism, the economy, opportunities, growth for the future — those are concerns that many Puerto Ricans have,” she said.

In recent years, events like the ousting of the island’s former governor Ricardo Rosselló after widespread protests have shown that “young adults are really energized,” Rivera-Rideau said.

In “Marketing Puerto Rico,” Bunny runs a risk of attracting more mainlanders, people who listen to the music simply because they find it “exotic” and catchy, Nevárez Araújo cautioned.

Still, for many young Puerto Ricans, “Debir Tirar Mas Fotos” is “the closest they will get to voicing those fears and those anxieties” about the island’s future, he said.

Some TikTok users have taken to posting photos and videos of people and places they’ve lost, set to the album’s title track, indicating that Bunny’s music is resonating on the island and further afield.

“Many of these songs are pointing out the story of displacement,” Rodriquez-Silva said. “That is something that is so real to many of us today.”