While the chorus is clearly an analogy for transient love, it also sheds light on the tourism Puerto Rico receives yearly. People go to the island to have a good time, unaware of the battles locals are fighting and the problems they are facing, and not caring about leaving it in the best condition.
2. “Te fuiste como la luz”
It wouldn’t really be a Bad Bunny album if he didn’t call out electricity blackouts. In the Christmas song “PIToRRO DE COCO,” (track 13) in reference to the quintessentially Boricua alcoholic beverage of the same name, Bad Bunny sings: “Tú eres mala, te fuiste como la luz,” which means “You’re bad, you left like the light.”
Power outages are the order of the day in Puerto Rico. On New Year’s Eve, just days before Bad Bunny released DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS and a couple of days after “PIToRRO DE COCO” came out as a single, the nation suffered an islandwide blackout that left millions without electrical power. Per CNN, on Jan. 1, 25% of the island remained in the dark. The reason? “Long-lasting structural issues with both generation and distribution, involving GeneraPR, one of the companies operating the power plants, and LUMA Energy, the Canadian-American company responsible for transmission on the island,” according to the outlet. To make matters worse, CNN notes Puerto Ricans pay twice as much for electricity as customers in mainland U.S.
Though this reference is quick and chirpy, blackouts are a recurring motif in Bad Bunny’s oeuvre — — take, for example, the 2024 single “Una Velita” or Un Verano Sin Tí‘s “El Apagón,” which literally means “The Blackout.”
3. “No quería irse pa’ Orlando, pero el corrupto lo echó”
Without a doubt, the most politically charged song in the album is “LO QUE LE PASÓ A HAWAii” — which Bad Bunny introduces as “a dream,” or more like a nightmare. From the get-go, the song starts off by personifying the island of Puerto Rico. “She looks so pretty even though she’s doing badly,” he sings in the opening verse. By the end of the first, we find the first lines alluding to gentrification and the displacement of Puerto Ricans.
“No quería irse pa’ Orlando, pero el corrupto lo echó,” which he sings about a crying jíbaro — the word used in PR to describe natives who live in the mountain range and are often farmers — literally translates to, “He didn’t want to go to Orlando, but the scoundrel pushed him out.”
Though the majority of the Puerto Rican diaspora resides in New York, Orlando has also been a main migration destination for Puerto Ricans since the 1900s, with many jíbaros moving under sponsored agricultural workers program. In 2015, the Pew Research Center reported that for the first time, the number of Puerto Ricans living in Florida had surpassed 1 million due to the island’s economic recession forcing people to seek job opportunities in the mainland. In 2017, shortly after Hurricane María, the worst in Puerto Rican history, The New York Times reported that more than 168,000 people had landed in Florida from Puerto Rico, escaping not only the immediate aftermath but the political climate and “el corrupto” — i.e., corruption, perpetuated within the government and from outside forces.
4. “Quieren quitarme el río y también la playa”
In the chorus for “LO QUE LE PASÓ A HAWAii,” Bad Bunny openly denounces the gentrification of Puerto Rico. “They want to take the river and the beach away from me,” he sings, referring to the many outside investors buying property on the island. “They want my neighborhood and my grandma gone,” he continues, later changing the latter half for “They want your children to leave.”
