Bad Bunny’s latest album, Debí Tirar Más Fotos, is vast in scope. It is simultaneously retro and thoroughly contemporary, mixing Puerto Rican traditional genres and instrumentation with música urbana. The album is, as many have noted, a “love letter to Puerto Rico,” replete with nostalgia. However, it also has plenty to say about tourism-related displacement in Puerto Rico—as well as Bad Bunny’s own feelings of romantic displacement. The album’s first track, “Nueva Yol,” encapsulates its intent: illuminating the ways the past informs the present. It opens with a sample of El Gran Combo’s 1975 salsa “Un Verano en Nueva York,” but soon transitions to dembow, a Dominican variant of reggaeton. The song pays tribute to the Puerto Rican diaspora, but the video adds an additional layer: a defense of immigrants within a xenophobic climate. Bad Bunny mines other Puerto Rican musical traditions beyond salsa. “Turista” is a poignant bolero, while “Café con Ron” is an infectious plena, which emerged in the late 19^th century among poor and working-class Afro-Puerto Ricans. “Pitorro de Coco” and “Lo Que le Pasó a Hawaii” are other songs that draw on past styles. The range of genres Bad Bunny showcases on Debí Tirar Más Fotos, and the fact that he worked with an historian, gesture toward applied ethnomusicology. His goal is to educate his reggaeton-oriented audience on past Puerto Rican musical styles without suggesting their superiority; in fact, música urbana infuses the project. This album is his most ambitious and significant work yet.

Global awareness of Puerto Rican popular music has grown with the success of Bad Bunny’s DTMF album and Superbowl LX performance. One resource that has contributed to this success is his use of plena, a Puerto Rican folk genre that symbolizes a version of nationhood in a way that is more accessible and less threatening to a broader audience than the one that consumes Bad Bunny’s usual reggaetón. This contemporary use of plena resonates with how, in the early 20^th century, the genre became more widely palatable than another genre, bomba, despite both genres emerging from the island’s same working-class, Black cultural spaces. In this paper, I will discuss the characteristics that marked plena’s emergence as a folk music, its transition to a commercial and national genre, and its recent renewal as a community-building resource. Drawing on Becker’s concepts of art worlds, I illustrate that Bad Bunny’s use of plena fits into a series of interactions between roots plena performers, commercial artists, and national/international audiences over the course of the genre’s history that mediate racial and class identities. The varying importance of plena as a vehicle for personal expression, for commercial entertainment, and for mass protest cycles through all these interactions. Bad bunny’s use of plena demonstrates how the dynamics of a genre’s multiple meanings to different audiences contribute to the construction of a single artist’s art world.

How is the past reorganized when it enters contemporary global music production? This paper examines the temporal transformation of Caribbean archival narratives within Cosa Nostra: Capítulo 0, a recent large-scale Latin urban music project by popular Puerto Rican artist Rauw Alejandro. Rather than asking how history is represented or commodified, I argue that archival knowledge mediated by academics undergoes temporal reconfiguration as it moves through studio practice, aesthetic decision-making, and digital regimes of circulation.

Positioned inside the production process as a consultant, I observed how extended historical formations, rooted in Caribbean musical memory, colonial histories, and diasporic genealogies, could not circulate unchanged. These archival forms were selectively activated, compressed, stylized, and reformatted: historical duration became an aesthetic gesture; genealogical depth was reorganized into curated reference; collective memory operated less as a sustained narrative than as atmospheric signification. In this process, the past was not erased — it was temporally recalibrated to function within the regimes of cultural circulation.

My embedded position became the primary site where this recalibration unfolded: where decisions about historical scope, narrative depth, and temporal framing were actively negotiated between archival knowledge and production logics. My ethnomusicological consultancy was not merely a form of applied expertise, but a mediating interface through which the archive was transformed from an extended historical process into globally legible aesthetic signification.

By foregrounding this consultative mediation, the paper contributes to broader debates on capitalism, memory, and cultural production — suggesting that within platform-driven music industries, the archive persists, but in reorganized form.