Take heed to the fascinating six-minute salsa “BAILE INoLVIDABLE,” the place a heartbroken Benito footage life as a celebration that should someday finish. The eagerness within the chorus is available in waves—“No, no te puedo olvidar/No, no te puedo borrar/Tú me enseñaste a querer/Me enseñaste a bailar” (“No, I can’t neglect you/No, I can’t erase you/You taught me to like/You taught me to bounce”)—set to a brassy, unquenchable corrillo that captures the nostalgia of previous love with a way of grace that lingers like rum within the throat. Later, as Benito sings, “Y yo tenía mucha’ novia’/Pero como tú, ninguna” (“And I’ve had a number of girlfriends/However no person such as you”) the phrases wash like seafoam, affirming: It’s me, not you. Carried out by college students from el Libre de Música San Juan, this good salsa counteracts sorrow with the therapeutic properties of its horns, drumline, and cowbell. When the piano solo cuts in like a much-needed smoke break, it invokes Tito Nieves within the ’90s or Héctor Lavoe within the ’70s: basic salseros whose music was designed to harm so good.
DeBí TiRAR MáS FOToS is greater than only a technique of liberating the hips; it arrives amid a broader narrative of the island’s battle for sovereignty, rooted in compounded centuries of Spanish, then American, colonization. DTMF reminds us that whereas musicians worldwide look to Boricua innovation and resistance for inspiration, many Puerto Ricans really feel like an endangered species on their very own land. Many islanders rang in 2025 at the hours of darkness, experiencing but one other blackout of the unreliable, privatized energy grid; simply after New Yr’s Day, a Missouri vacationer allegedly set hearth to 3 native companies in Cabo Rojo earlier than fleeing again to the States. Life on the island consists of Boricuas confronting the results of practically 130 years of U.S. company funding and gentrification via beneficiant tax incentives. The gorgeous bolero lullaby “TURiSTA” underscores this poisonous, transactional relationship. And on the muted bachata “BOKeTE,” or “Potholes,” Benito swerves round deception as if primed by the island’s crumbling roads.
The DTMF brief movie stars Jacobo Morales, the now 90-year-old director of Lo que pasó a Santiago, the one Puerto Rican movie ever to be nominated for an Oscar, practically 35 years in the past (the Academy subsequently banned Puerto Rican submissions within the Worldwide class, forcing the island’s filmmakers to compete in opposition to American studio budgets). One scene imagines a Borinquén so depleted of Boricuas that listening to reggaetón blasting from the road is a distant reminiscence. The perreo sucio “EoO” commits to holding our classics related by calling again to the mid-’90s, when the police and Nationwide Guard tried to fight violence and different “obscenities” by sweeping reggaetón CDs and tapes off the streets. The crackdown fueled the rise of underground perreo golf equipment, corresponding to DJ Negro’s The Noise, which hosted early stars like Child Ranks and Ivy Queen. Producer and frequent collaborator Tainy’s experience on this period shines as he builds the track’s sweltering beat across the refrain of Héctor y Tito’s 2002 observe “Perreo Child” and samples the ultimate second of his X 100pre manufacturing for “Solo de Mí”: “¡Mira, puñeta, no me quiten el perreo!” (actually “Rattling, don’t take away my perreo!” however extra just like the Boricua model of “Bitch, don’t kill my vibe!”). The uncommon reggaetón track to thirst after a girl turning 30—extra of that, please—“EoO” is devoted to the technology of millennials who grew up witnessing a vital section within the growth of urbano music on the island.
