Crying in Smart Fit (Bad Bunny-Induced Tears)
how we lose (and honor) places and people ☼ a spiritual response to bad bunny's newest album ☼ "dtmf" as a theme song for humanity
They say that music has the power to change the world. That it can convince someone to keep living when they thought they had reached the end. That it can remind a person of their own humanity, stitching together parts of a self that were once stored in lodges of gray matter. That the song and the therapist are one and the same, teaching us to feel, to remember, to lift ourselves up again and again so that the habit becomes our person, so that it becomes easier to enjoy.
There is a Bad Bunny song that has gone viral on TikTok, titled “dtmf,” an acronym for the album’s name: DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS, which translates to (in Puerto Rican and Caribbean Spanish slang) I should have taken more photos. The trend is subtle, a collage of videos that people stitch together to the second chorus, typically featuring the people they love, the places they lost, or the moments that made them wish they had the power to make something last forever: a sunset, a boyfriend, a father, a daughter, a city, a neighborhood once less gentrified, a street once called home. When I first listened to Bad Bunny’s new album, I paid more attention to the melodies than the lyrics. I did not dwell on the album’s name until I saw videos on TikTok celebrating the title track.
Bad Bunny’s new album is a tribute to the Puerto Rican diaspora, a commentary on the ongoing waves of neo-colonization that continue to transform places like Puerto Rico and Hawaii (and Mexico City, Bali, Cape Town, Lisbon—the list goes on), and a celebration of Puerto Rican music itself. It tackles the capital forces of displacement and gentrification with melodies and lyrics that function as mirrors. Everyone has lost something; everyone, at one point or another, has felt lost themselves. The album forces listeners to consider the communities and livelihoods that are being lost right now, that have been forced to lose over the past several decades at the hands of the American empire—most ironically personified by Americans who move, in mass, to “find” themselves. The purpose of the album is captured no better than in the short film Bad Bunny created himself.
When I revisited Bad Bunny’s album with the context of the creator’s intentions, I thought: PERIOD. This album slaps. I listened through it and thought: This album is important. And then, a week later, “dtmf” appeared on my playlist as I attempted to overcome a third shoulder press at the gym, and then I felt it.
I did not recognize the introduction, nor the first quarter of the song. I thought: Why haven’t I heard this before? Maybe I skipped through it. The chords are nostalgic, a bit sad, a bit romantic. And then the chorus appeared, and I thought: Oh, this song. The one I keep humming, the one from TikTok, the cornerstone of the album. I took a deep breath and attempted my fourth rep. And then the version of the chorus with everyone singing, engineered to sound like the collective effort of a group of friends on a beach or a crowd at a concert, rang around my ears like gentle fireworks, queuing fireworks of my own. The shoulder press clang back down on the machine and I felt the corners of my eyes go wet.
Not this, I thought. Not me crying in a Smart Fit.
I tried to push the swell of my throat down to my heart, then from my heart down to my gut, breathing long in an attempt to ward away the longing to cry and smile at the same time, to scream and melt on the floor in a chorus of laughter, at least until I reached somewhere private. But I let the song keep playing. In fact, I started it over, just to hear it again. And so the tears fell anyways, precious little gems tumbling through a stream.
I thought about my grandmother. I thought about Mijael. I thought about Palestine, Hawaii, Puerto Rico, Portugal, Mexico…I thought about my parents and I thought about my friends. I thought about everyone on TikTok who had posted their own precious collection of gems for the entire internet to see—clips of a house, a brother, a dog, a country—one of those rare trends where everyone comes together to honor something real, to share their life stories in the comments and question how odd it is that everything, and everyone, eventually becomes a story. How difficult it is to see someone or something become a story when it did not have to. How confusing it is to ask: Why?
Today (as I am writing this: January 22nd, 2025) marks a year since my grandmother passed. Before writing that sentence, I thought to myself: Haven’t I written about this enough? Yet here I am again, crying. I have cried, and I will continue to cry, because grief, I realize, is not something that we graduate from. It is a topic we will continue to learn about in the grand course of life, and it is not always sad.
Over the past year, I have had many dreams about my grandmother. Typically, I will notice her in a room or a house. Everything will feel normal until I realize that she is supposed to be gone, that her being right in front of me is a miracle, at which point I pulse with the urgent desire to talk to her, to ask her everything, to tell her everything. In some of those dreams, I do: I tell her about my life, I ask her about hers. In one, I interviewed her. I asked how she felt on her wedding day. What song they played when she walked down the aisle. In that dream, she told me it was Over the Rainbow, which was always her favorite song, the hawaiian ukulele fluttering in the air like a flock of island birds, and then she started to sing it:
Where trouble melts like lemon drops…
High above the chimney top…
That's where you'll find me…
As she sang, I realized that she was talking about herself. That she was, finally, somewhere over the rainbow. I woke up in a convulsion of tears, barely able to realize that I was awake, thinking: She is gone.
There are ways, of course, that the people we lose will always remain here (in our hearts, in our minds), but it is true: They are gone. I have had enough dreams to know that, enough tears to prove it, but still, sometimes, I will find myself doing something ordinary like watering a plant or watching television, and it is as though I have forgotten, as though, in the current of my everyday life, I still expect her to be here, and then I will remember. I think that is what grief is: remembering. Remembering them, remembering that time, remembering us. Remembering that everything, in the end, will be something to remember. Remembering, then, to take more photos before it is over.
The thing is, I did take photos. I took videos. I took voice memos. Every year, I tend to take more of all three than most people take in their entire lives. Ever since I got a camera, I became obsessed with documenting. Obsessed with trying to capture things before they got lost. Yet the trick of life is that we cannot capture everything, no matter how many photos we take. In the end, it is not about the photos, not about the videos or the ways in which we preserve our stories. It is about the way we lived inside of them before they became just stories.
“dtmf” is a wonder of a song. It flashes through the temperatures of life like the soundtrack of our own. With a melody designed for nostalgia and a chorus that flickers between grief and hope, it is impossible not to reminisce, not to want to sing along. It is impossible not to want to scream it, at the top of our lungs, with our friends, to our families, inside of our own heads, humming along the shapes of places and people lost into some form of spiritual permanence, because it reminds us, just like grief does, to pay more attention. To witness the interiority of our lives.
Maybe the title of the song should be something else: “dpma,” debí prestar más atención. All I want for all of us is to pay more attention. ☷
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With love,
Your favorite capybara ~ AKA Travis Zane
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