Can Bad Bunny and Rauw Alejandro Help Put Salsa Back in the Spotlight?

Bad Bunny’s all-Spanish Debí Tirar Más Fotos seems poised to enter its third week at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 chart, and with it comes renewed hope for a salsa comeback that many in the industry have been heralding for years now.

To be clear, if you listen to Debí Tirar in its entirety, you will quickly hear it is not a salsa album, or trap, or reggaetón, or even tropical music. Rather, this is a love letter to Puerto Rico and its music in a dizzying array of genres and rhythms — with urban and trap music at its core, but infused throughout with tropical genres like plena, bomba and yes, salsa, both as protagonists and guests of some of the 17 tracks.

The tone is set in the opening “Nuevayol,” which kicks off covering the opening verses of El Gran Combo de Puerto Rico’s 1975 salsa anthem “Un Verano en Nueva York,” then eventually devolves into a rapid reggaetón beat.

It’s clever, this particular fusion of tropical and urban, never quite taking over the other’s territory, comingling the two worlds with extreme care and authenticity. Bad Bunny, a trap star, manages to bring in salsa devotees in the first 45 seconds of his album without alienating his core reggaetón fan base — which will find something to connect to in the next 45 seconds. It’s the meeting of two musical worlds that have danced around each other for decades now; Celia Cruz incorporated rap into her groundbreaking “La Negra Tiene Tumbao” single in 2001; Daddy Yankee blended mambo and reggaetón in his mega-hit “Lo Que Pasó Pasó,” included on his seminal Barrio Fino album of 2004, just to name two prominent examples.

But while rap and reggaetón soared, tropical music and salsa waned. Not only is tropical music the smallest subgenre of Latin music commercially, it’s also been the slowest-growing of the past few years, according to Luminate.

Now, Bad Bunny and some of his fellow urban stars could help change that. Last year, another reggaetón star, Rauw Alejandro, released Cosa Nuestra, an album full of salsa and Puerto Rican notes. The set, named in part as an homage to Willie Colón and Hector Lavoe’s seminal 1969 salsa album of the same name, debuted at No. 6 on the Billboard 200 chart, making it Rauw Alejandro’s highest charting set. It would end up having the the highest-streaming first week for any Latin album in 2024.

“Salsa obviously is not my essence, but it’s something that’s in my blood and in my culture, and it’s something I love,” Rauw Alejandro told Billboard last fall. “The Colón-Lavoe Cosa Nuestra had the elegance and the musicality and the instruments, which you will hear in this album. It’s the first time I use my band and live music in almost an entire project.”

In Debí, Bad Bunny also leaned heavily on live instruments, incorporating students who play salsa from Puerto Rico’s Escuela Libre de Música in some of the album’s most compelling trakcs.

“This album, and specifically the song “Baile Inolvidable,” has viralized not just salsa music but I’m also seeing people taking salsa lessons,” Bunny told Billboard last week. “I think the whole world wants to dance salsa,” he added, which makes sense considering the video to “Baile” specifically features a salsa lesson.

Bunny’s performance on the Billboard charts seem to back that statement up. On the Billboard Global 200 and Hot Latin Songs chart this week, “DtMF” — which is infused with plena and includes plena singers — reigns at No. 1. There is no precedent for plena (which is a very traditional genre — think the cultural equivalent of bluegrass or gospel, given the use of vocals) rising on the charts like this in recent memory.

“Baile Inolvidable” and “Nuevayol,” the latter with its old salsa reference, follow at No. 2 and 3 on Hot Latin Songs, respectively. On the all-genre Hot 100 chart, “DTMF” sits at an astounding No. 2.

“Knowing the market, one could think reggaetón is what was going to shine most,” Bunny told Billboard. “But to see that the top song was a plena? That, I didn’t expect.”

To be honest, neither did we.

If we look at this week’s Tropical Albums chart, most titles are compilations or catalog albums. The newest release is Camilo’s album Cuatro, released last year, and Camilo is not a core tropical act. But he has connections to a growing group of tropical acts — in all subgenres — who have charted by collaborating with non-tropical acts. They include Mexican cumbia group Los Angeles Azules in tracks with Emilia and Nicky Nicole, and Prince Royce and María Becerra.

That still doesn’t put salsa in the top tiers of the chart. But it feels, finally, like such an ascent is truly on the horizon for the genre, beyond anecdotal evidence. If Bad Bunny’s listeners are willing to take in four-minute salsa tracks full of live instrumentation and soneos – or improvisation — it would stand to reason that they’d be willing to venture into other salsa territory.

This week’s Tropical Albums chart, for example, features new entries of six salsa compilation albums, including Luis Enrique and Eddie Santiago’s Los Principes de la Salsa at No. 13. The album was originally released in 1990, the heyday of “romantic salsa.”

More importantly, a new generation of salsa singers — which includes Luis Figueroa, Christian Alicea and Peter Nieto — are standing up for the genre, attempting to make a chart breakout with new fusions while staying true to the standards and spirit of the music.

Let’s see if reggaetón stars can help pave the way for them.