Just in case
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Variety told us a few days ago that Bad Bunny's new album made it to first place on the Billboard 200 — "Bad Bunny Beats Taylor Swift in Extremely Tight Race to No. 1 on Albums Chart". In other coverage, Pitchfork's review leads with the assertion that "Bad Bunny synthesizes the past and present sound of Puerto Rico for an anthemic, cross-generational album", and connects the music to the island's social and political history.
My focus this morning is on the album's non-standard capitalization ("DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS"). We can start with a difference in editorial choices: Pitchfork follows the album's use of upper and lower case letters in its title, while Variety standardizes the spelling (“Debí Tirar Más Fotos”). The English translation in either case is of course the same, "I should have taken more photos".
Across the current mass media coverage, Variety's editorial standardization seems to be the most common, but there are some outlets besides Pitchfork that respect the album's orthographic choices.
The album's non-standard capitalization choices continue through the tracklist:
NUEVAYoL
VOY A LLeVARTE PA PR
BAILE INoLVIDABLE
PERFuMITO NUEVO
WELTiTA
VeLDÁ
EL CLúB
KETU TeCRÉ
BOKeTE
KLOuFRENS
TURiSTA
CAFé CON RON
PIToRRO DE COCO
LO QUE LE PASÓ A HAWAii
EoO
DtMF
LA MuDANZA
The title "DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS" has ten upper-case consonants, four lower-case vowels, and three upper-case vowels, and the initialized title track "DtMF" has three upper-case consonants and one lower-case consonant. All the other track names employ all upper-case letters, except for exactly one lower-case vowel in each of them.
There are a few discussions elsewhere but it's striking that TikTok offers so MANY explanations for "What Do The Lower Case Letters In Bad Bunny's new Album Mean" — which probably tells us something about TikTok's current cultural role, though maybe also its search algorithm (since
In this 1/14/2025 interview, Bad Bunny is asked "Por qué se titularon así las canciones con así mayúscula minúscula?" ("Why were the songs titled that way with majuscule and minuscule letters?"):
I'll leave it to readers to evaluate his answer, and to compare the various tiktok explanations.
For now, I'll just note the loss of syllable-final /s/ in the question's pronunciation of "mayúscula minúscula":
[For some linguistic background (totally unrelated to capitalization and only marginally related to pop music), see the section on "Spanish /s/ Lenition" in this paper.]
Laura Morland said,
January 22, 2025 @ 10:10 am
My Spanish is minimal, but I believe that Bad Bunny said that he was searching for a creative way to make his song titles sTaNd OuT.
He succeeded!
J.W. Brewer said,
January 22, 2025 @ 10:40 am
I'm looking right now at what purports to be a scan of the album's back cover, and the variation of case in the song titles is quite minimal. Most seem to be ALLCAPS with a single lower-cased intrusion. E.g. "BAILE INoLVIDABLE" and "PERFuMITO NUEVO." The lower-cased ones in the song titles are almost always vowels except for DtMF, which is perhaps an initialism and lacks an obvious vowel.
"Not as cool as the distinctive fonts Led Zeppelin sometimes used to use!" said one aging LL commenter while yelling at a cloud in the sky.
Mark Liberman said,
January 22, 2025 @ 10:52 am
@J.W. Brewer: " [T]he variation of case in the song titles is quite minimal. Most seem to be ALLCAPS with a single lower-cased intrusion.":
As the OP put it, "the initialized title track "DtMF" has three upper-case consonants and one lower-case consonant. All the other track names employ all upper-case letters, except for exactly one lower-case vowel in each of them."
So, yes…
Gregory Kusnick said,
January 22, 2025 @ 11:30 am
Back in my online gaming days (late 90s to mid-aughts) it was considered cool (for reasons that still escape me) to choose screen names with wEiRd CaPiTaLiZaTiOn. Bad Bunny, born in 1994, would have grown up during this era, if that's of any relevance.
Mark Liberman said,
January 22, 2025 @ 12:53 pm
@Gregory Kusnick:
Version 4.4.7 of the Jargon File has an entry for "studlycaps":
A hackish form of silliness similar to BiCapitalization for trademarks, but applied randomly and to arbitrary text rather than to trademarks. ThE oRigiN and SigNificaNce of thIs pRacTicE iS oBscuRe.