Just in case

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 many most of the results don't try to answer the question…).

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":

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[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.]