Associate Professor Jessica Swanston Baker recently published an article in The Guardian. The piece, titled "Bad Bunny gives Super Bowl viewers two choices: crash out or tap in," discusses the conservative cultural backlash to Bad Bunny's Super Bowl halftime show, arguing that "the claim that music sung in Spanish will alienate viewers ignores the fact that many people would rather join the fun than risk being left out of it."
Read an excerpt of the article below, and click here to read the full piece in The Guardian.
Want to learn even more? Join Jessica Baker for a Bad Bunny Talk on Friday, February 20 at 12pm in Fulton Recital Hall.
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"Caribbean artists, for their part, make these invisible borders graspable – often dance- and sing-along-worthy, too. Much of what I know about the shape of imperialism comes through Caribbean sounds: Peter Tosh, The Mighty Sparrow, Singing Sandra and Ruben Blades, to name a few. Before I could understand exactly what they meant when they sang about freedom, liberation and colonization, the sticky melodies and body-rocking rhythms kept me close long enough to learn more and learn better.
That’s why I’m not moved by the claim that music sung in Spanish will alienate viewers. Bunny’s 2022 song El Apagón, for example, references the frequent blackouts in Puerto Rico’s long run of infrastructural failures – an electrical grid left to rot and wider colonial abandonment. Over a heavy percussive beat, stripped of its digital sheen, the song sounds out the lo-tech conditions named in its title, The Blackout. It’s still a party song; it makes you move, but the political center is unavoidable. Caribbean music like Bad Bunny’s – inflected with reggaeton and its dembow backbone, alongside salsa and bomba, fortified by trap and their diasporic cousins – performed on a stage like the Super Bowl halftime show is an invitation into a shared situation, and people want in.
My point isn’t that music is universal or that Bad Bunny’s is a transcendentally global sound. It is not. It is very specifically rooted in and routed through his island home. His music doesn’t transcend language so much as it holds our attention long enough to do the actual labor of getting beyond surface lyrics. It invites us to do the work of figuring it out, and that feels especially poignant (crucial, even) in a political landscape where nativism is dressed up as logic and fear is marketed as patriotism."