Students analyze his Grammy-winning album “Debí Tirar Más Fotos” and discuss his record‑breaking Super Bowl halftime show, highlighting his impact on Spanish-language music in the U.S.
Bad Bunny is one of the biggest artists in the world and also the subject of a new course at the University of Maryland.
“Nobody looks or feels or sounds like Bad Bunny,” said professor Juan Carlos Quintero-Herencia.
The writer and critic teaches “Contemporary Puerto Rican Musicality: From Plena to Bad Bunny.”
“What he’s doing, I think, goes beyond language,” he said. “What he’s doing musically is quite sophisticated.”
His students study how Bad Bunny experiments with genres — from reggaeton to trap to salsa — and how he weaves Puerto Rican history into his music.
“There something in him about how he presents himself that people immediately believe him. Maybe this is what my students call authenticity,” Quintero-Herencia said.
The class analyzes Bad Bunny’s latest album “Debí Tirar Más Fotos,” which just became the first Spanish-language album to win Album of the Year at the Grammy Awards.
“Sometimes, music does something to you that doesn’t require words,” he said. “We say that when the ‘cuando la música es sabrosa’ — when music is really tasty or funky — your feet start moving by itself.”
Quintero-Herencia’s students were emotional about Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl halftime show, which was the first show performed almost entirely in Spanish and the fourth most watched in history.
“Benito showed that Spanish is not a foreign language in the United States,” he said. “The United States doesn’t make any sense if we don’t take into consideration all the contributions made by people that live and work and dream in Spanish.”
He said Bad Bunny’s global reach is clear in how his music resonates with audiences of all ages, regardless of language.
“A global audience encountering Puerto Rican and Caribbean musical forms. Whether this sparks deeper engagement with Puerto Rican culture and reality beyond the spectacle remains uncertain. We’ll have to see,” Quintero-Herencia said.
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