Bad Bunny is the latest musician to become the focus of a college course. Yale Daily News reports that Yale University is looking to offer a course about the Puerto Rican star in the fall.
Titled “Bad Bunny: Musical Aesthetics and Politics,” the Yale course will take a deep dive into the artist’s cultural impact, as well as how his music serves as a lens for understanding the Puerto Rican diaspora. The course was created and will be taught by Albert Laguna, an associate professor of American Studies and Ethnicity, Race & Migration.
Laguna told Yale Daily News that the idea of a Bad Bunny course came to him after listening to the artist’s latest studio album, DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS. He explained that the album’s “depth and cultural resonance” inspired the course. “I was walking around New Orleans, caught up in the Caribbeanness of the city, just listening to the album over and over again,” he said. “I was taken by how every song opens up avenues of exploration in relation to topics that are important to me.”
The course will highlight “Spanish-speaking Caribbean culture, popular music, migration and politics.” Laguna hopes that his course will dissect history and the evolution of the genre through the use of a popular contemporary artist. At the same time, he hopes his students will “appreciate” Bad Bunny’s “socially conscious choices” and the other genres that influence the artist.
“Of equal importance will be our engagement with how musical genres and aesthetic choices manifest these histories and challenges as well,” Laguna added. “You can ‘hear’ what the mass migration of Puerto Ricans made possible. Reggaeton in Puerto Rico cannot be divorced from musical flows in the region inseparable from colonial projects in the Americas, and locally, the politics of policing on the island. The class will be attuned to these histories and their sonic manifestations.”
He further shared that the album’s opening track “NUEVAYoL” was a special one while creating the course syllabus. The track features a sample of El Gran Combo De Puerto Rico’s “Un Verano en Nueva York,” and Laguna states that its top spot on the tracklist is “no coincidence.” Laguna continued, “You cannot tell the story of Puerto Rico from the 19th century to the present without New York and the movement of people and cultural production back and forth between both places.”
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