The Edge

#31 Bad Bunny with Petra Rivera-Rideau

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No doubt you’ve heard a thing or two about Bad Bunny recently. He’s a rapper, singer, and producer, also known as the “King of Latin Trap”—and reggaeton, of course—who’s soon to become the first solo Latino to headline the Super Bowl. But he’s also Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio, a 31-year-old from Puerto Rico and an outspokenly political artist, using his platform and music to address humanitarian crises, gender-based violence, and political corruption. Our guest today is Petra Rivera-Rideau, an expert in music and racial politics who completed her Ph.D. at UC Berkeley and also holds the distinct honor of having taught the first-ever (as far as we know) course on Bad Bunny. She talks about her latest book, P FKN R: How Bad Bunny Became the Global Voice of Puerto Rican Resistance, Bad Bunny’s artistic and political legacy, and the rise of popstar-studies in academia. 

Further reading:

This episode was written and hosted by Leah Worthington and Nat Alcantara and produced by Coby McDonald. 

Special thanks to Petra Rivera-Rideau, Pat Joseph, and Laura Smith. Art by Michiko Toki and original music by Mogli Maureal. Additional music from Blue Dot Sessions.


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LEAH: Unless you’ve been living under a rock, no doubt you’ve heard a thing or two about Bad Bunny. He’s a Puerto Rican rapper, singer, and producer, also known as the “King of Latin Trap.” And reggaeton, of course. He’s also one of the most popular musicians worldwide: Spotify’s top artist for three years, and was twice named Artist of the Year by Billboard. Just last weekend, his 2025 record “Debí Tirar Más Fotos” won Album of the Year at the Grammys, making him the first Latin artist to win the award. Bad Bunny will also be the first Spanish-language artist to perform during the Super Bowl halftime show this Sunday—a choice that has ruffled some American feathers.


What you might not know is that Bad Bunny is also Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio, a 31-year-old from a small neighborhood on the northern coast of Puerto Rico. Benito, as many fans affectionately call him, is the oldest of three sons of a truck driver and schoolteacher. Twelve years ago, Benito was bagging groceries and studying communications at the University of Puerto Rico at Arecibo—all before dropping out to pursue music. 


19 billion or so annual Spotify streams later and Bad Bunny is now truly a phenomenon. 


But he’s not your average pop star. Bad Bunny is outspokenly political, using his platform and music to address humanitarian crises, gender-based violence, and political corruption affecting his beloved Puerto Rico and the U.S. It's this other side of the megastar that American studies professor Petra Rivera-Rideau explores in her latest book P FKN R: How Bad Bunny Became the Global Voice of Puerto Rican Resistance. As she writes: “Bad Bunny is part of a newer generation of Puerto Ricans who imagine a different kind of future for their homeland.” 


[MUSIC IN]


LEAH: This is The Edge, produced by California magazine and the Cal Alumni Association. I’m your host, Leah Worthington. 


NAT: And I’m your co-host Nathalia Alcantara.


LEAH: Our guest today is Petra Rivera-Rideau, an associate professor at Wellesley College studying music and racial politics in Latin America and U.S. Latinx communities. Petra, who completed her Ph.D. at Berkeley, also holds the distinct honor of having taught the first-ever (as far as we know) course on Bad Bunny, which—as you’ll hear—raised some academic eyebrows. Following the release of her book and with Bad Bunny’s highly-anticipated Super Bowl performance just days away, she sat down with Nat to discuss the artist’s legacy, Puerto Rican resistance, and the rise of popstar-studies in academia. 


[MUSIC OUT]


Nat 0:00

So it's great to talk. I'm really excited for this conversation. So thank you for taking the time. 


Petra Rivera-Rideau 

Thank you so much.


Nat 0:08

I think a great place to start is with the title of this book. it illustrates a lot of what it accomplishes. And I would love to hear how you and Vanessa decided on that title? 


Petra 0:24

Yeah. So the book, which I coauthored with Vanessa Díaz, is called P FKN R, how bad bunny became, the global voice of Puerto Rican resistance, and we called it perfect. That is one of Bad Bunny's songs, but it's also a phrase that he uses a lot. He had a concert with that title. The phrase shows up in a lot of his songs. And to us, the phrase P FKN R reflects this duality of Puerto Rican life, right on the one hand, this tremendous pride in Puerto Rico's contributions to the world and things like that, and on the other hand, perfect as a phrase that expresses the frustration with many of the difficulties of life in Puerto Rico, like ongoing blackouts, cost of living, poor access to health care, closure of public schools. I mean, these are all things that have happened in the past few decades in Puerto Rico, and things that have that someone of bad Bunny's age, you know, he's in his early 30s, would have witnessed. And so to us, the way he uses the phrase, and now it's become part of some people's, like everyday speech, right? Or a phrase that you hear in songs by other artists. It really captures this double sense of both, like pride and frustration in his homeland.


Nat 1:57

One thing I was wondering, there's so many artists from Puerto Rico, who are also doing, you know, many different things with different styles of music. So why do you think bad bunny? Why is bad bunny this sensation, and you know, undeniably the most famous and popular Puerto Rican artist of our time?


Petra 2:17

Well, I think it's a I think it's a few different things. So when Bob bunny first starts out, he's singing Latin trap, and he has a very distinctive voice. So a lot of the people that we interviewed for the book talked about how his voice was very deep, how he grew up singing in a church, and that impacted the way he could sing, and so he sounded different than other people, but one thing that happens that really kind of gets his foot in the door. You know, his first single, Diles a very sexually explicit song, and he has some more songs, and then he has a song called Soy Peor, and it's a kind of a classic breakup song.


<Soy Peor>


3:14

And that song becomes a really big hit, and I think in part because the lyrics are very sort of classic, right? Like, you know, you left me, my life is bad now, blah, blah, blah, right? We interviewed somebody who said that's the kind of song that you could take those lyrics and you could put them on any type of genre, and it would still be popular, right? And I think what that song did, or what that song showed, was that Latin trap, which at the time was not receiving a lot of airplay on radio, wasn't being taken seriously by the Latin music industry, could have this really big audience and could be more mainstream right as his career has progressed, bad bunny. You know, his bread and butter and butter really is Latin trap and reggaeton, but he is really good at putting sounds together, at fusing these genres and so taking them musically into these other places. So you know, he works often with two really major producers. One is Tiny, who is one of the you know, he's only in his mid 30s, but he started when he was a young teenager, and he has produced massive reggaeton hits over the past 20 years. And he is very melodic. He incorporates a lot of different influences. And then in 2020 Bad Bunny links up with a producer named MAG, who's a Puerto Rican Dominican, producer from New York City, who brings in a lot of pop elements, a lot of rock elements, and a lot of really unique fusion sounds so TINY and MAG, I think, have helped bad bunny create these. Is this musical style that is relatively unique in the kind of crowded field of Latin urban music. And I think another, I think there are two other really big factors. One is just his ability to write really clever and interesting lyrics. you know, most of this music, and most of these songs are party songs. They're songs about women. You know, there's songs about sex. They're not necessarily deep, per se, but they are clever. You know, he's a really good songwriter, lyrically. And then I think the last thing is his persona, so bad bunny. You know, in 10 years, he's had a bunch of blockbuster albums, each of them kind of has a different style, a different sound associated with it, although the core is trapped in reggaeton. But I think his person persona remains consistent throughout, right? He seems like a very regular guy. He seems very approachable, which is really unusual for someone at that kind of level of superstar status. And he remains committed to Puerto Rico and you know, and what he talks about, and what he, you know, supports, financially, politically, etc. So I think that gives an aura of authenticity that is really appealing to a lot of people, whether or not they are Puerto Rican.


Nat 6:31

Right. And one of the things that I found striking about the book is how you really tell the history of Puerto Rico, while you tell the story of Bad Bunny. So let's go to the beginning and go back to the early days of his career, and the context where he emerges as a young musician or artist.


Petra 7:05

yeah, well, so Bad Bunny really starts making a name for himself in 2016 he begins as a SoundCloud rapper, making his own beats and his own songs at his house, uploading them onto SoundCloud, and eventually he gets signed by a Puerto Rican record label called Hear this Music, and they put out his first single, which is called Diles.


<Diles> 


Speaker 1 7:42

John, genre that he's singing at that time is called Latin trap, and this is a genre


Nat 7:48

Just before we keep going, can you explain the difference between reggaeton and trap?


Petra 1 7:52

Yeah, in terms of how it sounds, I think people would say reggaeton is a lot more Caribbean and dance hall sounding. So reggaeton blends the reggae part of reggaeton is really important, right? So, taking sounds from Jamaican dance hall from reggae in Espanol, which is coming out of Panama in the 80s and 90s, right? I'm blending that with hip hop, whereas Latin trap sounds a lot more like southern US Hip Hop and R and B and a little bit less Caribbean. And I think at the time that Latin trap really starts to come out in Puerto Rico in the 2010s This is a time when reggaeton is becoming really like the backbone of Latin pop, you know. And so do you have major hits by people like Enrique Iglesias by Lando in 2014 which then opens the drawer for despacito, of course, in 2017 so these pop reggaeton fusions that are really pop songs like at their heart. And then you have other places where reggaeton is popping up, most notably Colombia. And in Medellin, in Colombia, the Colombians are making it style reggaeton that people understand to be more romantic, more soft, a little bit less hard hitting, more sort of palatable. And so it's in that context where reggaeton, some people are saying reggaeton is losing its sort of connection to the working class in Puerto Rico, that Latin trap kind of comes up to take its place. And bad bunny is part of this Latin trap wave. But I think your question also speaks to the reality now you know, 10 years later, where a lot of people use reggaeton and Latin trap interchangeably because of the success of an artist like bad bunny. Latin trap has also become more mainstream within the Latin music industry. So technically, there are two different genres. A lot of people, including bad bunny, but many of his other contemporaries perform in both.


Nat 10:19

So how does someone like him, who's just starting out as a party music artist, begin to become more political?


Petra 1 10:36

I think there's a couple of things. One of the things is that, you know, bad bunny is only 31 so we're seeing, you know, as a college professor, I think about this a lot. I engage with people in their early 20s every day, and this is a time period when a lot of people are, like, really, kind of forming and and solidifying their political beliefs. And I feel like. So there's a generational, you know, age aspect of this. There's also the kind of myriad crises that have been happening since he came out, right? So he starts in 2016 This is the same year that the Obama administration passes the PROMESA bill, which is a bill that aims to restructure Puerto Rico's debt by 2015 Puerto Rico has ma amassed upwards of $70 billion in debt as a result of their complicated financial system that is rooted in US colonialism since Puerto Rico has been a colony of the Us since 1898 so PROMESA comes along, and it's presented as a way for for Puerto Rico to kind of to function, sort of like bankruptcy, but it causes a lot of extreme austerity measures. It really reduces the autonomy of Puerto Rico and Puerto Ricans to make decisions. So for instance, one of the things it does is implement what the law calls a fiscal oversight and management board, what many Puerto Ricans refer to as La Junta. This is a group of people, often people who have ties to the same financial institutions that own Puerto Rico's debt. Are who are tasked with, kind of maintaining the archipelago economy. And the Puerto Rican Governor sits on this board, but they have no voting power, and that gets implemented in 2016 and it's at this time, you know, we see people losing their retirement pensions. We see public hundreds of public schools closing all of these, you know, hospitals closing, all of these things happening. And then in September of 2017 hurricane Maria hits Puerto Rico. And this is a category four storm that hits right after another hurricane that the island is already struggling with Hurricane Irma happens the week before Maria comes around and devastates Puerto Rico's infrastructure. So the electrical grid is just destroyed. Some people are left without power for a whole year. Whole communities are cut off from the rest of the country because roads aren't passable because no, like, literally no one can access them. You have, over 4000 people are estimated to have died as a result of Hurricane Maria, and many of those deaths happen in the aftermath of Maria. So for instance, people who need electricity to keep their medications cold. So you need your insulin to be kept in a refrigerator, but you have no power and there's no generator, your insulin goes bad.People who couldn't access healthcare, incidents of domestic violence increase. So there's like this, myriad crises happening back to back at this time when bad bunny is first starting as an artist. And I think one of the arguments we make in the book is that, on the one hand, bad bunny is very exceptional, obviously, as this superstar who has, like broken all these barriers as a Spanish language artist, on the other hand, he seems to be relatively typical, meaning that there are many people of his generation who grew up as the Puerto Rican economy, which was already doing poorly, began to spiral kind of out of control, who grew up under all of these severe austerity measures combined with a very high cost of living, and who grew up disenchanted with the options that have historically been available to Puerto Ricans politically and wanting to imagine something different. And I think when you talk to people who are in their 20s and 30s, who grew up in. This environment, many of them have articulate similar opinions as bad bunny. So I think all of those things are happening in kind of in real time as he's making his music. And I think his most recent album, Debí Tirar mas Fotos is the one that a lot of people latch on to as this like very political album, and it is right through the way he blends reggaeton and trap with traditional Puerto Rican sounds, but also in songs that he sings and lyrics that are in party songs that reference, you know, the independence movement, or, most notably, in LO QUE LE PASÓ A HAWAii, which is, you know, this very slow song that that kind of warns Puerto Rico to defend its homeland and not to become like Hawaii.


<LO QUE LE PASÓ A HAWAii>


Petra 15:55

But he actually has been doing this stuff for a long time. So you know, one really notable moment in Bad Bunny's career happens in back in 2018 his very first time on US English language mainstream television is the Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon, and his first album has just come out. And at that time, his English was very labored, you know. And he gets on that stage, and the very first thing he does is virulently critique Donald Trump for the federal government's completely inadequate response to Hurricane Maria and the 1000s of people who died. And then he goes into his song Estamos Bien, which is a song that is on the surface about like, I'm good. I have all this money. I fly private, blah, blah, blah. But then he also talks about things like not having electricity, driving over potholes, all of these, like aspects of Puerto Rican everyday life. And so to me, that moment is really important, because, you know, this is a time when Latin music is surging and streaming right, and the US mainstream media is paying attention to it more than maybe it has ever before, but it's still not common for Spanish language artists to be in spaces like The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon, and so to have that be his very first performance, and to say I'm going to take advantage of this platform to make this statement, I think, is really important, and we see him doing things like that over and over again.


Nat 17:34

Yeah, there are so many examples. I'm thinking about El Apagón also. 


Petra 1 17:40

Yeah. I mean, El Apagón is a major hit for Bad Bunny. It means the blackout, and it's a song that, again, speaks to this duality, like I was talking about with the title of the book, right? Like one of the most famous lines in that song is Puerto Rico. 


<El Apagón>


A so Puerto Rico is really messed up, but like, in a crazy like, yeah, we're so great, we're so messed up. Like, we're like, awesome, but also, like, we're really screwed in this system that we have some Latino, 


<El Apagón>


but it talks about like life under the blackout or whatever. And then it and it shifts into a more like EDM type song, where his then girlfriend Jerry sings that, this is my land. These are my beaches. This place belongs to me, make them leave, and not to reference to this massive wave of gentrification that Puerto Rico has seen in the past few decades that is a result of shifting tax policies that lure wealthy American investors to the island by giving them a lot of tax breaks and making it really like a tax haven, extending those policies also to like cryptocurrency investments. 


Nat

Cryptocurrency investors? 


Patra

yeah, yeah. There was a group of cryptocurrency investors, notably Brock Pierce, led by Brock Pierce, and they were proposing Puerto Rico to be a portopia, and they were kind of gobbling up these different properties in Old San Juan and having conferences and things like that. So they were one of the drivers of this gentrification and increased cost of living. And so that's what El Apagon is about. And then the music video, you know, is by Cacho Lopez Mari, who is a very well known Grammy winning music video producer, I'm sorry, music video director. He's also the grandson of Juan Mari Bras, who's one of the most important leaders of Puerto Rican independence movement in the 20th century. So he directs El Apagón, and they create this really cool music video where people are kind of like living their lives and partying and all of these sort of like joyful forms of protest. And then it shifts into a 20 minute documentary called Aqui Vive Gente that explains more the historical roots of this gentrification and its impact on everyday Puerto Ricans, by Bianca carrala, who's a independent Puerto Rican journalist who bad bunny selected to make the documentary. So like, it's a very cool thing, right? You know, he has this music video. He holds on to it and releases it around the time when Hurricane Maria hits, when another hurricane, at the time, Hurricane Fiona, is going to hit Puerto Rico. And then he's like, you're going to listen to my party song and watch this music video, and then at the end, I'm going to hit you with a 20 minute documentary on the colonial roots of gentrification. It's like, amazing,


Nat 20:59

Yeah, yeah. And it’s just typical for him,


Speaker 1 21:03

virtually every music video and the whole concept of DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS similarly, makes a lot of really important political interventions. But even his other music videos do it too. So like, there is a very simple, but I think very interesting and moving music video for a song called Turista, which is means tourist. And it's like a bolero style song about a tourist. You know, that's basically like you were a tourist in my life. We had some good times, but now you're gone. And it could be a love song. It could be a discussion about tourism. Of course, Puerto Rico, the Caribbean place, is a tourist economy, but the music video is him as a cleaning person, showing up to this very trashed vacation home and cleaning it. And that is the whole music video, right? And it's really simple, but it's, I think, really important in the context of that song, given that like one of  the main drivers of gentrification right now in Puerto Rico are companies like Airbnb and these vacation rentals where people which have increased the property values and increased rent and made it difficult for Puerto Ricans to buy property or to live. And so he could have made a music video about anything, and it's literally, you know, three minutes of him cleaning an apartment and even these kind of choices he's making, you know, he's not the Puerto first Puerto Rican artist to make political statements, right? You know, music in Puerto Rico, including reggaeton, has long been used as a space for protest and politics, but I think he does it in a way that is very digestible for people, in a way that really kind of fosters, like, some form of critical thinking, and like as someone who teaches university courses, I mean a lot of faculty at a lot of different universities who don't even study Puerto Rico, or don't even study music, maybe they study, you know, environmental studies, or, you know, history of whatever. They're all using these materials in their courses because students consume them, and they're like such a great entry point to getting to these bigger issues, and bad bunny seems to be aware of that, and to be someone who's really thoughtfully taking advantage of his platform to, like, push these conversations and ideas forward.


Nat 23:35

Right. You know, it's striking that you're talking about using his work as a teaching tool, because it makes me wonder what the response from the rest of academia has been. So what was the reaction of academia when you talk about your work, how do your colleagues react to your papers and syllabus?


Speaker 1 23:55

You know, that's a really it's a really good question. So, you know, I graduated from Cal with my PhD in African American studies in 2010 and I wrote my dissertation about the racial politics of reggaeton, and that became the basis of my first book, which came out in 2015 and I was, I had wonderful mentors and advisors at Cal who really encouraged me to pursue this topic. And when I left Cal and started entering academia, I realized that that was like a pretty special thing, and that even in fields like Latino Studies, people were not taking reggaeton seriously as an object of study when I first started, you know, and this is a time when it is dominating the Latin music scene. My students, all my friends, are listening to this music all the time. But, you know, academia is definitely not taking it seriously, and it. Not just because they think you should study opera, right? It's also like in the spaces where you think people would be taking it seriously, they're still not. And I think one of the things about bad bunny is that, particularly with this last album, because it is so musically innovative and such a phenomenon and so overtly political and such a good teaching tool. People are very excited and happy and willing to talk about Bad Bunny. There are many Bad Bunny classes now at universities. So I teach at Wellesley College, now in Massachusetts, and I developed my course in 2022 which, as far as I know, is the first bad bunny class in the country. My coauthor Vanessa Díaz, was the second, and people thought our classes were kind of weird. Like, why would you have a class about this pop star? What is there to learn? And now, with DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS, there are bad bunny courses all over the place. There's courses in Princeton, there's courses at Yale, there's courses at Rutgers and Emory and Georgetown and, you know, all over but there are still very, very few courses about the genre reggaeton.


Nat 26:14

But I'm curious what makes an artist worthy of a whole syllabus or a university course. What's the criteria here?


Speaker 1 26:23

Well, honestly, I kind of feel like you can make a syllabus about almost anything. I've always been attracted to popular culture, like, since I was a teenager, like, I love all of the like, popular things, and I think a lot of popular culture phenomena are popular because people see themselves or some aspect of their life reflected in it. And so there are university courses now, many about Beyonce. They're about Taylor Swift. There's courses about Jay Z about Kendrick Lamar. There's courses that center television programs, you know. So I feel like what makes an artist worthy of study is sort of the same thing of what makes kind of popular culture in general worthy of study, which, for me, is that it is something that we consume that we can people relate to in different ways, but it's also a very accessible entry point to get at much bigger questions around race, around gender, bigger theoretical questions around performance and racial formation, and all of These different kind of theoretical topics that we learn about in the academy. And so sometimes I will have students in my courses who are like, Oh, I'm so afraid. I'm a chemistry major and I've never taken a humanities class, and I'm so scared. But the thing is, when they sit down and reflect on kinds of conversations they have with their friends in the dining hall about this Beyonce music video, and what did this mean, and what did that mean, and was this song reproducing stereotypes of X thing, or was it actually something that's pushing against them, like people are having those conversations every day, they're maybe not Using the language or the theoretical frameworks that we use in academia, but they're familiar with them.


Nat 28:26

Yeah, super interesting. Can you also walk us through how your syllabus came to be?


Speaker 1 28:31

Yeah, I was teaching a course about Latin music, and in that course, we talked about all different kinds of genres, you know, Afro Cuban jazz and Mambo. We talked about northenia and Banda corrido, salsa, like all these different genres. And, of course, reggaeton, since that's what I study. And no matter how many genres I introduced, how many artists and playlists I made them listen to. Like, 75% of my final papers were about bad bunny. Everybody wanted to talk about baptismal in 2018 2019 and then at the same time, I was teaching a seminar on Puerto Rican history and politics, and it would enroll like five students. And after a while, and this happened, particularly after I met him at Harvard, which was in October of 2019 you know, he was very young then. It was really interesting to engage with him. He was not that much older than my students, probably, like, 24 or something. But what I found so interesting about him is you could really see how he was also thinking about these things in the creation of his own work, right? And so that got me a little more interested in him. And I was like, you know, what if I tacked him on to my Puerto Rico class? What would happen? And, you know, the pandemic happened. I went up for tenure. All these things were going. On, and then when things settled down for a little bit, I was like, I'm going to do this. I'm going to try teaching this class. And the first half of my class was, and still is, more or less six weeks deep dive into Puerto Rican history and politics. We talk about the colonial roots of the debt crisis, the complicated nature of Puerto Rican citizenship. We talk about environmental disasters like Hurricane Maria. We talked about, you know, politics and protests centered around these historic protests in 2019 that ousted the governor that Bad Bunny actually participated in. So he becomes like a hook to get the students in the classroom. But a lot of my students are ultimately wind up researching things that don't have anything to do with bad bunny or tangential bad buddy things, right? Like, I've had some really amazing research projects come out of this class, you know, like econ papers about the role of tax policy and US colonialism and like just all kinds of really cool things that maybe people don't expect to come out of a class when you hear there's a class about Bad Bunny.


Nat 31:14

So shifting gears a bit. Bad bunny is, of course, this year's Super Bowl halftime performer. And this came at a really particular moment. Right to say the least, we're seeing this mass ICE raids, anti-immigration rhetoric, and so there's been, well, some backlash. Donald Trump has said he's never heard of Bad Bunny, But anyway, here you have the Spanish speaking Puerto Rican artist who is about to perform at what's arguably America's biggest cultural event. So what are your reaction when you heard about the backlash to his selection?


Speaker 1 31:58

So honestly, to me, the backlash is completely predictable. You know, we are in this moment of extreme xenophobia and racist rhetoric targeting Latinos and people who speak Spanish. You know, we are watching ICE raids every day on the news, we see racial profiling of you know, people because they speak Spanish or indigenous people, or, you know, it doesn't matter if you're a citizen or not, if you kind of fit the mold of what a Latino is supposed to look like or supposed to be ICE is is stopping you and trying to figure out who you are and do you belong here. And it's kind of extreme, right. But of course, we've seen this before, right? Like the US has done mass deportations before. You know, probably the most famous was the 1950s Operation Wetback, the targeted Mexican immigrants in the United States, and we know that many Mexican Americans were caught up in that and also deported, right? So in this context, is really not shocking at all that people would be upset about Bad Bunny being on in the Super Bowl, right? He's Spanish speaking. A lot of people don't know that Puerto Ricans are US citizens. So people are like, he should be deported. I mean, it's worth mentioning that this has also happened to other Puerto Rican artists, right? So like perhaps most famously, Jose Feliciano, he wins the Grammy for Best New Artist for an album that he sings in English in 1968 and then he sings the national anthem at the World Series in a sort of Latin tinged guitar way in English. And people are like, this is a horrible protest. This is so disrespectful he should be deported. And he's also Puerto Rican, you know, and spends most of his life in New York City. So this is sort of an old story, and when you think about it like that, the backlash is totally unsurprising. To me, the more interesting question is, how did this happen? Like, how did he get selected? And I'm really interested. I would have loved to be a fly on the wall during those conversations and this negotiation, because I think rock nation and the NFL must have been aware that they were going to receive backlash for this, but at the same time, this guy is the biggest global pop star of our time, and the NFL is trying to globalize its audience, right? They're playing games in Sao Paulo, in London. In a lot of ways, it makes very good business sense. Like, who else could you possibly have if your goal is to get as many eyes on this thing as possible?


Nat 34:48

And what do you think we should expect from the performance? Any predictions?


Speaker 1 34:52

You know, that's a very hard question for me, because one of the things that I think is interesting about bad bunny. Me is that he sort of keeps you on your toes. He keeps things very secret. He has really mastered the art of surprise, whether it's the way he drops his album or concert announcements, thinking outside the box, right? Like the summer he had the historic residency in Puerto Rico, like that, you know, was not something that anybody saw coming, right? So I don't know what he's going to do. I mean, he just released the trailer, which features him and a lot of different types of people, different racial and ethnic groups, you know, different ages, different occupations, dancing together to one of his hit songs, a salsa song called Bailey, and they're on a set that looks like the set from the residency with the flamboyant tree from Puerto Rico in the mountains, and it says the world will dance, and so that's all we got. I feel like it's going to be a party and we're going to be dancing and grooving, and I think it's kind of like it's very joyful, and I think it's like a really great sort of antidote to that backlash, like you're going to hate on me, you're going to say that I don't belong here, but here I am bringing all these people together to celebrate this moment. And I think, I mean, it's very hard to criticize that. Why wouldn't you want unity and joy?



[MUSIC IN]


LEAH: This is The Edge, brought to you by California magazine and the Cal Alumni Association. I’m Leah Worthington. This episode was produced by Coby McDonald, with support from Nat Alcantara, Laura Smith, and Pat Joseph. Special thanks to Petra Rivera-Rideau. Original music by Mogli Maureal. Additional music from Blue Dot Sessions.


[MUSIC OUT]