Beyoncé, Taylor Swift and Lady Gaga are among a handful of living pop artists who have amassed enough cultural clout to result in college classes being taught about them. At 31, the global superstar Bad Bunny is about to have (at least) his third, as Yale University plans to offer a course about him this fall.
The Yale course, “Bad Bunny: Musical Aesthetics and Politics,” was conceived by Albert Laguna, an associate professor of American studies and ethnicity, race and migration. The Yale Daily News was the first to report on the new course, saying that Professor Laguna was inspired to create the class by Bad Bunny’s latest album, “Debí Tirar Más Fotos,” which the artist has described as his “most Puerto Rican album ever.”
Bad Bunny was raised in the coastal town of Vega Baja, Puerto Rico, and has risen over the past decade to become a megastar of reggaeton and Latin trap, helping launch Spanish-language music into the contemporary pop mainstream. He has since netted three chart-topping Billboard albums, headlined at Coachella and become one of the most streamed artists in the world. But his new album, which was recorded in Puerto Rico, is a soulful ode to his roots and homeland, where he was born as Benito Martínez Ocasio.
The Yale course intends to use the album to study the Puerto Rican diaspora, Caribbean politics and culture, colonialism and musical genres that Bad Bunny has experimented with, such as salsa, bomba and plena.
In a phone interview, Professor Laguna described an experience with Bad Bunny’s new album during a trip to New Orleans, which inspired him to design the class.
“I was walking around New Orleans listening to it, connecting with the Caribbean feel of the city in neighborhoods like the French Quarter, which can feel a bit like San Juan, and I just became struck by everything this album is doing,” Professor Laguna said. “You have all these creative ways he’s addressing Puerto Rico’s colonial past and present in it and the current challenges the island faces. It’s all over the album. And he’s engaging these issues in music that’s joyful.”
The course, and its emphasis on a young Puerto Rican pop star, comes at a time when universities are under pressure from the Trump administration and conservatives to reshape themselves and to eliminate what could broadly be considered attempts at diversity, equity and inclusion.
“The intellectual right’s perspective on classes like this is, they tend to pooh-pooh on them, seeing them as lacking rigor or even indoctrinating,” said Lauren Lassabe Shepherd, the author of “Resistance from the Right: Conservatives and the Campus Wars in Modern America,” who cited previous criticism of courses on Ms. Swift. “For the faculty teaching these classes, though, they take them dead seriously, as chances to view a topic through a critical lens.”
“The Ivies tend to make headlines,” Ms. Shepherd added. “It can be easy to anticipate the Fox News headline banner, just because it’s at the Ivies. But if it happened at a community college, it probably wouldn’t even make a wave.”
That response may come, but Professor Laguna believes the time is right to study Bad Bunny and the impact his music has already had on the world.
“I think we often mistakenly believe that to study culture we have to study the past, but that couldn’t be more wrong,” he said. “Bad Bunny is interesting for many reasons, and it’s important for students to understand him in regards to the Puerto Rican diaspora, but he’s also a global star, which isn’t new. Music from the Hispanophone Caribbean has shaped the world before, and Bad Bunny is a link in a longer chain.”
Professor Laguna said that the response to the course’s announcement had been enthusiastic on Yale’s campus.
“There are only 18 seats, and I’ve gotten notes from about a hundred students who want to get in,” he said. “I’ve also gotten notes from Yale alums, some of them Puerto Rican, who appreciate we’re doing this. There’s really a hunger for this material.”
Professor Laguna’s course won’t be the first of its kind. Wellesley College has offered a class taught by Petra Rivera-Rideau called “Bad Bunny: Race, Gender, and Empire in Reggaetón.” And there has been one at Loyola Marymount University taught by Vanessa Díaz, titled “Bad Bunny and Resistance in Puerto Rico.”
Those professors launched an online resource, “The Bad Bunny Syllabus,” dedicated to their scholarship of the artist and his cultural influence.
A representative for Bad Bunny did not reply to a request for comment about the Yale class, but the artist was asked about the other courses during an appearance on “The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon” in 2023.
“Did you ever think you were going to be taught in a course at a school?” Mr. Fallon asked.
“That’s a very crazy thing,” Bad Bunny said. “I don’t know, it feels weird. But I would love to take one of those classes.”
“You’d be really good,” Mr. Fallon replied.
“I think I would get an A,” Bad Bunny said. “Totalmente.”
