Yale Launches Course on Bad Bunny’s Music and Impact

College courses are starting to look a lot more like your playlist. More and more universities are using pop culture to help students explore deeper topics like identity, history, and politics. The latest example? Bad Bunny.

Yale Daily News reports that Yale University is planning to offer a new course this fall focused entirely on the Puerto Rican superstar. The class, titled “Bad Bunny: Musical Aesthetics and Politics,” will explore how Bad Bunny’s music reflects the experiences of the Puerto Rican diaspora and sheds light on cultural and political issues.

The course was created by Albert Laguna, an associate professor of American Studies and Ethnicity, Race & Migration. He said the inspiration came after listening to Bad Bunny’s recent album DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS. “I was walking around New Orleans, caught up in the Caribbeanness of the city, just listening to the album over and over again,” Laguna told Yale Daily News. “I was taken by how every song opens up avenues of exploration in relation to topics that are important to me.”

Students will learn about “Spanish-speaking Caribbean culture, popular music, migration and politics.” Laguna hopes the course helps them not only understand history, but also recognize how Bad Bunny’s artistic choices reflect broader social issues. “Of equal importance will be our engagement with how musical genres and aesthetic choices manifest these histories and challenges as well,” he said. “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.”

One track from the album that stood out to Laguna while building the syllabus is “NUEVAYoL,” which samples El Gran Combo De Puerto Rico’s “Un Verano en Nueva York.” Laguna explained the track’s placement is intentional. “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.”

Bad Bunny isn’t the only chart-topping artist making waves in academia. Harvard University entered its Taylor Swift era during the spring 2024 semester with an English course all about the singer-songwriter.

Course instructor Stephanie Burt had students explore more than just Swift’s lyrics. The class also looked at her musical influences, such as Dolly Parton, and examined literary works that connect to themes in Swift’s songs.

In an interview with the Harvard Crimson, Burt explained that Swift’s shift from country to pop music is part of a larger cultural conversation. “Taylor Swift is someone who establishes complicated and changing relationships to the idea of Americanness and to the idea of white Americanness and of middle America,” she said.

Harvard followed the lead of Boston’s Berklee College of Music, which already offers a course analyzing Swift’s songwriting techniques—designed to help aspiring musicians write their own hits.