The ‘Benito Bowl,’ Puerto Rican superstarBad Bunny’sSuper Bowl halftime show, sparked a global reaction across popular culture. Seen by an estimated 128 million viewers, the performance was a love letter to all things Puerto Rican. Few people in the mainland United States were as well-prepared to take it all in as students inMarysol Quevedo’sMusic of Latin America class at theFrost School of Music.
“I completely reorganized the course to get into some Cuban and Puerto Rican genres at the beginning of the semester,” said Quevedo. “I wanted to give students what they needed to understand musically what would happen.”
Marysol Quevedo giving a talk on Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl performance at the Frost School. Photo by Gonzalo Mejia/Frost School of Music.
“Ricky Martin had to sing in English in 1999 to break through to the mainstream pop market, and 25-plus years later, Bad Bunny had him on the world’s biggest stage singing in Spanish,” said Quevedo, who gave a talk on the event for Frost School faculty and staff and was interviewed about the Super Bowl by NBC 6, the South Florida network affiliate. “That’s such a full-circle moment. I can teach a bunch of different genres through this halftime show because it engaged so many different musical styles. There are so many different angles through which to examine it – racial representation, music, lyrics, visual symbolism, fashion. It will be generating discussion for a long, long time.”
Marysol Quevedo was interviewed about the Super Bowl by NBC 6.
“There were so many tiny little things in it, all well-chosen and so meaningful,” said Quevedo. “The whole thing was a brilliant master class in live video production, and the fact that nothing went wrong was amazing. Changing my class to fit it just felt like the obvious thing to do, like it would have been weird not to. Our responsibility as faculty is to work to make the classroom relevant to what is happening in the world right here and right now.”
