San Diego State University (SDSU) has freshly announced that it will soon begin offering a course on the one and only music superstar, Bad Bunny.
The news came earlier this week, and Dr. Nathian Rodríguez, SDSU’s Associate Professor of Digital Media and the Associate Director of the School of Journalism & Media Studies, is gearing up to teach the course next fall.
“Bad Bunny has transformed reggaetón like no other artist has. When you think about reggaetón, it’s hypermasculine, machista is embedded in its core. And Bad Bunny has come and flipped it upside down,” Rodríguez, who previously taught a class on Selena Quintanilla at the institution, said, CBS News reports.
“Bad Bunny gives us another side to masculinity, and how masculinity can be, how it should be. How it can be authentic, how it can be endearing, how it can be loving,” he continued.
Notably, Rodríguez’s comments on how Bad Bunny combats toxic masculinity come less than a month after the Puerto Rican heartthrob sent shockwaves by sharing a kiss with two dancers — one male and one female — during his performance of “Tití Me Preguntó” at the MTV Video Music Awards (VMAs).
“Bad Bunny is this global phenomenon, and he has been elevated in every single way,” Rodríguez said of the Latin music icon. “Men, women, children, older people, people of all sorts of different colors, people who don’t even speak Spanish are singing his songs.”
“The Latino community wants to see themselves represented,” he continued. “We rarely see ourselves on television, in movies, in media, especially in English-language spaces. And to see Bad Bunny win awards, perform on these different award shows that are traditionally reserved for only English-language-speaking people gives us an opportunity to see ourselves, hear ourselves.”
While there is so much that can be covered in a course about Bad Bunny, real name Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio, this class will focus on his social impact and contributions to Latin culture.
“Bad Bunny makes a perfect cultural anchor to be able to unpack and understand at different levels of media and representation and activism,” Rodriguez told San Diego’s ABC 10 News.
Rodriguez, who previously taught a similar class at SDSU on the late Tejano singer Selena Quintanilla in 2020, hopes that his upcoming Bad Bunny course will have an equal impact on Latinx students who want to learn about themselves, their culture, their communities, and navigating the media.
We should note that the news of SDSU’s upcoming Bad Bunny course comes as the University of Texas at Austin (UT-Austin) launches a course on Taylor Swift; additionally, Texas State University will unveil a course on Harry Styles this upcoming spring, according to the New York Post.
What do you think about SDSU’s upcoming Bad Bunny course, and what other poppin’ classes on noteworthy musicians would you like to see in the future?
