Perhaps, you've heard the news? Bad Bunny is headlining next year's Super Bowl halftime show.
In a stroke of perfect timing, World Cafe caught up with Alt.Latino hosts Anamaria Sayre and Felix Contreras just days before the announcement to talk about their experience at the Puerto Rican superstar's concert residency on the island.
Dubbed No Me Quiero Ir de Aquí, the 31-date residency at the José Miguel Agrelot Coliseum in San Juan attracted half a million fans, with several of the shows reserved exclusively for residents of Puerto Rico.
Sayre says Bad Bunny's residency was unprecedented. The livestreamed finale became the most-watched single artist performance on Amazon Music. On top of the economic boon for Puerto Rico, Sayre says it also had tremendous cultural resonance.
"[Bad Bunny] is basically taking advantage of a political moment, of a social moment, of a cultural moment that's been happening for a number of years now in Puerto Rico," Sayre says. "That involves people very overtly, forcefully, saying that they want to stay in Puerto Rico in response to different things like rising prices on the island and gentrification ... Basically, what he's done — musically and just personally in how he talks and what he says — is he's taken that concept and he's basically adopted it as the overarching idea of his latest record and also this entire residency that he's done on the island."
The live show featured elaborate staging, modeled after the Puerto Rican countryside, with plantain trees and live chickens and goats gracing the stage. Another smaller stage featured a simple concrete home, common in rural Puerto Rico, with Bad Bunny performing on the roof and the porch, harkening back to the early days of reggaetón.
"This whole series of concerts meant a lot of different things to different people, and it was very cool to see all these different levels of pride about the island, the music, the island's history and its influence in the Caribbean," Contreras says. "Personally, in that room, in that moment, I felt like we were all Puerto Rican."
Contreras, who attended one of the shows, says it reminded him of another wildly popular live show.
"It felt like a Grateful Dead show, man," he says. "I'm a longtime Deadhead, and the Dead created this sense of community with their audience ... I couldn't figure it out until was the next day — I had time to think about it — that give-and-take with the audience, that sense of community that we've talked about already, it was very much like a Dead show."
Sayre, who attended five shows, says it's hard to describe the energy in the room.
"You sit in that room, like Felix said, and you feel the pride of what it feels like to be proud of where you're from and to be unapologetic about that and to sing in Spanish and to scream in Spanish," she says. "I think that was mostly what mattered here is to flip the script on what it means to be from a colony, what it means to be from a country in Latin America. So that, to me, is really the lasting impact here."
No doubt the 31-year-old artist will bring some of that indescribable energy when he takes the Super Bowl halftime stage next Feb. 8 in Santa Clara, Calif.
We'll be tuning in.
This episode of World Cafe was produced and edited by Miguel Perez. Our senior producer is Kimberly Junod and our engineer is Chris Williams. Our programming and booking coordinator is Chelsea Johnson and our line producer is Will Loftus.
