Is Bad Bunny Good? Does it Even Matter?

El hace lo que se da la gana, sure, but should we?

Friedrich Schiller contemplating un verano sin ti.

While this substack is not the place to talk about my own scholarship, I will mention that next month I have an article coming out that examines how aesthetic judgment about music was transmitted to the public in the early nineteenth century. The underlying concern of the so-called connoisseurs of the period was that if the public was captivated by the aesthetically unambitious, which is to say, music that, from their perspective, simply pandered to popular taste, then society as a whole would fail to progress. It wasn’t just music – this concern extended to all the fine arts (poetry and literature, painting and sculpture, theatre and opera, etc.), which were understood as vehicles by which individuals could connect to their own, inner humanity. Thus, culture consumed at the individual level was transformed at the collective level into a society-wide expression of what was, in effect, a public aesthetic.

The primary driver of these concerns was, as with so many things around that time, the perceived failures of the French Revolution. As the German playwright and sort-of philosopher Friedrich Schiller wrote in 1793 (i.e. during the Reign of Terror), “The French people's attempt to realize their sacred human rights and thus achieve political freedom has only revealed their own incapacity and unworthiness. Not only have they plunged themselves, but also a good part of Europe as well, a whole century backwards into barbarism and servitude.” Goddam French, ruining it for everyone.

A few years later, Schiller would write a largely unreadable tract that laid out a plan to remedy this unfortunate circumstance, entitled “Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man.” His basic idea was that it was completely unreasonable to expect the downtrodden and unwashed hoi-polloi to be capable of some kind of responsible political action when they were hopelessly mired in a condition of (his term) savagery. And as for the aristocratic upper classes, they were no better. He referred to them as “barbarians,” i.e. people who are uninterested in cultivating a wider civility – because why would they? With their power and privilege they already had theirs and so had no incentive to think about changing society as a whole for the better. No wonder the ideals of Revolution ended up awash in blood under the guillotine.

The solution to this mess for Schiller was: consume better art in a better way. Yes, the way you avoid political madness is to sit through 3 hours of some thought-provoking (or we might say, tedious) drama, like, say, Schiller’s own play Die Jungfrau von Orleans (i.e. Joan of Arc). The idea is that as we are enduring the interminable third act (of five!), our minds begin to wander process the inner beauty and deeper meaning of what we are watching (what Schiller terms our play drive or Spieltrieb), and by the end we are somehow more in touch with a recognition of our universal humanity. Forget all those fine-sounding Conventions and Constitutions and Proclamations that the French revolutionaries kept throwing about. Where did that get them? Instead, for Schiller, beauty is the real path to liberty. And beauty is found in art.

So before I have sat through Schiller’s play, I am just some unrefined savage who of course thinks in terms of liquidating his enemies under the guillotine’s blade. But afterwards? Well, now I see your humanity, I recognize you as part of a collective fellowship, capable of being moved, as I have been, to appreciate and feel the truly beautiful and sublime. Wasn’t it wonderful and so moving that Joan of Arc was redeemed at the end of those three hours! Come on, let’s have a hug.

That, for Schiller, was the true power of art – the feelings and thoughts it can inspire are universal, and thus create the basis for a kind of universal empathy for and with our fellow human beings. Thus, Schiller dreamed of a world where the masses aspired to consume a better, uplifting art in a better, uplifting way. Popular demand for serious art – say, Die Jungfrau von Orleans – would be proof positive that society is on the march.

How we doing on that front?

This brings me to Bad Bunny. (For those of my readers who may not be familiar with Bad Bunny, it is not the name of a macabre or ironic stuffed animal, but rather the moniker of a musician from Puerto Rico.) Bunny is (again) taking his Latin Trap stylings to the world later this year – his “I should have taken more photos” (Debí Tirar Más Fotos) tour. He has no less than ten concerts planned for Madrid next June, taking place in the 70,000 seat stadium used by the Atletico football club. So that’s 700,000 seats available to hear Bunny lament his woeful lack of instagram photos, just in Madrid. 700,000. And those seats sold out almost immediately.

Now, I am picking on Bad Bunny because last month I had the privilege to witness in my classroom a moment of mania for art of the kind that Schiller would, in the abstract, be excited to see. Various of my students were feverishly trying to snap up one of those highly-coveted spots for the Bad Bunny tour. The queue for buying tickets online was apparently long and the process quixotic, and the mood was tense as a group of my students huddled around a computer, like anxious NASA engineers tracking the re-entry of an imperilled spacecraft.

Suddenly! a burst of pure celebratory joy erupted after one of the students, let’s call her Ines, managed to obtain one of the nearly three-quarters of a million seats available. We’re talking jumping up and down exuberance with hugs from her friends, and much excited back and forth over her good luck. Even the thought of being able to attend the Bad Bunny concert brought immense joy into my classroom, which, I can tell you, doesn’t happen very often. Was I jealous? Sure, a little, although I am realistic in my aspirations for what a dry lecture on the mechanics of distributive justice in the work of John Rawls will produce. Mostly, I was impressed.

So question. Is Ines (and the other, many millions around the globe who will share Bad Bunny’s concerns over his woeful shortage of photos) poised to have a Schillerian moment? Will her Spieltrieb be kicked into high gear? Can we expect Ines to get closer to her universal humanity in a year from now?

No. And here’s why.

Let’s take one of the more popular numbers that Bunny will be performing: his song Unforgettable Dance, which is styled in the original title as BAILE INoLVIDABLE. (The significance of the lower-case ‘o’ escapes me, but no matter.) At first glance, this looks like promising terrain for Schillerian Spieltriebery. A catchy salsa number, the unforgettable dance features in the accompanying music video Bad Bunny transforming from bumbling dance noob into smooth old-school crooner, dishing out a Latin beat for over 6 minutes (rather long for a pop number – Schiller would approve) fronting a group that would not look too out of place in an old Havana nightclub in the Batista days. The song’s lyrics have a winsome, almost existential inflection: “Life is a party that one day ends / And you were my unforgettable dance.” I mean, okay it’s not Yeats, but still.

Now, there may be a universe where the poetical and musical depth of Bad Bunny is conjoined with the reflective aesthetic sensibilities of his fans to produce some kind of profound experience. But Ines doesn’t live in that universe: no-one lives in that universe. That is one sad and empty universe. Because basically no-one who listens to Baile Inolvidable gives a shit about the lyrics or whatever narrative it might be trying to convey, if any.

They like it – as they should – because it’s a catchy number they can dance to that makes them feel good. And the idea that they can go feel good in the company of many tens of thousands of other fans to share in Bad Bunny’s regrets that he didn’t take more photos and he really should have given more kisses and hugs when he had the chance – well, that just intensifies the core experience of those good feelings.

And let’s be honest, as for Bad Bunny, the same for all the other artists who dominate the Spotify streaming pantheon. (Lookin’ at you, Taylor Swift!)

Now I am not calling the music of Bad Bunny mindless, but it is not mind-full. The distinction lies in what the German philosopher Kant described as experiencing art in “sensual” versus “sensible” terms. Of all the arts, none was as fundamentally “sensual” as music, which is why Kant placed it as the lowest, basest art form. It makes people feel good, he conceded (and people have always tended toward music they could dance to), but it doesn’t make them think. In other words, the music that people like, that brings them joy, that elicits exuberance, is the music that comes to you, beat-ready and delivered in a short, easily-consumed package, no thinking required. Average length of a catchy pop song today? 3’:30” Average length of popular minuets in the 18th century? 3’:30” But the music that people need, according to folks like Kant and Schiller, is music that requires you to make an effort beyond swinging your body to the beat.

Does that mean that music, in order for it aspire to more than the merely sensual must be … what’s the word … boring? No, but it helps. Because boredom is the absence of stimulation and gratification. And so those are the moments when you have to fill in the space yourself, to do your own thinking about what the music means to you. If you listen to something which requires no work on your part, then there’s no Spieltrieb, no pondering the inner depths and structure of the moment, no approaching, in other words, the truly beautiful or the truly sublime. Just sheer sensual enjoyment.

This mode of thinking has had a long shelf life. The famous Frankfurt school philosophers Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer in their unreadable book Dialectic of Enlightenment, identified what they called the “culture industry,” in which popular culture is manufactured as a kind of soma for the masses, not only to keep people in line by offering them easily consumed baubles and gewgaws, but also to ensure they remain enthralled to the machinery of capitalism capable of delivering their cultural fix. They were thinking more of radio and film, but I’m fairly confident that the oeuvre of a Bad Bunny would count, too. Some people might see Ines dancing at a Bad Bunny concert as a young woman having fun and living her best life. Not Theodor and Max, though. They would see someone caught up in the churning gears of capitalism being pacified to provide a lifetime of wage-slavery to feed the means of production. I mean, it’s a matter of perspective.

So, to answer my own question, no Bad Bunny is not good considered as art in the way that disapproving, moralizing German theorists would define it. But also, no it doesn’t matter, because people have always sought out the sensual over the sensible. Sure, suffering sitting through a 4-hour long Wagner opera might offer superior mental stimulation over the offerings of the “I should have taken more photos” tour, just like a kale-lentil-quinoa salad is better for you than a sloppy Joe. But I suspect you’ll get French Revolutions either way, so I say haces lo que te da la gana, and live loud.