Ink Tea Stone Leaf

If you caught the halftime show on this year’s Super Bowl broadcast, I’d be curious to hear what you thought about it. In these days of cultural division, when people are increasingly unable to agree about the meaning of all the things that play out in front of our faces, I don’t want to take for granted that we all saw the same show. Some folks, as I understand it, were primed to interpret the performance of Bad Bunny as a bloodthirsty attack on the beating heart of wholesome American values, and to the extent that anybody who watched the show actually saw it that way, I would just like to know if they could articulate why that is without using any coded or uncoded racial slurs.

How did I like the show? Well, I was primed to look at it quite differently, as you might imagine if you’ve read anything else I have ever written on this blog. If it really was an attack on the beating heart of anything at all, then it wasn’t the heart of anything that I hold dear. But you know, it never ceases to amaze me the sort of thing that the culture warriors of the right will characterize as an “attack.” What I saw in Bad Bunny’s show was a joyful, animated, and passionate defense of a culture (or rather, a diversity of national cultures spanning two continents) that has been unjustly maligned for decades. In a sweeping theatrical tableau, Bad Bunny showed us his people and his world in the way that he loves them, and invited us all to love them along with him.

So I liked it pretty darn well, thank you, and this despite (despite!) the fact that nearly every word of it was delivered en español.  I am not very familiar with Bad Bunny’s body of work, and my Spanish was only just good enough to keep me sort of on top of the general direction of his lyrics, but I have eyes, and I understand visual storytelling. I also have ears, and I like to think I know good music when I hear it—and I didn’t hear any music that I didn’t like.

Speaking to that point about language, I want to say how very strange it is that so many of my fellow gringos are so insistent that the music they listen to be performed in English. I certainly understand preferring lyrics that you can understand, but U.S. Americans are notoriously bad at listening and understanding what songs are about, to the point that they think “Born in the USA” is about how awesome it is to be born in the USA, and that “Every Breath You Take” isn’t about being a dangerously obsessed stalker. Insisting on hearing English that you will not actually listen to strikes me as more an act of cultural chauvinism than one born of an earnest desire to “understand” anything.

I’ll admit, the majority of my favorite music has English lyrics. However, I listen to music in other languages all the time. The Portland jazz radio station that I listen to, KMHD, has programs that regularly play jazz and jazz-adjacent styles from Latin America, Europe, Africa, and Asia. I also listen to a fair amount of opera, most of which is not in English. For that matter, a lot of the jazz, classical, and soundtrack music I adore does not have any words at all. Forgive me if I sound elitist, but as much as I sincerely appreciate music that speaks to me in my mother tongue, I do not burst into flames when faced with the prospect of not having a lyric I can sing along to.

They say that music is the “universal language,” and as it is undeniably one of the central pillars of human culture, the demand for monolingual music strikes me, just as does monolinguism in general, as terribly, hopelessly, intolerably parochial. It reeks of the kind of cultural inferiority complex that stunts wide swaths of this country, rejecting anything it doesn’t already understand, and staging tired events where no colors are allowed to shine brighter than the ones on the flag. It is a culture without questions, which is to say a culture without growth, which is to say hardly a culture at all.

When I started writing this post, I was sitting in a salon and waiting to get a haircut, and the music they were playing there was contemporary country music. Now, speaking as broadly as possible, I like country music. I listened to more of that as a little kid than just about anything else. I like fiddles and dobro and chick-a-boom rhythm sections and heartbreak stories in southern accents, and I don’t really get why people dismiss them out of hand, except as proxies for a culture they aren’t inclined to validate. But if you bend an ear toward contemporary country, the kind of Jason Aldean-ish tracks that get piped into barber shops to fill time, the hollowness and the shallowness of its worldview are hard to ignore, lyrically or musically speaking.

When I was a kid, country music was too worldly and secular to satisfy the exacting standards of the evangelical kids I knew, who preferred bloodless anthems about being sanctimonious. Nowadays, a “Christian” group like Turning Point USA can put on a country music concert as hostile counterprogramming to Bad Bunny, and call it a celebration of the “real America,” which evidently matters more to them than whatever it was about Kid Rock that they found objectionable twenty or thirty years ago. I’m not saying the country scene wasn’t already in serious decline by the 1990s, but both sides of that divide have fallen pretty far to associate with each other in this way.

Now, if I were asked to program a quarter-hour of the most genuinely American music… well, I would run over the time, and justice would be done to just about nobody. You can be sure that country music would be represented—somebody like Loretta Lynn singing “Coal Miner’s Daughter,” or somebody like Johnny Cash singing “The Man in Black.” But I wouldn’t forget the other sides of country, like the folkies in the Guthrie tradition singing about abolishing private property in “This Land is Your Land.” I wouldn’t leave out Dixieland jazz or fusion or bebop or “Rhapsody in Blue.” The blues of the Mississippi Delta and Chicago would have their due, as would the great American genres of popular music: R&B, rock & roll, and hip hop. And since the United States has more Spanish speakers than any country in the world except Mexico, I reckon that about a fifth of all of it should be sung in Spanish.

But alas, I’m the one being parochial now. As Bad Bunny demonstrated by concluding his set with a parade of all the American nations, from Chile to Canada, equating “American music” with the music of the United States ignores the real history of that culture, which has always been deeply integrated across borders, even when political leadership has tried to obscure that fact. Many people have noted that Bad Bunny is an American citizen by virtue of being from Puerto Rico, a territory of the U.S., and this is certainly true. But he proclaims an “American” identity that is larger and more important than incidental facts like that.

Watching the halftime show, with all of its history and inclusivity, I couldn’t help but think of the kind of people who would rather turn into Turning Point’s little sideshow, and about how mad all the elements of Bad Bunny’s performance would make them. And then I thought, that’s kind of sad, isn’t it? That this kind of music, with its color and energy and its message of shared humanity, is infuriating enough to send some people scrambling into the arms of Kid Rock, of all people? That the biggest television event of the year offered them a piece of real culture, and they opted for something smaller, narrower, and meaner? Right wingers are probably always going to keep putting on “alternative” cultural events where everything is worse and there’s always a flag or an eagle in the background, but it’s never going to lead to the kind of genuinely broad appeal they crave. They can make life miserable for all of us in any number of ways, but they can’t rule the culture.