(upbeat music) - [Reporter] Like a good deal of modern dancing, it is Pagan in origin and in expression.
One cannot help but feel that it's having a bad spiritual effect upon them.
- Hear me out.
I personally loved the Bad Bunny Super Bowl halftime performance.
The music, the dancing, the costumes, and especially the way that they depicted Puerto Rico's everyday life.
But there is a trend behind the show that we need to talk about.
- Bad Bunny Rabbit or whatever his name is.
- [Trump] I never heard of him.
I don't know who he is.
- Bad Bunny is being accused of snubbing the United States.
- Not everybody loved his performance, and some people even hated the idea of him performing on such a big stage.
- Do you think maybe we should just kind of entertain blowing off the NFL like a boycott?
- Bad Bunny was the first all Spanish language artist to headline the Super Bowl, and not everybody liked that.
Some people said it was too sexual.
Others said it was un-American, even though Puerto Rico is part of the United States.
But there is a pattern here that isn't being talked about.
This has happened before.
Throughout history, dance music gets labeled as outsider music and as a bad influence.
It's not always reggaeton, but it's always the same arguments and backlash.
(explosions) And one of the craziest examples also took place during a sporting event but that time it actually ended in a riot.
So why does everyone hate dance music?
(upbeat music) To get a better sense of how we got to Super Bowl boycotts, let's rewind the clock to the age of disco.
(upbeat music) From the mid to late 70s, disco was all the rage.
It ruled the charts, the radio, and even the Grammy Awards.
- And the winner is "Saturday Night Fever."
- But not everyone was on board.
In 1979 one summer night in Chicago backlash against disco grew so intense it led to a full blown riot.
It was called Disco Demolition Night.
Anti disco radio host Steve Dahl partnered with Chicago White Sox promoters, and fans were given discounted entry to the game if they brought disco records to destroy.
During intermission, thousands of records were burned on the field with explosives.
Then the crowd got out of control.
Fights broke out, and thousands of people ended up storming the field.
This sounds like a crazy thing to do during a baseball game.
So what was really going on?
The anti disco rally was the result of a disco sucks campaign.
It was led primarily by young white men who preferred rock and roll, but disco sucks wasn't just about different taste in music.
It was deeper than that.
The rejection and popularity of dance music mirrored the social and political tensions of the time.
Trans women and queer folks rioted against police brutality at the Stonewall Inn.
Black Americans were fighting for socioeconomic equality.
Women demanded sexual autonomy and workplace opportunities.
American society was changing, and not everyone was happy about it.
But in discotheques and house parties, dance floors became a safe haven, an escape.
Disco music grew out of the underground club culture of people on the margins: Latinos, Black folks, and especially LGBTQ communities.
In New York City, DJs like David Mancuso and Larry Levan looped and mixed funk, soul and R&B to create upbeat melodies that would keep people dancing for hours.
And sonically a formula for disco emerged, syncopated rhythms paired with a four on the floor beat.
One, two, three, four, Boogie Wonderland.
(upbeat music) Boogie Wonderland - [Lucia] Signature instruments included electric bass, horns and eventually electronic synths and keyboards.
(upbeat music) Gotta move on - [Lucia] Sometimes the lyrics focused on topics that were considered radical or taboo at the time like sexual pleasure.
Lay your head down real close to me Soothe my mind and and set me free Set me free - [Lucia] Other disco hits focused on cheeky messages of empowerment.
I will survive - [Lucia] "Y.M.C.A."
by Village People embraced gay iconography.
They have everything for young men to enjoy You can out with all the boys - Soon enough, disco burst out of the underground and into the mainstream.
Two big things happened in 1977.
Studio 54 opened in New York City, (upbeat music) and the film "Saturday Night Fever" came out.
- Oh bad.
- By the end of the 1970s, disco went commercial.
It became whiter and straighter, but to a growing number of disillusioned white men, disco represented something else.
Facing an unstable economy and shrinking job market, they saw a culture and opportunity they were excluded from.
They thought rock represented blue collar values, and that disco was superficial by comparison.
Disco had gone mainstream, but no one had forgotten its queer and Black origins.
So all the pushback fell pretty loaded.
In his 2016 book, "The Night Disco Died," Steve Dahl denied that Disco Demolition Night was rooted in homophobia or racism.
Disco Demolition Night might be the craziest example of hate towards dance music, but it wasn't the first nor the last.
There is a pattern.
A genre grows in a counterculture's underground scene.
It becomes profitable, and then it's met with public backlash.
So what we saw happen at Bad Bunny at the Super Bowl, it's part of a repeating historic theme.
Like when jazz music was created by Black communities in the early 20th century.
It became a staple of popular music, was branded the devil's music and protested by those who saw it as sinful.
And now in the 21st century, we have reggaeton.
- Reggaeton is, I think the best way that I can answer that is by quoting a Reggaeton OG.
Shout out to Maicol of Maicol y Manuel.
He says, "If reggaeton is a beach, "it's a beach that everyone is adding "their granules of sand to."
It has granules of hip hop, of bomba plena, Puertorriquea, of dancehall.
(upbeat music) - In the 1980s, Afro Panamanians began translating Jamaican reggae and dancehall songs into Spanish, Reggae en Espanol.
They made mix tapes and cassettes that they sold on Panama City's Diablos Rojas, brightly decorated Red Devil commuter buses.
This new reggae mixed with Spanish language hip hop coming out of New York City.
Just like disco, the underground genre was establishing its foothold.
Can you talk about the moral panic that surrounds reggaeton specifically about it being overtly sexual?
- I love this question.
(both laughing) I believe that this moral panic has to do with anti-Blackness.
I think that it's not common within the Latin American context to celebrate certain things without guilt.
Latin America is a conservative society.
There's a panic regarding, is this right?
Can I really be doing this?
Am I allowed to enjoy this?
Because there's a lot of repression in society, despite the things that are marketed in this music, being sexy, being liberated, a lot of them are seen as extremely Americanized ideas.
- In 1990s Puerto Rico, all of these Caribbean infused sounds were growing into a distinctive new genre.
The live instruments used in Panama gave way to electronic production and booming beats with key players like DJ Negro and DJ Playero at the helm.
This new sound, it was led by kids from the housing projects addressing their realities and seeking escape in sweaty perreo parties.
And like disco, reggaeton kept growing.
And two huge stars emerged in the 2000s: (upbeat music) Tego Calderon who harnessed socially conscious lyricism and Afro-Latino pride and Daddy Yankee who commercially scaled and expanded the genre.
(upbeat music) He went from selling mix tapes out of the trunk of his car to making the first reggaeton song to go worldwide in 2004.
Today, it's one of the most popular genres in the world, which brings us back to Bad Bunny, Reggaeton's biggest star.
He started uploading songs to SoundCloud about a decade ago, and they struck a chord.
Just like disco and his reggaeton heroes before him, much of his music is sexually explicit, but he's always maintained a defiant and politically driven streak.
As he's grown in popularity, he's also become more unapologetic in his politics.
We saw this at the Super Bowl and in his song "El Apagn," where he used Bomba, Dembow and EDM to criticize the constant power blackouts and displacement of locals in Puerto Rico.
(Bad Bunny singing in Spanish) And his 2025 album "Debi Tirar Mas Fotos" takes activism to a new plane.
It's a genre bending love letter to Puerto Rico on every single level.
(Spanish music) Sonically it mixes dembow and reggaeton with full genres like Bomba, plena, Salsa and musica jibara.
- Bad Bunny is really the artist that is bringing this genre to stardom in a way that people have really dreamed of from the beginning of this music.
Earlier Bad Bunny, his music was heavily involved in Latin Drop and more Maria Toso type of reggaeton that, you know, has more to do with like a street sound.
And as time went on, he definitely went in a direction that's more pop.
That of course allowed him to incorporate messaging in very unique ways regarding the Boricua identity and the Boricua plight and that of the island.
- And Bad Bunny's taken swings at what's happening on the mainland US too.
In the music video for "NUEVAYoL," an ode to the Puerto Rican diaspora in New York City, he tackled President Donald Trump's anti-immigration policies head on.
- [Trump] I made a mistake.
I want to apologize to the immigrants in America.
- [Lucia] In an interview with ID, he also said he would not be bringing his global tour to the states out of fear that immigration and custom enforcement would target his concerts.
- A lot of artists want to stay neutral, but this music is not neutral, and this music doesn't come from a culture that is neutral either.
And the people want to be represented.
They want to feel heard.
They want artists to say something.
It's the reason why Bad Bunny's the biggest artist in the world right now.
- So it's no wonder that his performance at the Super Bowl and what Bad Bunny has done for reggaeton and Puerto Rican music more broadly sparked outcry.
Just like young white men burnt disco records in the 1970s because they felt threatened by the rise of a cultural movement that was queer, Black and brown, the backlash to Bad Bunny's performance underlines a wider rejection of Latino, Black and immigrant contributions to American culture and society today.
It's part of a cycle that repeats whenever marginalized communities use music, especially dance music to take up space and demand to be seen.
Whether it's perreo at the Super Bowl or disco at the 1970s New York House parties, dance music has always been more than escapism.
It's a movement of resistance, physically and politically.
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