How Bad Bunny has tapped into a nostalgia for salsa that so many others were waiting to unlock

Dear Gossips,

Bad Bunny has arrived in Australia as he is scheduled to play two shows in Sydney before heading to Tokyo for Spotify’s first Billions Club Live performance and his first concert in Asia, “a testament to his incredible global reach and the power of Latin music”. After that, Benito will have a bit of a break as the tour doesn’t resume in Spain until the third week of May. With the schedule he’s had the last few months, and the spotlight he’s had on him, along with all that pressure to deliver, he probably really needs the rest.

If he does rest, however, his impact will still be working. I read a really interesting piece at the New York Times yesterday about “The Bad Bunny Effect” on salsa dancing and how it’s exploded in popularity in the time since he released “Baile Inolvidable”, the third track off Debí Tirar Más Fotos. Over the last year, young people have been heading in big numbers to the dance studio for salsa classes, or to salsa parties, as Benito’s album has become a “bridge between generations”. In her post after the Benito Bowl about his performance, Violeta wrote about the power of salsa and her personal connection to it, how Benito was able to revive  those memories and emotions with his halftime set.

This has been a community experience, even within a subculture that, as noted in the NYT, has been largely “unaffected by mainstream popular culture” and coincidentally, “the year that Bad Bunny changed salsa dancing was also a year when the salsa dance industry started to talk about abuse of power”. In the video for “Baile Inovidable”, a woman is the salsa dance teacher – Tamara Livolsi, she also did the choreography. She told the NYT that salsa is “an industry very dominated by men. Women all over the world wrote to me about how having a woman represented as the leader inspired them.”

That too has influenced those who are returning to salsa or engaging with it for the first time, because the way Benito has represented it is much more inclusive. And it’s how he himself dances the salsa – not as an expert but as someone who just loves it, which of course is the true spirit of expression through dance.

All of this, for him, is instinctive. It’s the music and the dance that has always been a part of his life, the music and dance that shaped him, informed his artistic sensibilities, to the point where he wanted to pay tribute to that in his album. And the result is that he tapped into a nostalgia that so many others were waiting to unlock. This innate ability to read where the culture wants to go, and how he can facilitate it, is just one of the reasons why Bad Bunny is an icon.

 Yours in gossip,

Lainey