The Bad Bunny effect: Dance without fear.
- The San Juan Daily Star
- 4 days ago
- 6 min read
By BRIAN SEIBERT
Nearly every move Bad Bunny made during the Super Bowl halftime show last month has been scrutinized for its cultural significance. But there’s still more to say about one.
It came during the segment devoted to a wedding, when Bad Bunny took Lady Gaga by the hand and led her to the dance floor. The song was his “Baile Inolvidable” (or “Unforgettable Dance”), and as he gallantly guided her in a circle around him, Bad Bunny wasn’t doing just any dance. It was salsa.
Salsa dancing — a partner form of entangling turns and Afro-Caribbean rhythms — has a large global following. But when Bad Bunny released “Baile Inolvidable” at the start of 2025, many were surprised that an artist known for reggaeton and Latin trap had put out a salsa track. What came next was equally unexpected: a surge of interest in salsa dancing, especially among the young. A surge felt immediately on the New York scene.
“The song became an instant classic,” said the DJ and dance teacher Engels Vargas. “A song that they play every night when you go out.”
Talia Castro-Pozo has been hiring salsa bands for her Latin Mondays dance parties for 20 years. She also helps organize outdoor salsa events in New York every summer. Last year’s were packed, she said: “We really saw how the numbers changed because of more young people. This new generation — they don’t partner dance so much, they’re always on their phones. But when that song came on, everybody was on the dance floor.”
The effect was felt even more strongly in classes. Over the past few decades, they had been losing their draw among young students, said Eli Perez, an owner of Lorenz Latin Dance Studio in Queens. But then the Bad Bunny track dropped: “And boom, my classes doubled in size,” he said, “and I had young dancers back in the studio.”
By the end of 2025, the influx of new dancers had tapered, but the Super Bowl show seems to be starting a new wave. Castro-Pozo said that her event the next day was already “full of new faces.”
The Bad Bunny salsa surge hasn’t been limited to New York. Puerto Rican dancer Tamara Livolsi has dedicated her life to salsa for a quarter century and has never been busier than the past year, performing and teaching at salsa events across Latin America and Europe. “It’s been positively contagious,” she said.
There’s a special reason that Livolsi is particularly in demand. In the video for “Baile Inolvidable,” Bad Bunny humbly struggles through a dance lesson that becomes a fantasy sequence. Livolsi plays the teacher. She also choreographed the video, which is essentially an advertisement, both disarming and seductive, for all classes in salsa dancing. No wonder enrollment spiked.
For many in the salsa dancing community, though, Bad Bunny’s influence isn’t just about numbers. Gael Seraphin, who runs several regular salsa events in New York, believes the album has served as a bridge between generations.
“Kids want to be different from their parents,” he said. “What the parents did back in the day isn’t what the kids want to be doing now. But Bad Bunny is going back to his roots, to music playing in his house when he was growing up. His album has unified the kids and the parents.”
WHEN SALSA EMERGED as a genre, in the 1970s, it was the style with which a new generation distinguished itself. What came before was mambo, an Afro-Cuban form, particularly as developed by Cuban and Puerto Rican immigrants in New York in the 1940s and ’50s.
Mambo added Afro-Cuban percussion and rhythms to the instrumentation of big band jazz. As a dance, the mambo, crossing the Cuban son with African American jazz dances like the Lindy Hop, alternated between coupled turns and breakaway solo improvisations. Writer Anatole Broyard described the way dancers toyed with rhythm as “triumphing over time.” The most advanced practitioners — Latino but also African American, Italian and Jewish — could be found at the Palladium Ballroom in Midtown Manhattan, until it closed in 1966.
By then, the mambo was starting to seem old-fashioned to Latinos raised on rock ’n’ roll and R&B. Many craved more overt expressions of racial pride and political activism. From mambo and its Cuban roots, this generation developed a leaner, hard-driving sound that was labeled with a culinary reference to mixed ingredients: salsa. A 1972 concert film with musicians from Fania, salsa’s dominant record label, was called “Our Latin Thing,” encapsulating a message and style that became so popular across Latin America that arguments broke out over which country deserved to be considered salsa’s home.
The dancing that went with it was similar in style to mambo (and the related cha-cha) and was commonly called by that name. With bass lines that perpetually moved in advance of where the song was about to go, the music had a fluid momentum that dancers could ride. In the 1980s and ’90s, the original salsa sound was displaced by a softer, more polished version eventually called salsa romántica — which was later overwhelmed commercially by Dominican-derived merengue and bachata. But salsa dancing was changing in other ways.
Central to those changes was teacher Eddie Torres, who, in training dancers for his professional troupe in the ’80s, codified a particular rhythmic approach to salsa dancing (called “on 2”) that was closer to Palladium style. From the hustle, he adopted more complicated and continuously looping partnered turns, tricky entanglements at high speed. Solo steps were named and broken down into counts.
Torres and his disciples dominated an explosion in salsa dance instruction in New York. Large numbers of Latinos started going to classes to learn social dance, rather than picking it up informally from friends and family. This was new — and was sometimes disparaged by older dancers.
Dancers trained in the studio style began gathering at informal events called socials, commonly associated with a school, where the focus was on dancing rather than drinking or romance. Jimmy Anton, a Torres disciple, started the first one in 1993, and it still happens several times each month. At public clubs, studio-trained dancers sometimes failed to mesh with more casual dancers who didn’t follow the same rules.
Even as salsa music was losing its commercial reach in the early 2000s, the salsa dance industry was ballooning globally — not just with classes and socials but also congresses, where hundreds or thousands of dancers meet in hotel ballrooms for days of classes, performances and dance parties. There are hundreds of these each year, evidence of a salsa subculture that is usually unaffected by mainstream popular culture.
THEN BAD BUNNY made a salsa song.
“New York salsa dancers are famous for being snobby about their music,” said dancer and scholar Ahtoy Juliana. “We preserve the past by continuing to dance to songs from a generation or two generations ago, so when new music comes out, we tend to turn up our noses to it.”
Immediate dismissal wasn’t the reaction to Bad Bunny’s song, though, which surprised Juliana. Even at socials like Anton’s or the one run by the popular teachers Joel Dominguez and Maria Palmieri called La Vieja Guardia, or the Old Guard or Old School — regulars also call it church — the song was accepted.
“We’re always scared when salsa becomes popular again — that we’re continuing to further commercialize this thing we love, that it’s going to get watered down,” Juliana said. “But Bad Bunny and his lyrics connect to a genuine authentic community.”
This is the flip side of how Bad Bunny is changing the attitude of young people toward salsa. As Livolsi, Bad Bunny’s teacher, put it, “Old-timers usually don’t give new musicians a chance, but Bad Bunny opened their minds.”
Bad Bunny isn’t an expert dancer — far from it. For that reason, his dancing gives everyone permission to join in, whatever their abilities.
“Baila sin miedo,” he said at the end of that segment. Or, in English: Dance without fear.
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