Скачать или смотреть Breaking Culture Live! Bad Bunny and the Superbowl Halftime - Courtney M. Cox and Perry B. Johnson

Breaking Culture Live is a Cultural Studies Association affiliated program hosted by Past President Sean Johnson Andrews and current CSA President Rob Carley. Each week on Wednesday we will spend half-an-hour breaking down the breaking news with cultural studies scholars and activists, discussing their work and how it helps us understand a contemporary event or emergent trend and intervene in making the world a better place.

In this episode we talk about the controversy over Bad Bunny’s anticipated performance at the NFL 2026 Super Bowl Halftime show. Perry B. Johnson and Courtney M. Cox are co-directors of The Sound of Victory, an interdisciplinary, multi-platform project dedicated to investigating the deeply-intertwined relationship between music, sound and sport and co-editors of a forthcoming NYU Press book of the same name. They discuss the context of this controversy as well as the history and meaning of the Superbowl Halftime show.

Perry B. Johnson, Ph.D. is a music scholar, cultural historian, and producer. Her primary research and practice focus on issues of power and identity through a critical examination of America’s culture and entertainment industries. Johnson is co-director of The Sound of Victory (with Dr. Courtney M. Cox), an interdisciplinary initiative dedicated to exploring the historic relationship between music, sound and sport. She is currently producing Arts Talk, the official podcast of the USC Arts Now initiative and is also the associate producer and co-host of the second season of Outside the Lyrics’s, an award-winning, Emmy-nominated documentary series from PBS. Johnson teaches in the Annenberg School of Communication at the University of Southern California.

Courtney M. Cox is an Associate Professor in the Department of Indigenous, Race, and Ethnic Studies (IRES) at the University of Oregon. Her research examines issues related to identity, technology, and labor through sport and wine. Her book, Double Crossover: Gender, Media, and Politics in Global Basketball considers how Black women and non-binary athletes maneuver through the global sports-media complex. She is also co-director (with Dr. Perry B. Johnson) of The Sound of Victory, a multi-platform digital humanities project located at the intersection of music, sound, and sport. She previously worked for ESPN, Longhorn Network, NPR-affiliate KPCC, and the WNBA's Los Angeles Sparks.

In our conversation, we discuss the controversies over the Super Bowl Halftime show, informed by their research on the history of this “American entertainment spectacle,” particularly in so far as it frequently intersects with larger political controversies over race, gender, sexuality, and representation. It is a rich conversation with two sound and music scholars with a deep knowledge of their intersection in the Superbowl Halftime show.


Check out their research on their web project The Sound of Victory: https://www.thesoundofvictory.org/

And keep up with the show and other Breaking Culture at https://breakingculture.substack.com/