A2 · Elementary
9 min
musicglobal culturesports entertainmentpop culture
The World's Show: Music, Football, and Global Culture
El Espectáculo del Mundo: Música, Fútbol y Cultura Global
BTS, Madonna, and Shakira will headline the first-ever FIFA World Cup final halftime show. Fletcher and Octavio dig into pop music, global culture, and what this moment reveals about the world we live in.
BTS, Madonna y Shakira actuarán en el primer show de medio tiempo de una final del Mundial de fútbol. Fletcher y Octavio hablan de música, cultura global y lo que este momento dice sobre el mundo de hoy.
5 essential A2-level terms from this episode, with translations and example sentences in Spanish.
| Spanish | English | Example |
|---|---|---|
| mundial | worldwide / the World Cup (as a noun) | El Mundial es en julio. |
| espectáculo | show / spectacle / performance | El espectáculo es muy grande. |
| artista | artist / performer | Shakira es una artista famosa. |
| himno | anthem / hymn | Waka Waka es un himno del fútbol. |
| grupo | group / band | BTS es un grupo de música de Corea. |
My daughter texted me from Madrid yesterday.
Just three words: 'Did you see?' And I thought, did I see what?
The sky?
A car accident?
No.
She meant BTS, Madonna, and Shakira at the World Cup final.
Es una noticia muy grande, Fletcher.
This is very big news, Fletcher.
Muy, muy grande.
Very, very big.
Reuters confirmed it yesterday.
BTS from South Korea, Madonna from the United States, Shakira from Colombia.
They will headline the first halftime show in the history of the FIFA World Cup final.
July 19th, MetLife Stadium, New Jersey.
Es la primera vez.
It's the first time.
El fútbol no tiene este show normalmente.
Football doesn't normally have this kind of show.
Right, and that's the thing that keeps snagging my attention.
The Super Bowl has done halftime shows for decades.
The World Cup final, which draws three or four times the audience, has never done this.
Until now.
El fútbol europeo no quiere esto.
European football doesn't want this.
El show es para el público americano.
The show is for the American audience.
There it is.
You think FIFA is playing to the host country here, essentially borrowing the Super Bowl format because the tournament is on American soil for the first time.
Sí.
Yes.
El fútbol es el juego.
Football is the game.
La música no es necesaria.
The music isn't necessary.
Fair enough.
But let me push back gently on that, because music and football have a longer history together than people remember.
Think about 2010.
Shakira.
Shakira.
'Waka Waka.' Sudáfrica.
'Waka Waka.' South Africa.
Sí, yo recuerdo.
Yes, I remember.
Exactly.
Shakira performed the official anthem of the 2010 World Cup in South Africa and it became one of the most-streamed songs in the history of the tournament.
So her presence at this final is not random.
There's a logic to it.
Shakira es perfecta para el fútbol.
Shakira is perfect for football.
Su música es energía.
Her music is energy.
And she's Colombian, which matters enormously given that this World Cup stretches across North America and there's a massive Latin American fanbase in the United States.
That's a deliberate choice.
Sí.
Yes.
Y Madonna es americana.
And Madonna is American.
Madonna es la reina del pop.
Madonna is the queen of pop.
The queen of pop, forty-plus years in the business, still performing.
I covered her first world tour as a side note in a broader piece I was writing about music and commerce in the mid-eighties.
She was already a force of nature then.
Madonna es cultura americana.
Madonna is American culture.
Ella representa los Estados Unidos bien.
She represents the United States well.
And then there's BTS.
Which is where this gets really interesting for me, because what BTS represents is something genuinely new in the history of global pop music.
BTS es de Corea del Sur.
BTS is from South Korea.
Ellos cantan en coreano.
They sing in Korean.
They sing primarily in Korean, yes, and they have hundreds of millions of fans worldwide.
A decade ago, that sentence would have sounded impossible.
The idea that a pop group singing in a non-English language could dominate global charts, sell out stadiums on every continent, that was not how the music industry worked.
El mundo cambia.
The world changes.
El inglés no es la única lengua importante.
English is not the only important language.
That's a bigger point than it sounds.
For most of the twentieth century, English was the operating language of global pop culture.
Hollywood movies, rock music, later hip-hop.
If you wanted to reach the world, you generally needed English.
BTS broke that assumption wide open.
El K-pop es muy popular ahora.
K-pop is very popular now.
En España también.
In Spain too.
Really?
Walk me through that.
When did K-pop become a thing in Spain?
Because I'd genuinely assumed it was more concentrated in East Asia and among younger audiences in the US.
Los jóvenes en Madrid escuchan BTS.
Young people in Madrid listen to BTS.
Hay grupos de fans en mi ciudad.
There are fan groups in my city.
Fan groups in Madrid.
Dedicated, organized groups of Spanish teenagers and young adults who are fans of a South Korean boy band.
If you'd told me that in 1995, I would have needed a moment.
La música no tiene fronteras, Fletcher.
Music has no borders, Fletcher.
Tú eres muy americano a veces.
You're very American sometimes.
I will accept that criticism.
So what we're really looking at with this lineup is a kind of deliberate map of where global culture sits right now.
South Korea, the United States, Colombia.
Three different musical traditions, three different languages, three different fanbases.
FIFA quiere el mundo entero.
FIFA wants the entire world.
Estos tres artistas son el mundo.
These three artists are the world.
It's smart, when you think about it.
A World Cup final can draw an audience of a billion people.
If you're FIFA and you're staging a halftime show for the first time ever, you don't want it to feel like it belongs to one country or one culture.
Sí, pero el fútbol ya tiene su propia cultura.
Yes, but football already has its own culture.
Su propio espectáculo.
Its own spectacle.
Tell me what you mean by that, because I think there's something real there that people outside football culture might miss.
En el fútbol, el juego es suficiente.
In football, the game is enough.
No necesitas música extra.
You don't need extra music.
That argument holds for the people already in the stadium or already watching.
But FIFA is trying to grow its audience in the United States, where the Super Bowl halftime show is basically a cultural event on its own.
People watch the Super Bowl who have no interest in American football, just to see the show.
That's the market FIFA is chasing.
Entiendo.
I understand.
Pero yo prefiero el fútbol sin canciones pop.
But I prefer football without pop songs.
That's an honest position and I respect it.
Though I notice Octavio Solana has never refused to sing along to Waka Waka at a party, so I'd take that preference with a small grain of salt.
Eso es diferente.
That's different.
Waka Waka es un himno.
Waka Waka is an anthem.
No es un show de marketing.
It's not a marketing show.
The line between anthem and marketing is thinner than you're giving it credit for.
But I take your point.
There's a difference between music that grows organically from a tournament, the way Waka Waka did, and a produced spectacle that's essentially imported from American entertainment culture.
Exacto.
Exactly.
Shakira está bien.
Shakira is fine.
BTS y Madonna son...
BTS and Madonna are...
diferentes.
different.
What's interesting to me is what this signals about the direction of global pop culture more broadly.
The fact that a South Korean group is sharing a stage with the biggest American pop icon of the last forty years, at what might be the most-watched live television event in human history, that's a statement about how the world has shifted.
El mundo tiene muchos centros ahora.
The world has many centers now.
No solo uno.
Not just one.
That's it exactly.
And I've watched that shift happen across my career.
When I started out, American cultural exports dominated almost everything.
Now you have Korean pop, Nigerian Afrobeats, Latin urbano, Turkish television dramas that are watched across the Middle East and South America.
The map has genuinely changed.
El internet cambia todo.
The internet changes everything.
Ahora la música viaja muy rápido.
Now music travels very fast.
Streaming, YouTube, social media.
BTS built a global fanbase through platforms, not through radio or MTV gatekeepers.
That's a completely different mechanism for how a culture spreads, and I don't think we've fully processed what it means yet.
Es fascinante.
It's fascinating.
Pero el 19 de julio, yo miro el partido.
But on July 19th, I'm watching the game.
No el show.
Not the show.
And my daughter will be watching the show from Madrid, texting me exclamation points, and I'll be the one smiling and nodding.
Some things don't change.
Fletcher, antes dices 'el Mundial.' ¿Sabes qué significa 'mundial' en español?
Fletcher, earlier you say 'el Mundial.' Do you know what 'mundial' means in Spanish?
World Cup, right?
But I've noticed you use it as a noun, and it's clearly also an adjective in other contexts.
'Fama mundial' means world fame or global fame.
The word is doing two jobs.
Sí, correcto.
Yes, correct.
'Mundial' es un adjetivo.
'Mundial' is an adjective.
Pero 'el Mundial' es el torneo.
But 'el Mundial' is the tournament.
So you just drop the noun and the adjective carries the whole meaning.
The world-level thing, which everyone understands to mean the tournament.
We don't really have an equivalent in English.
We say World Cup and it's two words, always a noun phrase.
Spanish condenses it into one word that flexes.
Exacto.
Exactly.
'Fama mundial', 'problema mundial', 'el Mundial.' Una palabra, tres usos.
'World fame', 'global problem', 'the World Cup.' One word, three uses.
I will carry that.
'El Mundial.' And when I'm watching the halftime show with my daughter in July, I'll say it correctly and Octavio will find something else to correct, I'm sure.
Siempre hay algo, Fletcher.
There's always something, Fletcher.
Siempre hay algo.
There's always something.