From the Magazine
America’s greatest hits: The soundtrack of a nation at 250
PLAY IT AGAIN, UNCLE SAM: From jazz and country to rock and hip-hop, American music is the result of a remarkable mix of cultural influences, shifting identities, social and economic changes, and constant advances in technology. (Illustration by James Taylor)
The lights drop. Seventy thousand people fall silent. Then a beat pulses through Levi’s Stadium, thick and insistent, as sugarcane stalks rise from the field. Dancers spill forward in waves. And at the center of it all, Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio—better known as Bad Bunny—moves with absolute command, rapping in Spanish to an audience of millions around the world.
For a moment, Super Bowl LX feels less like a football game than a declaration. Since July 4, 1776—and long before—American music has done more than entertain. It has documented the country’s ideals, exposed its contradictions, and given voice to the people shaping it. Music has never been just a reflection of the nation; it has been one of the ways the United States defines itself.
At the Ģý, students and scholars, musicologists and cultural critics, composers, archivists, technologists, and performers have all sought to understand the sometimes chaotic, sometimes beautiful nature of American identity. Each perspective reveals another layer of the American musical story.
At 250, the nation is still grappling with one of its oldest questions: Who gets to be American? The music, as always, is trying to answer. There may be no better place to begin than on that stage with Bad Bunny.
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The biggest stage
A transcendent cultural phenomenon, the Super Bowl is an unofficial national holiday that merges elite athleticism with entertainment. This year’s contest did not disappoint—at least, not musically. For months ahead of the game, the halftime show dominated conversation: What would Bad Bunny do? What would he say? And who would be there to listen?
The answer was electric—a collision of sound, imagery, and identity. Paired with traditional American standards from the opening ceremony, the pageantry on the field created a vivid portrait of American music in 2026: multilingual, multiracial, multigenerational.
Before kickoff, singer-songwriter Charlie Puth performed “The Star-Spangled Banner” in a refined, piano-driven rendition marked by flawless vocal delivery and understated confidence that felt both intimate and celebratory. Adopted as the national anthem in 1931 and performed at public events since World War I, the song stirs a swelling sense of national pride. But it also invites reinterpretation. Each artist—whether Jimi Hendrix at Woodstock or Whitney Houston at Super Bowl XXV—reshapes the anthem in their own voice, ensuring that it remains not a relic but a living expression of the nation.
“Hip-hop music has always been a temperature taker of American society.” —Jeffrey McCune
Brandi Carlile followed with a heartfelt interpretation of “America the Beautiful,” bringing her folk-rock sensibility to the hymn. The original poem was written by Katharine Lee Bates and paired with music composed by church organist and choirmaster Samuel Augustus Ward at the turn of the 20th century. Accompanying Carlile were violinist Chauntee Ross and cellist Monique Ross of SistaStrings, adding warmth and resonance to the performance.
Completing the trio of opening songs, Coco Jones delivered a stirring rendition of “Lift Every Voice and Sing” alongside an eight-member string ensemble. Often referred to as the Black national anthem, the powerful hymn of hope, faith, and resilience was written by NAACP leader James Weldon Johnson in 1900 and set to music by his brother, John Rosamond Johnson. It debuted in Jacksonville, Florida, performed by a choir of 500 schoolchildren celebrating President Abraham Lincoln’s birthday—a moment of collective affirmation that continues to echo more than a century later.
And then there was Bad Bunny. Celebrating real people and everyday life, his halftime show became both a love letter to his Puerto Rican heritage and a cultural statement about what it means to be American. —an award-winning scholar whose work examines race, gender, and identity—heard something larger at work.
“Hip-hop music has always been a temperature taker of American society,” says the founding chair of Ģý’s . “Part of what I think Bad Bunny’s performance brought to life was a reading of where we are now as a country. He’s responding to the questions of this American experiment and where we stand 250 years later.”
McCune adds: “The national anthem speaks promises. The Black national anthem reminds us that the promises have not been kept. When you put Bad Bunny’s performance next to them both, we can start to have a conversation. It may be a tense one, but it’s a conversation that we as the American public need to have.”
In many ways, this is the conversation American musicians have been having for 250 years. The notes may change, the instruments may evolve, but the impulse remains the same: to celebrate the nation’s possibilities while holding it accountable to its ideals.
Music in the New World
When the Pilgrims arrived on the Mayflower in 1620 to establish some of the earliest English colonies in Plymouth, Massachusetts, they brought very little music with them. Settlers favored psalms and religious songs, while instrumentation was rare and plain—typically limited to flute or violin, though even this was often forbidden.
What they found wasn’t just a wilderness of rugged coastlines, towering trees, and resources to be exploited. They also encountered Indigenous communities that had been singing, drumming, and passing down musical traditions through generations.
’92E (MM), the Eastman School of Music’s artistic and music director of opera, emphasizes the extraordinary diversity of those traditions. The pianist, conductor, and composer—a member of the Muscogee Creek Nation from the Thlopthlocco Tribal Town who is Choctaw on his mother’s side—notes there are 574 federally recognized tribes in the United States, each with its own language, culture, history, and musical customs.
Through initiatives such as the —Long’s ambitious project championing Native composers and performers—he and other artists are helping bring these voices to wider audiences while preserving their legacy. Powwow music, for example, was a vibrant, communal expression of Native American life that served as the heartbeat of their culture, aiding moments of celebration and war. Long describes it as the original version of minimalism.
“People think minimalism started with La Monte Young, and in a way, it did in the white field,” he says, referring to the 20th-century American composer. “But if you go to powwow music, it’s drumming that is looping and repetitive. Usually eight men sitting around a giant drum, singing in really high pitches, doing vocables almost like singing in tongues. It puts audiences into a trance and brings them all into the same emotional energy.”
“The fundamental techniques of Black music begin in the spirituals. Call and response, improvisation, participation, the use of the body. Those elements later show up in gospel, blues, jazz, and even hip-hop.” —Cory Hunter
As the colonists gradually turned away from England and the Crown, their own musical life began to flourish. Tavern songs, sea shanties, and military marches became the norm, but music struggled to break free from its mobilizing intent to become something to be enjoyed on its own terms.
Only when patriotic songs such as “The Liberty Song,” which helped unify colonists around a common cause, and instruments like the fiddle and harpsichord became more prominent did musical life grow more expansive and the search for a distinctly national sound begin.
At the same time, enslaved Africans clung to their own rich musical histories as they sought solace and strength through song even under the most brutal conditions. These traditions would eventually become the backbone of American music. “The fundamental techniques of Black music begin in the spirituals,” explains ’06E, the James P. Wilmot Distinguished Assistant Professor of Music, whose teaching and research span gospel, protest music, and Black musical traditions in America. “Call and response, improvisation, participation, the use of the body. Those elements later show up in gospel, blues, jazz, and even hip-hop.”
These musical characteristics rippled outward through American culture. Gospel singers brought the emotional power of church music into popular performance—think of Aretha Franklin, Gladys Knight, and Chaka Khan—while blues musicians like B.B. King turned personal hardship into lyrical storytelling.
Creating the first national sound
In the 19th century, Stephen Foster emerged as one of the first truly national songwriters. Born in 1826, he wrote melodies that traveled far beyond parlors and concert halls through sheet music, touring performers, and minstrel troupes. Songs such as “Oh! Susanna” and “Camptown Races” became some of the best-known tunes of the era, sung across regions and class lines.
That reach explains why Foster is so often described as the “father of American music”: He helped create a popular repertoire in a young nation still searching for common cultural reference points. His songs were memorable, portable, and unmistakably woven into everyday American life. But that influence came with deep complications.
“The Black spiritual really became the foundation of the American entertainment industry, through the use of blackface minstrelsy,” says Hunter, whose work traces how Black musical practices move across sacred, popular, and political traditions. “Entertainment that mocked Black people and Black song became the first form of popular music entertainment in the country.”
That paradox sits near the heart of American music history. Some of the nation’s earliest mass entertainment drew heavily from Black musical traditions while simultaneously distorting and exploiting them. Even as Foster’s songs helped define a national sound, the machinery that spread that sound was often entangled with minstrelsy’s racist caricatures. From the beginning, American music carried both brilliance and contradiction.
American music rarely follows a single path, however. Instead, it continually absorbs influences from different communities and traditions. Ragtime, for example, emerged in the late 19th century as Black American musicians blended banjo traditions and syncopated rhythms with European piano music. Scott Joplin, later known as the “King of Ragtime,” transformed the style into a sophisticated art form, bringing compositional rigor and emotional depth to works such as “Maple Leaf Rag” and “TheEntertainer.”
“There’s a hybridity within a lot of these musical practices that is foundational to the country, as well as to the music itself.” —Darren Mueller
Then, a few years later, a new sound emerged out of New Orleans: jazz. Often described as America’s first original art form, jazz grew from a remarkable mix of cultural influences—African musical traditions, European harmony, Creole and Caribbean rhythms, and the lived experiences of Black Americans navigating a segregated society.
But it did not merely adapt or imitate inherited forms. It transformed a broad range of influences into something radically new. Jazz created a fresh musical language built on improvisation and individual expression within collective form. As a port city and cultural crossroads, New Orleans proved the ideal incubator.
, an associate professor of musicology whose research explores how sound technologies shape musical performance and who trained in jazz history and research before earning a doctorate at Duke, notes that this blending of influences is central to understanding American music more broadly.
“There’s a hybridity within a lot of these musical practices that is foundational to the country, as well as to the music itself,” he says. “We see it in ‘The Star-Spangled Banner,’ but in other forms as well. Jazz was famously born in New Orleans, a city where many peoples and cultures were always circulating. Jelly Roll Morton, one of jazz’s earliest great composers and pianists, named influences from outside the United States as the essential ingredient to what became known as jazz.”
As the Great Migration reshaped American cities in the early 20th century, jazz traveled north with Black communities seeking jobs and opportunity. Chicago and New York became major destinations, and recordings by artists such as Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington introduced the music to national audiences.
By the 1930s, the swing era had turned jazz into a cultural phenomenon as big bands filled dance halls across the country, offering audiences both excitement and escape during the hardships of the Great Depression. This sweeping move across the continent also echoed the spread of radio technology, marking the beginning of a new era in which music could travel directly into people’s homes.
While jazz flourished in nightclubs and concert halls, another distinctly American tradition was taking shape on Broadway. In 1924, George Gershwin captured the merging of traditions in a single composition. With its famous opening clarinet glissando, “Rhapsody in Blue” felt unmistakably American and helped establish him as one of the defining composers of the Jazz Age.
That same year, Gershwin visited the . Alongside a scribble of the opening bars of “Rhapsody in Blue,” he signed Eastman’s guestbook: “To the most Wonderful Music School in America. Long may its flag wave.”
“The American popular song and the American musical theater tradition became a huge influence internationally.” —Vincent Lenti
American popular song became one of the country’s most influential cultural exports. Songwriters such as Gershwin and Irving Berlin created melodies that blended storytelling, jazz, and classical craft into what became known as the Great American Songbook. For Eastman historian ’60E, ’62E (MA), this represents one of the country’s most significant contributions to world culture. “The American popular song and the American musical theater tradition became a huge influence internationally,” he says.
The same hybridity that Mueller describes shaped the rise of other genres as well. Country music from Tennessee helped introduce Appalachian sounds to the wider world. Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings became one of the most emotionally powerful orchestral works ever written by an American composer. And Broadway musicals such as Oklahoma! by Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II in 1943 merged theater with popular song and became a box-office hit.
Each of these milestones reflects a slightly different version of American identity. Sometimes that identity was hopeful and expansive. Woody Guthrie’s folk anthem “This Land Is Your Land,” written in 1940, imagined a country defined by shared belonging and would go on to influence generations of musicians, including Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen.
Other times, the music captured conflict and uncertainty. The folk revival of the 1960s tied music directly to social activism, with artists using songs to protest war and advocate for civil rights. Rock musicians pushed boundaries of sound and culture. Jazz continued to evolve, incorporating avant-garde experimentation and new global influences. And by the late 20th century, hip-hop became one of the most influential musical movements in the world.
Rock, hip-hop, and the technology of sound
In the years after World War II, new technology and new audiences drove further change—and a defining generational shift. It was time for rock and roll.
Drawing from rhythm and blues and country traditions, rock introduced a sound that resonated especially with young listeners. “The growth of rock and roll isn’t just about the music itself,” says Satz Professor , whose dozens of publications on popular music include the influential textbook . “It’s about markets. Teenagers suddenly had expendable income and their own musical tastes.”
Cheap 45-rpm records, jukeboxes, and radio broadcasts gave teenagers unprecedented influence over the direction of popular culture. Artists such as Elvis Presley brought blues-influenced music into the mainstream, while later bands—including the Beach Boys and Eagles—expanded rock into a more ambitious studio art form. Throughout these transformations, music continued to reflect the tensions and aspirations of American life.
Hip-hop emerged in the Bronx during the 1970s, when DJs began using turntables not just to play records but to manipulate them—looping beats, scratching vinyl, and creating entirely new sonic landscapes. This spirit of innovation was often driven by necessity.
“The growth of rock and roll isn’t just about the music itself. It’s about markets. Teenagers suddenly had expendable income and their own musical tastes.” —John Covach
’05E (DMA)—an associate professor of music and technology at Eastman whose background includes leading music-learning initiatives at Ableton, a music software maker, and contributing to the development of its signature tools—notes that many musical breakthroughs occur when artists repurpose technology in unexpected ways.
“Early techno, for example, was made with gear people bought at pawn shops,” he explains. “They used technology in ways its designers never imagined.” Techno originated in Detroit in the early 1980s with pioneering musicians like the Belleville Three, made up of Juan Atkins, Derrick May, and Kevin Saunderson. Living in one of the first post-industrial cities, they had limited means but abundant creativity, using what they could find to make sounds nobody expected. “That’s a very American story,” DeSantis says.
Hip-hop DJs transformed turntables into instruments. Electronic musicians in Detroit used inexpensive synthesizers to create techno. In both cases, artists took tools that had been overlooked or discarded and turned them into engines of creativity. That experimental spirit continues today as musicians explore new technologies, from digital production software to artificial intelligence.
“When people start forcing tools to do things their creators never intended, that’s when new genres appear.” —Dennis DeSantis
According to DeSantis, the most exciting developments will likely come not from the technology itself but from how artists choose to use it. “When people start forcing tools to do things their creators never intended,” he says, “that’s when new genres appear. So, when we think about AI and music, it’s exciting to think about how people might subversively repurpose it for creative uses we haven’t thought of yet. Which is exactly what hip-hop did with turntables 50 years ago.”
This is America
Musicians have been writing about this country for centuries—and will continue to long after the semiquincentennial celebrations end. As long as America fuels an artist’s imagination and ignites their conviction, musicians of every genre will chronicle it. American music is a story of invention and reinvention, and across generations, one pattern has emerged again and again: American musicians rarely stop trying to explain the country to itself.
Sometimes they do it directly—with the word America in the title. From classical compositions like William Grant Still’s The American Scene to Green Day’s “American Idiot” (which the band included in a medley during this year’s Super Bowl preshow), there is an impulse that has long been part of the nation’s musical DNA.
Don McLean’s “American Pie,” released in 1971, is perhaps the most famous example. The nine-minute epic became a nostalgic meditation on the cultural upheaval of the 1960s, weaving references to rock and roll, political turmoil, and the assassination of John F. Kennedy into a sprawling musical allegory. McLean famously described it as a reflection on “the day the music died,” but the song’s deeper resonance lies in its sense of a country wrestling with its own identity.
Nearly 50 years later, actor, comedian, and musician Donald Glover—performing as Childish Gambino—offered a very different portrait. In 2018, “This Is America” juxtaposed joyful gospel-inspired music with stark visual imagery of violence and social tension. The song and its accompanying video won four Grammys, including Song of the Year and Best Music Video.
Despite the decades between them, the two songs share something striking. Both function as musical time capsules—expressing a moment when Americans paused to reflect on who they were and what their country had become.
“When you put ‘American Pie’ next to ‘This Is America,’ you start to see how musicians are constantly trying to interpret the nation back to itself. They’re responding to the same question across generations: What does it mean to be American right now?” —Jeffrey McCune
For McCune, whose scholarship often explores how Black expressive culture reveals the pressures and possibilities of American life, the pairing is especially revealing. “When you put ‘American Pie’ next to ‘This Is America,’ you start to see how musicians are constantly trying to interpret the nation back to itself,” he says. “They’re responding to the same question across generations: What does it mean to be American right now?”
Which brings us back to Super Bowl LX. As Bad Bunny redefines what it means to be American, live in front of approximately 128 million viewers, we have an opportunity to explore the role American culture—and particularly its music—has played on the worldwide stage.
In a single evening, each of the Super Bowl performances captured something essential about the nation’s music: its ability to hold multiple histories at once. Because 250 years after its founding, the United States still has no single musical voice. Instead, it has something far more powerful: a chorus.
This story appears in the spring 2026 issue ofRochester Review,the magazine of theĢý.
