Oooh, reggaeton.
Even as of a couple of years ago, you know, I’d be told specifically by certain club owners, “Don’t play that sh*t.”
And now those are the same club owners that are booking perreo parties and reggaeton parties.
So it’s like, well, what happened, right? What changed?
Hey guys, it’s Sana, and I’m in New York City exploring the roots of one of the most
popular musical genres today,
and its journey from being an expression of Afro-Caribbean identity to, well, everywhere!
You definitely know the reggaeton sound.
While those songs aren’t reggaeton, they do use that very unique rhythm know as Dembow.
And Wayne Marshall, a music historian, can break that rhythm down.
If you've ever heard reggaeton, you've probably heard that running underneath.
You could say somewhere between three-quarters to
100 percent of all tracks contain these actual sounds.
A really good and popular example of a reggaeton song that uses these sounds
is Daddy Yankee’s 2004 hit “Gasolina.”
So what are the roots of that rhythm?
Reggaeton is deeply diasporic music
in a number of different ways.
All of this wouldn't have happened if it wasn't for Jamaica, straight up. I always say,
passageway from Jamaica, to the immigrants
who went to Panama to build the canal,
which is part of my personal lineage.
Reggaeton has this history of being born out of the way
that people were playing in the clubs, like in Puerto Rico for example,
of taking hip-hop samples, hip-hop loops, dancehall loops, from the original records.
The early origins of reggaeton actually go back to the emergence of dancehall reggae
in the late ’80s and early ’90s in Jamaica.
It started in literal dance halls, where the “selectors,” or DJs, would mess around with the sound by using the
volume knob to let in as much of the rhythm as they wanted, creating what Marshall calls a “polyrhythm.”
And then artists actually started building this effect into their own tracks. And it sounded like this:
So that's an example of what started to become a sort of prevailing pattern in dancehall reggae.
The most influential of these tracks, of course, is Shabba Ranks’ “Dem Bow,” and the original for Dembow
sounds like this. You'll note that it uses the same
snare-drum rhythms that we just heard
on “Poco Man Jam.”
In Panama, artists like El General started remaking dancehall reggae hits, translating them into Spanish.
This became known as “reggae en Español.”
And DJ Nelson, a pioneer in reggaeton, explains why the use of Spanish by those Panamanian artists
was important for him in Puerto Rico, years ago.
“Oh my God, these guys are singing in Spanish, I can understand!”
Imagine artists from Puerto Rico, singing in Spanish on a hip-hop beat? Dancehall beat? House beat?
Techno beat?
It's crazy.
OK, so back to Panama.
Many of the artists making reggae en Español songs were the descendants of immigrants from Jamaica and
the West Indies who had moved to Panama in the early 20th century to work on the Panama Canal.
And they wanted to keep in touch with their roots.
A couple generations later, they still had familial and cultural ties
to Jamaica. Reggae was one of many regional musics that were part of the sort of popular mix.
It was in New York that Panamanian artists like El General actually recorded in Jamaican recording studios.
And a lot of reggaeton’s history and development happened here because it’s here where Panamanians,
Jamaicans, Puerto Ricans and African-Americans crossed communities and sounds.
Those communities, and New York’s hip-hop scene, were instrumental in the development of reggaeton,
as Petra Rivera-Rideau, who studies race and pop culture, explains.
If you talk to early reggaeton artists, you know
many of them list hip-hop artists in the U.S. as some of their biggest influences.
In New York, Puerto Ricans settled everywhere, but among the neighborhoods where there was
the largest concentration was the Bronx, the South Bronx, and this is where hip-hop originated.
And that hip-hop sound
traveled from New York to San Juan.
While a lot of people consider Puerto Rico to be the home of reggaeton, the question of who owns it is
actually a lot more complicated – because the history of reggaeton is the history of diasporas and migration.
The Noise was one of the most influential collectives to come out of Puerto Rico in the ’90s.
We actually came to the Red Bull Music Festival – you can totally hear the reggaeton playing in the background
– and we caught up with DJ Negro and DJ Nelson of the Noise.
Before the Noise became a musical collective, it was actually a club in San Juan,
and it’s where artists like Daddy Yankee and Ivy Queen got their start.
The Noise, as a club, was founded in 1991 by DJ Negro.
At the same time, the Noise was pretty much the only place where
you could listen to music that later became known as reggaeton.
That’s because “underground,” as it was known then,
wasn’t really widely liked and it was associated with criminality and obscenity.
Talking about asses, talking about guns, talking about caseríos,
talking about crazy things. It took the country by surprise.
This is where the parallels between hip-hop in the ’90s and reggaeton in the ’90s get really interesting.
The way hip-hop came from New York’s projects,
“underground” music – proto-reggaeton – was coming out of caseríos,
or public-housing developments in San Juan.
And just like the projects of New York – or really anywhere in the United States
– caseríos were associated not only with the working class, but with blackness.
And while a good part of Puerto Ricans are believed to have African and Indigenous ancestry,
the Afro-Puerto Rican community has a history of being stigmatized.
I mean, check this – in the ’90s in particular, black Americans were stigmatized on the mainland through
associations made between their communities, the projects, drug use, increased so-called “urban crime”
and “obscene” music.
And so were Afro-Puerto Ricans in Puerto Rico.
It's not necessarily true that caseríos were the epicenter of criminal activity.
But they developed a reputation as being a place where a lot of criminal activity, particularly around drugs,
was taking place.
Between 1993 and 1996, the Puerto Rican government actually launched a campaign called
“Mano Dura Contra el Crimen," or “the Iron Fist Against Crime,” and targeted caseríos in particular.
They used the National Guard and the Puerto Rican police to occupy the caseríos
as a way to curb violent crime.
And it was a pretty violent occupation.
At the same time Mano Dura was happening, the government also undertook a censorship campaign.
The police came out to the stores and took the tapes, the cassettes,
people listening to the reggaeton in the cars get stopped by the police. It was crazy times.
And then in 2002, there was another censorship campaign
and it was focused on pornography, largely targeting reggaeton music videos.
But because Puerto Rico is a U.S. territory, the constitutionally protected free speech prevailed.
But that didn’t stop the the stigma that was associated with the music – and that in turn encouraged artists
to explore their own realities more so in their music.
Popular music in Puerto Rico has been a space where people have contested a lot of these racial ideologies
and pointed out racial discrimination.
Tego Calderón has several songs where he directly calls out this idea of racial harmony as a myth,
where he talks about institutional discrimination facing black Puerto Ricans in an explicit kind of way.
I also want to point out that even though reggaeton has this reputation of hypersexualizing women,
women singers and rappers were actually part of the scene from really early on.
Take, for example, Ivy Queen, who was part of the Noise.
And today you have women like DJ Bembona and DJ Riobamba
who are changing the reggaeton scene and image.
We love perreo, but even when you throw some tracks in, you’re like ohh,
hmmm, dayum, maybe I shouldn’t be playing this right now.
But I just love to throw my ass back.
I play those tracks and I’m going to stand in front of it and be like, I’m not supposed to be here.
Like, I’m not supposed to take up this space, but like I’m going to reclaim that space, in the club,
in a way that this was never intended to be.
And then there’s also the question of the whitewashing of reggaeton.
I think a big reason that reggaeton has had this huge crossover, general-market moment is that
it's become whitewashed.
It does erase the roots of the genre, and it does erase a lot of artists that have been there since the beginning
that are equally if not more talented and amazing that have never had this moment.
But the history of the genre is a history of diaspora communities,
connected through their Afro-Caribbean heritage, trying to reclaim it.
I am Afro-Latina, I am black and I’m proud.
I’m Panamanian, I’m Puerto Rican and I’m all these things together.
No more assimilation, none of that. We have to take up the space that, you know,
the generations before us weren’t able to.
Hey guys, thanks for watching. Hope you enjoyed the video.
Let us know what are some other pop culture histories you want us to delve into.
And hopefully we'll get around to it.
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