Whether you are Latino or not, chances are you know something about reggaeton. Maybe you love it, or maybe you love to hate it, but you’ve definitely heard that persistent boom-chi-boom-chick beat flying at you from passing cars, beaming at you through jewelry-soaked music videos, or moving you at the dance club. Although many claim that reggaeton’s day has come and gone, pointing to a declining share of the Latin market, there is no doubt that the music remains relevant – reggaeton is still by far the largest selling Latin genre of today and, until somebody comes up with something new, the sound of a generation of Latin youth. And despite a long litany of criticisms often directed at the music (it’s repetitive, it’s sexist, it’s materialistic), it has a fascinating musical history just beneath the surface, and the music goes much deeper than the radio-ready hits you’ve heard from stars such as Daddy Yankee, Don Omar, and Wisin y Yandel.

A Little History

The reggaeton story has been told many times, and the basic idea goes like this: In the late 80s, early hip-hop coming out of New York was catching on in Puerto Rico, and an influential Puerto Rican rapper named Vico C inspired a homegrown rap movement by showing it was possible to rap in Spanish. A little bit later, Jamaican Ragamuffin, a new electronic-based wave of dancehall reggae became the dance party sound of the early 90s and made its way to Puerto Rican discotecas.

Meanwhile, Panamanians had been making Spanish language covers of reggae songs throughout the 80s, influenced by a large Jamaican community living on Panama’s Caribbean coast. Spanish reggae from Panama took off among New York’s many Latin diasporas during the, and soon Panamanian vinyl began playing alongside hip-hop in San Juan as well. Around 1993, Puerto Ricans began rapping over sped-up Panamanian B-sides, and these freestyle sessions evolved into a truly grassroots movement known as underground, its music circulated outside of the formal economy on homemade mixtapes. Early producers like DJ Negro and DJ Playero would make 30 copies of  these tapes, with titles like Playero 37 and The Noise 1, and they then passed hand to hand across the country’s barrios.

Underground DJs made their tracks by recycling a handful of dancehall recordings and classic hip-hop samples and stringing them into intricate, fast-changing collages. Eventually one recording, Shabba Ranks’ “Dem Bow,” became the most popular drum track to use, and began to appear under virtually every underground pista, or backing track, becoming the reggaeton beat we know and love. In fact, in today’s Spanish parlance, dembow is used as the name of a rhythm, as if it were guaguanco or merengue.

As soon as underground music left the ghetto and appeared in stores, everything changed. Figures in the local government, appalled at underground’s explicit lyrics, connected the music to San Juan’s then endemic crime rates. In 1995, police raided music stores around the city and took underground CDs off the shelves, hoping to stop the music before it could take off.  As one might expect, the publicity generated by the crusade on underground only fueled its popularity, and soon the music was dominating the youth scene, eventually eclipsing classic Latin genres such as salsa and merengue.

Underground morphed into reggaeton along the way, and the old hip-hop samples gave way to the shimmering digital bleeps of today’s synthesizer-heavy sound. Reggaeton was growing in popularity in Puerto Rico and its diaspora, but nobody really suspected how big it would get. Every summer needs a good summer song, and in summer 2005, Daddy Yankee’s Barrio Fino changed reggaeton’s history with the mega-hit single “Gasolina,” which scaled pop charts not only around Latin America but in unlikely markets like Ireland and Denmark. Major labels came to gobble up local DJs’ imprints, and the reggaeton era was born. Young people across the Latin world became hooked, as the older generation shrugged its shoulders. It was a new age in Latin music.

Now that that’s out of the way, let’s get a little deeper.

Notes From The (Puerto Rican) Underground

There’s a long ongoing debate over where reggaeton really comes from, and without diminishing the importance of Panama’s Spanish-reggae tradition, today’s reggaeton is really a Puerto Rican phenomenon. Walking the streets of San Juan today, there can be little doubt that it must be ground-zero of the reggaeton explosion – the sauntering dembow beat is everywhere, seemingly floating out of every vehicle and storefront in the tropical metropolis.

While most Puerto Ricans have a thing or two to say about their island’s colonial status, and with plenty of good reason, the commonwealth’s ties to the United States have brought good economic tides to the island. Puerto Rico is wealthier than any Latin American nation and it shows. Luxury towers glisten above San Juan’s beachfront as steady lines of SUVs zip along the boulevards, and the walled city of Old San Juan has maintained it’s colonial splendor.

Just below the walls of the picturesque old city, however,  a maze of modest homes known as La Perla crawls up the hillside. It was in barrios like La Perla, as well as in the caserios, or federal housing projects, where the underground movement flourished in the early 90s among the city’s marginalized youth, who flocked at the famous Old San Juan nightclub called The Noise to partake in the revolutionary freestyle sessions that led to the birth of the genre.

I sat down with one former young mixtape star, Omar Garcia, in a quiet Old San Juan café. Omar, who once went by O.G.M, has long since left the reggaeton scene and is currently working on an eclectic album inspired by sources as disparate as electro rock and trip-hop. However, take a look at some of the grainy old underground videos of the mid 90s, and you can see a 14 year-old running with future reggaeton stars like Daddy Yankee before they had hair on their chins, as they extolled the virtue of pretty girls, heavy marijuana consumption, and poetry of the vulgar.

“It was crazy, but I think the hardest, craziest and most fun, wasn’t the music or the scene – it was the streets,” said Omar. “When I was 14, I was just from barrio to barrio, running the island from side to side. I used to have two or three shows every weekend, and all of them were in a different casario, in a different project. In the park or basketball court, they used to put up a stage and some sound equipment and bring whoever was available.

“It was too much, and eventually I had to stop. Because, you can imagine, I sang at midnight at the earliest, and I was in high school, and in the middle of the casarios, whether it’s the coolest one or the hottest one. But I learned a lot. You get a sense of your country in a very direct, objective, non-hypocritical way, just going to every hood, barrio, and project and hearing from them. There's no VIP area in the casario. Back then, that was the real thing. Underground, that was the real stuff. You won’t get realer than that.”

Omar participated on one of the early mixes to appear in stores – DJ Adam Mad Jam vol. 1. DJ Adam had the commercial consciousness to make a comparatively clean album compared to explicit recordings being produced by other DJs at the time. Clean lyrics didn’t stop the backlash from mainstream society, however.

“There is a very strong conservative side in Puerto Rico because we’re Latin, we have a Catholic history,” said Omar.  “It was just a real shock. At three o’clock, your kids come home from school, and they’re used to cartoons, and all of a sudden there’s girls in bikinis on the television. Parents all over the country were like ‘its horrible, we have to take this out,’ but the kids were just dying for more. It was something so new.

“Socially, underground transformed Puerto Rico. Now, reggaeton is pop music, but when it started, it was letting people know what was going on in the barrio. The fact that the rappers were talking just like in their backyards – there’s a big sector in Puerto Rico that would never know about all that stuff,  because they wouldn’t leave their closed, protected, secure neighborhoods and their offices and their private schools. Reggaeton made them look.”

Musica Negra?

I visited a street festival in a town called Loiza, less than an hour outside of San Juan. Loiza, with the island’s largest concentration of black Puerto Ricans, is often considered the Afro-Puerto Rican cultural capital, and indeed, Afro-Latino roots music traditions such as plena and bomba are particularly strong there.

“Bomba  is very important to us Puerto Ricans,” said self-described street-poet Michael Cruz, alias Dulce de Coco. “It’s a chance for the human being to communicate through the drum, a place for the black man to let himself leave his pain in the clave and the wind, and clean himself  spiritually.”

I spoke with Michael by a lush riverbank, where, as he explained to me, his grandfather used to operate a ferry back before a bridge was built to connect Loiza to nearby towns. Fat-bodied bomba drums from the distant stage competed with the steady pulse of crickets and the mid-evening quiet. At 29 years old, Dulce de Coco is one of many black-and-proud rappers I spoke with in Loiza who saw no contradiction in pairing the centuries-old drumming tradition with reggaeton; whom in fact, see a synergy in the common African roots of diasporic reggae and rap with local styles of bomba and plena.

“I’m an artist of 2009,” said Dulce. “But I always respect what our grandparents gave us, their witness to a history of suffering. We have to fight that we don’t let ourselves lose the teachings from the old times, the ways of living from before, but bring it to today by mixing the traditions with the beautiful rhythms of rap and reggaeton.”

“Honestly speaking,” said Tatá, a wiry older gentleman who is also one of the great bomberos of Loiza. “Reggaeton is bomba. Because the root is in the bomba, in its beat. It all starts in Africa.”

Throughout the evening, bomba and reggaeton shared the stage as two Afro-Antillean traditions, many of the performers equally comfortable improvising a bomba verse and spitting a chorus over dembow. The purpose of the event was to raise money in order to send a Loiza delegation to cruise down 5^th avenue in New York’s annual Puerto Rican Day Parade.

Loiza itself is best known to some reggaeton fans as the subject of a bomba-inflected track from Tego Calderon, one of the few major reggaeton artists to explicitly wear  his blackness and to be outspoken about racism in Puerto Rico and Latin America in general.

It hadn’t always been so – before the name “reggaeton” became standardized as the title of the genre, artists referred to the music as musica negra, black music, or melaza, referring to the black color of molasses, a popular local condiment. Regardless of skin tone, early reggaetoneros chose to see their music as part of an international black music phenomenon, closer to the streets of New York than a flashy San Juan discoteca.

The Reggaeton Divide

The next time I saw the guys from Loiza, they were passing me by on a reggaeton-blasting float at the parade in New York City to the thunderous applause of flag waving, whistle-blowing Puerto Ricans out to show a yearly display of love for the motherland. Although there are significant communities throughout the U.S., the New York metro area is home to well over 1 million people of Puerto Rican heritage – a huge number when you consider that the entire population of the island is only 4 million.

Unsuprisingly, reggaeton made a big showing at the parade. As the island’s biggest musical export of all time, reggaeton is the source of great pride. When I asked people at the parade what they thought of the genre, I received similar answers again and again –reggaeton is beloved throughout the world, and was a great way to expose Puerto Rican culture to a global audience as never before.

However, reggaeton has sustained major criticisms as well – not the least from salsa-loving Latinos who see the music as fundamentally un-Latino – its hip-hopish stylings a sign of American culture imperialism creeping into the realm of music. Another, perhaps unexpected group of critics are Puerto Rican rappers from the local hip-hop scene, which split ways with the reggaeton scene in the mid-90s and went down a more conscious, political path.

I spoke with rapper-scholar Welmo Romero about this difference. Welmo grew up in Puerto Rico of Haitian and Dominican parents, and was on break from studying to defend his master’s thesis when we got together.

“One of the most important things about hip-hop to me, it’s way of being ‘in your face,’ of using poetry to talk about a very crude reality,” said Welmo. “So until reggaeton went mainstream, it maintained this spirit of defiance, of questioning inequality, poverty, the lack of resources…

“Reggaeton, I think, is a genre that had its moment. Once the major labels came in, it began to lose that defiance, and the image and music of the rapper was softened, and even the environments in the music videos changed. The ghetto disappeared and became the mansion, the cars, and the bling bling."

“What I really don’t like is how it’s gotten so much like a carbon-copy of the American rap scene,” says Omar Garcia, the former underground kid quoted earlier. “Because I’m a rap fan, but I’m a Puerto Rican first. What about the hungry and homeless guy from your barrio, or whatever. What does he think when he looks at the TV and sees you waving your chain in his face?”

The Reggaeton Boom (and Bust?) and What Future Awaits

Back in 2005, after “Gasolina” was unleashed upon the world, it seemed that a new industry sprung up over night. The music industry, seeing a whole new world of untapped sales, went into a reggaeton frenzy, inventing the concept of hurban (hispanic-urban) music. Spanish-media giant Univison converted their stations into 24/7 reggaeton formats, hip-hop magazines spawned Latino-oriented sister publications, and record labels expanded their Latin departments to prepare for the coming tidal wave of dollars.

Indeed, reggaeton continued to thump its way to commercial greatness for years and hit after hit arrived on the airwaves. Since then, however, the industry’s euphoria seems to have subsided, and reggaeton has begun to adapt to stay competitive with older sounds like bachata and salsa-romantica. Over the years, more and more reggaeton songs have fused such Latin styles in their music, and alternative reggaeton-ish acts such as Calle 13 have challenged the status-quo model of the reggaeton artist. Most recently, reggaeton artists have been ditching the classic dembow sound and incorporated more and more dace beats, and many are turning to the term “musica urbana,” or “urban music” to refer to reggaeton plus a whole swath of rap and R&B related sounds that are catching on in Puerto Rico and beyond.

Despite increasing pitched fights about the looming “Death of Reggaeton,” it doesn’t appear that the music is going anywhere right away. “There is a whole generation that grew up with reggaeton,” said Welmo. “I grew up with hiphop, my father’s generation grew up with salsa and merengue. So this generation grew up with hiphop, and that’s just the music they know.”