Tum-tac-a-ta, tum-tac-a-ta. Taca-taca-taca-taca-taca. Boom. Oof.
Even as of a couple years ago, you know, I would be told specifically by certain club owners, don't play that d***. And now those are the same club owners that are booking Fedeo parties or reggaeton parties. So it's like, well, what happened, right?
Like what changed? Hey guys, it's Sana. 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.
Oh baby when you talk like that, you make a woman go mad. While those songs aren't reggaeton, they do use that very unique rhythm known 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% 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 would not happen if it wasn't for Jamaica, like straight up. I always say, Passageway from Jamaica to the immigrants that had went to Panama to build a canal which is part of my personal lineage. Reggaeton has this history of being born out of like the way that people are playing in the clubs like in Puerto Rico for example of taking hip-hop samples, hip-hop loops, dance hall 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 Shaba Ranks'Dembow. 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 to 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't understand. Imagine, artists from Puerto Rico singing in Spanish on a hip-hop beat, dance-hop beat, house beat, techno beat. It's crazy.
Okay, so back to Panama. Many of the artists making reggae and espanol 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 cross communities and sounds. Those communities and New York's hip-hop scene were instrumental in the development of reggaeton. as Petra Rivera-Redeaux, 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 that were, 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... 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 1980s. We actually came to the Red Bull Music Festival and 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 Evie Queen got their start. The Noise as a club was founded in 1998. 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, you take the country by surprise.
Our attitude was the worst of the worst. It was a genre that didn't exist. The parents didn't want their children to listen to our music. And as you tell your children not to listen, but he said when you turn around, he'll hear it. 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-reggaton, was coming out of caseríos, or public housing developments in San Juan. And just like the projects in New York, or really anywhere in the United States, caserios 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 Duro 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 kind of occupy the caserios 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 get the tapes, the cassettes, people listening to the reggaeton in the cars, get stopped by the police.
It was crazy times. They took us as if we were the worst, we were the worst. Don't listen to that because that harms you. 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 stigma that was associated with the music, and that in turn encouraged artists to explore their own realities, more so in their music. Puerto Rico has been a space where people have contested a lot of these racial ideologies and pointed out racial discrimination. Tego Calderon has several songs where he directly calls out this idea of racial harmony as a myth, where he talks about institutional discrimination facing black people. Puerto Ricans in an explicit kind of way.
I also want to point out that even though reggaeton has this reputation of hyper-sexualizing women, women singers and rappers were actually part of the scene from really early on. Take for example, Evie Queen, who was part of The Noise. And today you have women like DJ Bambona, DJ Riobamba, who are changing the reggaeton scene and image.
Like we love perreo, but even when you throw some tracks in, you're like, ooh. What are they playing? Oh, yeah. Damn. Maybe I shouldn't be playing this right now, but I just love to throw my ass back.
I play those tracks because 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 the way that like... 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 like equally if not more talented and amazing that have never had this moment. But the history of the genre is a history of diasporic 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, I'm all these things together.
No more assimilation, none of that. We have to take up the space that 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 that you want us to delve into and hopefully we'll get around to it. Don't forget to like, share and subscribe.