Ozichi Okorom
The story of Reggaetón starts here...
You've often heard of Reggaetón as a Puerto Rican musical style, but its origins are much more complicated. The story of Reggaetón is the story of black migrant labor with the construction of the Panama Canal. Starting in 1903, the Black population in Panama grew from 35,000 to 150,000.
While the style of this genre has its origins based in the late 1990s in Puerto Rico, Panama is the original site that allowed for Black migrant workers from all over the Americas to come together and engage in exchanges of food, music, and other cultural forms. After a period of Black activism and revolution in Panama in the 1960s, Panamanian music began to reflect the especially Afrocentric Cuban and West Indian musical influences. It was described at the time as Spanish rap over dancehall beats, or Spanish reggae. This style became the blueprint for what Reggaetón would become 20 years later.
Construction of the Panama Canal, early 1900s.
Reggaetón in Puerto Rico
1989: Brooklyn-born Puerto Rican rapper, Vico C released his first album, La Recta Final. This album is said to be the precursor to Puerto-Rican underground music, which set the stage for reggaetón in later decades. His location in Brooklyn highlights the genre's diasporic origins.
1995: In a government led tirade against reggaetón artists, the police raided a record store in San Juan, Puerto Rico, fined the store owners and confiscated hundreds of cassette tapes. The government also tried to curb the spread of reggaetón culture by banning "hip-hop" clothing and paraphernalia in schools.
2002: The Puerto Rican government launches the Anti-Pornography campaign, which was organized by Senator Velda González, as a way to remove all pornographic material from the media. However, the Senator specifically targeted reggaetón artists for their "vulgar" language and how it "threatened" Puerto Rican values.
2006: Don Omar has the highest ranking reggaetón album, King of Kings, up to date in the United States. He also broke the record for most store appearance sales that was previously held by Britney Spears.
At the Billboard Latin Music awards for this year, Daddy Yankee, upon receiving awards for both Album of the Year and Song of the Year, gives a speech to the audience that addresses the economic crisis in Puerto Rico at the time, and calls for action from the government. This marks the turn of reggaetón in the mid-2000s towards politically consccious music.
2005: The Source, an American hip-hop magazine, debuts a photo of Daddy Yankee that's a play on the famous World War I photo titled, "Uncle Sam Wants You." It reflects the burgeoning crossover of reggaetón to the United States. Though reggaetón had always been a transnational project, Daddy Yankee's rise to fame in the US represented the genre's commercialization and appeal to a wider audience. Due to its burgeoning commercial success, the Puerto Rican state began to adopt the genre as a national cultural symbol.
2017: About 10 years later, reggaetón makes a reappearance into the American mainstream, but its face has drastically changed. The song "Despacito," by Luis Fonsi, featuring Daddy Yankee is released. The record reached 1 billion views in less than 3 months and is officially the best selling Latin American music single in the U.S.
Pivotal Songs
The BLACK in Reggaetón
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Reggaetón NOW
Since its most recent commercialization in 2017 with the song "Despacito," the face of reggaetón has been desperately changing. No longer the music of the black and poor living in the caserios, but it is now party music for the middle class white male. Artists like J Balvin, Luis Fonsi, and Maluma have taken advantage of reggaetón's global popularity for capital gain, using the same iconography, but in an exploitative way, and have-radicalized the genre, so much so that it is now being celebrated rather than maligned like it was less than 15 years ago.
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Sources:
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"Oye mi Canto" ("Listen to my Song"): The History and Politics of Reggaeton
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Remixing Reggaetón: The Cultural Politics of Race in Puerto Rico by Petra R. Rivera-Rideau