Content area
Full Text
Reggaeton has been profoundly shaped and reshaped by transnational flows of people, music, and ideologies, and one can hear and trace these movements in the very forms of the songs themselves. This essay offers an overview of the history of the genre and the shifting shapes of its forms, as well as how these forms articulate with social and cultural movements, by following a particularly audible thread through time and space. Although reggaeton's national provenance remains a hotly disputed issue, attending to particular sonic details can provide a persuasive resolu- tion of various claims to the genre, which has been defined, by various stake- holders, as essentially Jamaican, Panamanian, North or Latin American, and/or Puerto Rican.1 Seeking to tease these threads out, my narrative begins with a semi- nal 1991 recording by Jamaican DJ/vocalist Shabba Ranks, Dem Bow. Not only has the song been covered, or re-recorded, by performers in Panama, New York, and San Juan, but elements of the song's accompanimental track (or RIDDIM) ap- pear in upwards of 80% of all reggaeton productions.2 Thus, DEM BOW - also re- corded and referred to as SON BOW, DEMBOW, and DEMBO, among others, dem- onstrating the mutations of translation and localization - offers a rich set of exam- pies for understanding the transnational transformations so central to reggaeton's aesthetics and cultural politics. The changing shapes and enduring elements of DEM BOW illuminate in particular how migration and commercialization have contributed to the formation of a genre which today stands as one of the most popular youth musics across the Americas.
More specifically, an examination of the transformations of DEM BOW calls attention to some of the central political commitments underpinning reggaeton's resonance, as well as how this orientation - the very cultural politics of the genre itself- has changed rather radically over time, especially with the genre's increasing appeal to a »mainstream«, pan-Latino listenership. Since reggaeton emerged as a viable commercial product capable of transcending its initially subcultural or »underground« audience, in particular with the pop chart success of N.O.R.E.'s Oye Mi Canto (2004) and Daddy Yankee's Gasolina (2005), it has been hailed as a symbol not just of important demographic trends in the US but of an emergent pan-Latin American identity. In the...