Possibly you have been at a basement social gathering, grinding with a pimply crush in low-rise flare denims and a stomach button ring you couldn’t cease looking at. Possibly, should you have been just a little older, you have been driving round your metropolis with too many pals within the backseat. Possibly, should you have been within the Caribbean, you have been at a celebration de marquesina studying what your hips and ass might do. Possibly you heard it at a center college dance and felt compelled to interact within the ritual of a preteen dancefloor tryst. Possibly to procure it as a ringtone on your model new scorching pink Motorola RAZR flip cellphone.
Possibly you have been in East Harlem, or Humboldt Park, or Santurce, or a suburban strip mall city in center America. Regardless of the place you lived, there’s a powerful likelihood that sooner or later between 2004 and 2005, you heard Daddy Yankee announce his arrival within the U.S. mainstream with a crystal-clear introduction: “Who’s this? Da-ddy Yank-ee!” “Gasolina” was ubiquitous again then: That shouted hook, revving engine, and indelible, blistering pre-chorus blasted from each boombox, each passing automotive window, and each iPod Mini.
“Gasolina” was the daybreak of an empire. Barrio Fino, the album it appeared on, was the primary reggaeton LP to debut at No. 1 on Billboard’s High Latin Albums chart, spending 24 weeks within the high spot. In 2005, it gained a Latin Grammy for Greatest City Music Album. Inside a yr of the file’s launch, Daddy Yankee had landed a $20 million file take care of Interscope, a sneaker collab with Reebok, a Pepsi sponsorship, and a controversial modeling gig with Sean Jean. If reggaeton was going to go world, Yankee was going to squeeze each cent he might out of it. In spite of everything, the person bought an affiliate’s diploma in accounting so he wouldn’t be cheated “out of cash.”
That is the enduring picture of Daddy Yankee: style pioneer, enterprise tycoon, reggaeton king. On Barrio Fino, Yankee presents himself because the commander of a motion that was poised to imagine market dominance. However past its industrial influence, which is only one benchmark of its affect, Barrio Fino can also be a doc of a style in a second of transformation. That is an album that carries the knotty histories of reggaeton inside it—from its origins as a type of protest poetry, to its transition right into a moneymaking world pressure, to its position in affirming the imagined id of Latinidad.
Daddy Yankee, born Ramón Ayala, mentioned he imagined Barrio Fino partially as an antidote to reductive portrayals of life within the tasks. “The information you see in every single place is all the time marginalizing [the barrio], or blaming it for issues that aren’t its fault,” he mentioned in a 2005 interview. The barrio in query was Villa Kennedy, the caserío, or public housing undertaking, the place Yankee minimize his enamel freestyling at 13 years previous. At 16, he began recording his personal mixtapes, hawking bootleg cassettes for $5. Within the early ’90s, reggaeton hadn’t fairly consolidated into the style we all know it as right this moment; certainly one of its precursors was often called underground, and Yankee was certainly one of its preeminent practitioners. The Puerto Rican authorities used the music as a scapegoat for the proliferation of gangs, petty crime, and drug dependancy. Then-Governor Pedro Rosselló carried out an anti-crime marketing campaign that additionally focused underground artists, resulting in police raids of file shops that bought their cassettes in February 1995.
