Reggaeton

• 1. Introduction

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  Reggaeton's story begins not in the glittering studios of San Juan but in the carports and public housing complexes of Puerto Rico, where young people recorded music on second-hand equipment and sold cassettes from the trunks of cars. By the early 1990s, those tapes were spreading a new sound through informal networks, crossing socioeconomic barriers in ways that made the authorities deeply uncomfortable. The Puerto Rican police would eventually raid six record stores in San Juan in February 1995, confiscating hundreds of cassettes and imposing fines under obscenity laws. The Department of Education banned baggy clothing and the music itself from schools. The genre's own name was still unsettled: one account traces the word "reggaeton" to Daddy Yankee dropping it while freestyling on a mixtape called "Playero 34" in 1994; another credits DJ Erick's 1995 album "Reggaetón Live Vol.1", which abbreviated the words reggae and maratón. What everyone agrees on is that by 2017, a single music video for "Despacito" would reach one billion views in under three months. How a genre born in carports became one of the most heard sounds on earth, and who paid the price along the way, is the subject of this documentary.

• 2. Roots and Riddims

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  Reggaeton's percussion foundation has a precise origin. Steely and Clevie, the Jamaican dancehall producers credited with creating the dembow riddim, built it on a 3+3+2 tresillo rhythm complemented by a bass drum in 4/4 time. The percussion stack includes a kick drum, kickdown drum, palito, snare drum, timbal, timballroll, and sometimes a high-hat cymbal, drawing on soca, calypso, and cadence for its pan-Caribbean flavor. Shabba Ranks first highlighted the riddim in "Dem Bow" from his 1991 album Just Reality. Elements of that track's accompaniment can be heard in over 80 percent of all reggaeton productions made since.

  The path from Kingston to Panama City began with Jamaican and Barbadian immigrants who arrived to build the Panama Canal, bringing reggae with them. One of the earliest identifiable reggaeton predecessors was "El D.E.N.I" by the Panamanian artist Renato, a song that addressed discrimination faced by Black Panamanians who spoke English. Hip-hop then reached Puerto Rico and introduced Spanish rap into a space already shaped by Caribbean rhythms. When hip-hop and reggae in Spanish fused, a new form called simply "underground" took root in Puerto Rico, circulating through unofficial venues and informal cassette networks long before any label was involved.

  DJ Playero and DJ Nelson were among the first to produce riddims in this hybrid style, inspired by hip-hop and dancehall. The cassettes that circulated most widely in the early 1990s were DJ Negro's The Noise I and II and DJ Playero's 37 and 38. Gerardo Cruet, who handled the recordings, was instrumental in spreading the genre beyond marginalized residential areas into other parts of Puerto Rican society, particularly private schools. The venues where "underground" music was made and played tell their own story: recording sessions at Villa Kennedy, Jurutungo, and Club Rappers in Carolina, and at PlayMakers in Puerto Nuevo, the most notable clubs of the mid-1990s scene.

• 3. The Raids and the Resistance

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  In February 1995, Puerto Rican police raided six record stores in San Juan, seizing hundreds of cassettes and imposing fines under Laws 112 and 117 against obscenity. The Department of Education banned both baggy clothing and underground music from schools. Local media spent months calling rappers "irresponsible corrupters of the public order." Senator Velda González of the Popular Democratic Party became the most persistent institutional voice against the genre, and in 2002 she led public hearings specifically aimed at regulating the sexual content of reggaeton lyrics.

  The counterresponse was inventive. In 1995, DJ Negro released The Noise 3 with a label reading "Non-explicit lyrics." The album avoided cursing until its final track. It was a commercial hit. The genre kept finding new audiences despite, or perhaps partly because of, the official hostility toward it.

  The government's posture began to shift as reggaeton's reach expanded. By 2003, politicians including Senator González had started using reggaeton in election campaigns to attract younger voters. Mainstream Puerto Rican culture followed: a 2006 Pepsi commercial featured Daddy Yankee, and PepsiCo named Ivy Queen as musical spokesperson for Mountain Dew. A rap album called Reggae School was produced specifically to teach math skills to children, in the spirit of School House Rock. The upper-class verdict of "immoral" and "artistically deficient" was becoming harder to sustain against an art form that was now advertising soda on television and reaching classrooms through educational recordings.

• 4. The 2004 Crossover

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  Daddy Yankee's "Gasolina" was the track that opened the global door in 2004. The year also brought Luny Tunes and Noriega's Mas Flow, Tego Calderón's El Abayarde, Don Omar's "Pobre Diabla" and "Dale Don Dale", and N.O.R.E.'s single "Oye Mi Canto". XM Radio introduced a dedicated reggaeton channel called Fuego that year, reflecting the genre's new commercial weight in the United States.

  Shakira's involvement that year extended the audience further. Inspired by the success of "Gasolina", she collaborated with Alejandro Sanz to record "La Tortura" and "La Tortura -- Shaketon Remix" for her album Fijación Oral Vol. 1. At the 2005 MTV Video Music Awards, four reggaeton songs were performed: by Don Omar, Tego Calderón, Daddy Yankee, and Shakira with Sanz. It was the first time any reggaeton song had been performed on that stage.

  Producers began folding bachata into the reggaeton framework during this period. Ivy Queen released singles featuring bachata's signature guitar sound and slower romantic rhythms. Daddy Yankee's "Lo Que Paso, Paso" and Don Omar's "Dile" also drew on bachata's sensibility. By 2005, producers were marketing the blend as bachaton, described as "bachata, Puerto Rican style." The genre was already demonstrating the absorptive quality that would define its next decade.

• 5. Chart Records and Commercial Peak

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  Don Omar's King of Kings, released in May 2006, debuted at the top of the Top Latin Albums chart and peaked at number seven on the Billboard 200. His single "Angelito" topped the Billboard Latin Rhythm Radio Chart. Omar broke Britney Spears' in-store-appearance sales record at the Downtown Disney Virgin music store.

  Daddy Yankee's El Cartel III: The Big Boss arrived in June 2007 with first-week sales of 88,000 copies, a record for a reggaeton album at the time. It topped both the Top Latin Albums and Top Rap Albums charts, becoming the first reggaeton album to lead the latter. The album reached number nine on the Billboard 200. Wisin and Yandel's Wisin vs. Yandel: Los Extraterrestres debuted at number 14 on the Billboard 200 and number one on the Top Latin Albums chart later that same year. By 2008, reggaeton had been described as the "biggest-selling genre of Latin music."

  Shakira's "Hips Don't Lie", featuring Wyclef Jean of the Fugees, was named in that period as the most popular song in the genre's history. It carried the dembow beat, a trumpet sample from Jerry Rivera's "Amores como el nuestro", and a clear salsa influence. Tego Calderón used his commercial platform differently, emphasizing his Afro-Puerto Rican identity and addressing the discrimination faced by Afro-Latinos despite what he characterized as the "racial democracy" formally established in Puerto Rico. His approach signaled that reggaeton's commercial expansion had not severed its connection to the social critiques embedded in the genre from the beginning.

• 6. "Despacito" and After

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  "Despacito" by Luis Fonsi featuring Daddy Yankee reached one billion YouTube views in under three months in 2017. From January 2018 through November 2020, it held the record as the most viewed YouTube video of all time. With 3.3 million certified sales combined with streaming equivalents, it became one of the best-selling Latin singles in United States history. On the 9th of July 2017, the song's success pushed Daddy Yankee to become the most listened-to artist worldwide on Spotify, the first Latin artist to reach that position. He finished 2017 as the fifth most listened-to male artist and sixth overall on the platform.

  Billboard's Leila Cobo wrote in June 2017 that "Despacito" had renewed interest in the Latin music market from recording labels in the United States. Julyssa Lopez of The Washington Post described the successes of "Despacito" and J Balvin's "Mi Gente" as "the beginning of a new Latin crossover era."

  "Te Boté", released in April 2018 by Nio Garcia, Casper Magico, Darell, Ozuna, Bad Bunny and Nicky Jam, reached number one on the Billboard Hot Latin Songs chart and has since accumulated over 1.8 billion YouTube views. Its production marked a turn toward a sharper, minimalist dembow rhythm that began opening space for more syncopated rhythmic experiments across the genre. In 2019, the Steely estate and Clevie filed a lawsuit against Universal Music Group and Warner Chappell Music over approximately 1,800 tracks they alleged infringed the dembow riddim Steely and Clevie had created in 1990. Steely had died in 2009, but the case brought the genre's foundational percussion dispute into court, attaching a legal dimension to the rhythmic building block that had quietly underpinned the entire industry.

• 7. Queer Artists Remaking the Genre

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  Reggaeton was built, by most accounts, on norms that left little room for queer or trans artists. Bad Bunny's public support for the queer community began shifting what was acceptable in the genre's mainstream. His Un Verano Sin Ti tour gave Young Miko, a queer trap and reggaeton artist from Puerto Rico, her first major national exposure after she had built a local following releasing music independently on SoundCloud.

  In 2022, Villano Antillano, a trans-femme rapper from Puerto Rico, became the first trans woman to reach number 50 on Spotify with Villano Antillano: Bzrp Music Sessions, Vol. 51, a collaboration with producer Bizarrap. She began her career under that artist name while presenting as male, later chose to, in her words, "step into my femininity", and now identifies as non-binary and goes by the legal name Villana. She has spoken directly about what she encountered: "all of these cis male artists, who are very close, aren't going to collaborate with a trans woman. There are very few. We can count them on one hand."

  In 2023, Young Miko charted in the Billboard Hot 100 with her single "Classy 101". That same year, Venezuelan artist La Cruz released the music video for "Te Conocí Bailando", which centered homoerotic imagery with gay men as the object of desire rather than women. As of October 2023 it had reached 2 million views on YouTube. Tokischa, a queer dembow singer, appeared alongside Young Miko on Bad Gyal's "Chulo Pt2", which crossed 100 million YouTube views by that same date. The genre that once used official pressure to police its own sonic boundaries was now, through artists like Villana and Young Miko, negotiating the boundaries of gender and desire from within.