Perhaps 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 observing. Perhaps, in case you have been a bit of older, you have been driving round your metropolis with too many mates within the backseat. Perhaps, in case you have been within the Caribbean, you have been at a celebration de marquesina studying what your hips and ass may do. Perhaps you heard it at a center college dance and felt compelled to have interaction within the ritual of a preteen dancefloor tryst. Perhaps to procure it as a ringtone to your model new scorching pink Motorola RAZR flip cellphone.
Perhaps you have been in East Harlem, or Humboldt Park, or Santurce, or a suburban strip mall city in center America. Irrespective of the place you lived, there’s a robust probability that in some unspecified time in the future 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 Prime Latin Albums chart, spending 24 weeks within the high spot. In 2005, it received a Latin Grammy for Finest City Music Album. Inside a 12 months of the document’s launch, Daddy Yankee had landed a $20 million document 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 may 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 business influence, which is only one benchmark of its affect, Barrio Fino can 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 drive, to its position in affirming the imagined id of Latinidad.
Daddy Yankee, born RamĂłn Ayala, stated he imagined Barrio Fino partly as an antidote to reductive portrayals of life within the initiatives. “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 stated in a 2005 interview. The barrio in query was Villa Kennedy, the caserĂo, or public housing undertaking, the place Yankee reduce his tooth freestyling at 13 years outdated. 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 as we speak; one among its precursors was referred to as underground, and Yankee was one among its preeminent practitioners. The Puerto Rican authorities used the music as a scapegoat for the proliferation of gangs, petty crime, and drug habit. Then-Governor Pedro RossellĂł applied an anti-crime marketing campaign that additionally focused underground artists, resulting in police raids of document shops that offered their cassettes in February 1995.
