Perhaps you had been at a basement occasion, grinding with a pimply crush in low-rise flare denims and a stomach button ring you couldn’t cease gazing. Perhaps, should you had been somewhat older, you had been driving round your metropolis with too many pals within the backseat. Perhaps, should you had been within the Caribbean, you had been at a celebration de marquesina studying what your hips and ass might do. Perhaps you heard it at a center faculty 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 sizzling pink Motorola RAZR flip cellphone.
Perhaps you had 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 probability 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 automobile 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 prime spot. In 2005, it gained a Latin Grammy for Greatest City Music Album. Inside a 12 months 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 international, Yankee was going to squeeze each cent he might out of it. In any case, the person received 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 impression, 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 international drive, to its function in affirming the imagined id of Latinidad.
Daddy Yankee, born Ramón Ayala, mentioned he imagined Barrio Fino partly as an antidote to reductive portrayals of life within the tasks. “The information you see all over the 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 lower 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 now; one in all its precursors was referred to as underground, and Yankee was one in all 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 Rosselló applied an anti-crime marketing campaign that additionally focused underground artists, resulting in police raids of file shops that bought their cassettes in February 1995.
