![]() ![]() ![]() Alexis & Fido, whose nickname is Los Pitbulls, because of the musicians’ tendency to bark during songs, put on an invigorating performance. Wisin & Yandel did not appear as scheduled, but the genre has no shortage of male duos. Because all the acts used backing tracks or records, there were no instruments to assemble or break down, and the sets-each only three or four songs long-succeeded one another quickly, before similarities between them became obvious. Two of the station’s d.j.s, Alex Sensation and Johnny Famolari, repeatedly thanked the event’s sponsors, Cingular Wireless, McDonald’s, and Bud Light-one of the few times that English was spoken onstage. El General’s music was called “ reggae en español,” to distinguish it from Latin hip-hop, and in the mid-nineties, using a rhythm called Dem Bow, created by the Jamaican producer Bobby Digital, Puerto Rican rappers started rhyming in Spanish over dancehall, adding Puerto Rican slang and Latin percussion to the Jamaican template.įor the past three years, New York’s leading Latin station, Mega 97.9 FM, has sponsored an annual event called Megaton, and this year the show was held on Thanksgiving at Madison Square Garden. A founding influence was the Panamanian artist El General, who scored a novelty hit in 1991 with “Muévelo” (“Move It”), an infectious song that combined Spanish vocals with dancehall’s distinctively syncopated snare-drum pattern. Wisin & Yandel tinker with reggaetón’s formula, interjecting references to dancehall numbers and to the genre’s Latin antecedents. Luny Tunes also produced “Pa’l Mundo,” a new album by Wisin & Yandel, a pair of young Puerto Rican musicians who are among the genre’s most accomplished. The chorus consists of a teasing call and response: Yankee chants, “ A ella le gusta la gasolina” (“She loves gasoline”), to which a docile female chorus replies, “ Dame mas gasolina!” (“Give me more gasoline!”) Gasolina has been variously translated as “speed,” “rum,” “sperm,” and, of course, “gas.” The song is quintessential reggaetón: it hits the offbeat snares hard, and piles on sexual innuendo with manic energy. Then, as the beat and a meagre digital melody kick in, Yankee raps bluntly about a girl whose idea of fun includes turning on car engines. ![]() The genre’s most successful artist is Daddy Yankee, a twenty-eight-year-old Puerto Rican who, according to Nielsen SoundScan, has sold nearly a million copies of his 2004 album “Barrio Fino,” mostly on the strength of a song called “Gasolina.” Produced by Luny Tunes, two young Dominican men now based in Puerto Rico who are the genre’s current trendsetters, “Gasolina” begins with spastic keyboard tittering, like an electrical circuit sputtering to life, followed by a crescendo of hammering drums-a common reggaetón motif. Hollywood has also discovered reggaetón several films about the music are currently in development, including one funded by Jennifer Lopez’s company, Nuyorican Productions. Hispanics, who two years ago overtook African-Americans as the largest minority group in the United States, may be the music’s primary consumers, but this year reggaetón songs have begun to be played on pop radio, as well as on stations like Latino 96.3, in Los Angeles, which has adopted the Hispanic urban format, “hurban”-a mix of reggaetón and hip-hop. The music’s syncopated movement suits the hard phonemes and quick cadences of Puerto Rican Spanish the best reggaetón vocalists create long, complex musical patterns that are often more sophisticated than those of American rappers. Rather than stressing the first pulse in every measure, the music accents offbeats, and the difference is evident on the dance floor: reggaetón speaks to hips, hip-hop to heads and shoulders. These styles have existed for years, but until the nineties, when Puerto Rican artists began putting them together, Spanish rapping sounded like a stepchild of American hip-hop. Reggaetón consists of rapping in Spanish over rhythms derived from Jamaican dancehall and salsa. Latin music, the industry term for Spanish-language records, owes much of its commercial vitality to three very different phenomena: RBD, a Mexican pop group whose members are actors on a popular soap opera Shakira, a twenty-eight-year-old Colombian-Lebanese singer, who released albums in English and in Spanish this year and who performs in so many different styles that she is practically her own musical category and, especially, reggaetón, the first genre in Spanish to become part of mainstream pop. Sales of Latin music rose twelve per cent over the past year-the only pop category to experience an uptick. ![]()
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