Sales of Latin music rose twelve per cent over the past year—the only pop category to experience an uptick. 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.

Reggaetón consists of rapping in Spanish over rhythms derived from Jamaican dancehall and salsa. 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 turned the beat around. 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. 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.

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. Hollywood has also discovered reggaetón; several films about the music are currently in development, including one funded by Jennifer Lopez’s company, Nuyorican Productions.

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. 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 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.

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. Wisin & Yandel tinker with reggaetón’s formula, interjecting references to dancehall numbers and to the genre’s Latin antecedents. 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. 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.

As a genre, reggaetón is where hip-hop was twenty-five years ago, slowly making the transition from dance singles and d.j.s to hit songs and stars. Like dozens of reggaetón numbers, Wisin & Yandel’s single “Rakata” is addictive yet ultimately unsatisfying. The lyrics are aggressively sexual, and the title, which is the song’s leitmotif, is a nonsense word that evokes both gunfire and coitus, and meshes nicely with a series of drum accents that run beneath the vocals. But the track lacks the tension and the narrative arc of a good pop song, and the m.c.s’ voices are undistinguished. As was the case with hip-hop in the nineteen-eighties, the best way to experience reggaetón is on compilation albums—such as the successful series “Mas Flow”—or in live performance.

For 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. 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. 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.

Wisin & Yandel did not appear as scheduled, but the genre has no shortage of male duos. Alexis & Fido, whose nickname is Los Pitbulls, because of the musicians’ tendency to bark during songs, put on an invigorating performance. One of their most popular songs is “El Tiburón” (“The Shark”), which starts with the two-chord theme from “Jaws,” and whose chorus, like that of “Gasolina,” relies on goofy double-entendre: “Mama, what do you want? / To be taken away by the shark!” “El Tiburón” was produced by Luny Tunes and exemplifies the musicians’ penchant for pairing loud, simple beats with high, needling sounds and letting rappers fill in the sonic space between, trading lines with one another and the background singers. The effect is appealingly social; reggaetón songs seem to emerge from a room full of people.

Tego Calderon was one of the few performers to appear without backup dancers, and one of the few men onstage who had made an effort to look dapper. He strolled around in a blue sweater and a newsboy cap, and rapped in a low and craggy voice over both traditional hip-hop beats and snatches of salsa, which makes his palette currently the broadest in reggaetón. But the evening’s most memorable performance was by Ivy Queen, one of two female acts. Now in her early thirties, Ivy Queen is a Puerto Rican who spent her childhood in New York City, which may account for the tumultuous applause she received when she took the stage. Wearing a tight T-shirt, bluejeans, and knee-high leather boots, she exhibited a well-honed sense of theatre. She knew when to stand still, leading the crowd regally through a recitation of her name (“Como me llama yo?” “Ivy Queen!”), and when to crouch and start dancing. Ivy Queen has recorded a song about spousal abuse, but at Megaton she stuck to party anthems, singing over dancehall numbers made famous by Sean Paul and Lumidee. She has a deep voice and an impressive facility with fast polyrhythms, but her recordings lack the confidence and novelty of Luny Tunes productions.

Daddy Yankee, who closed the show, is a dogged performer, often pushing his unremarkable voice to the breaking point when he can’t think of anything better to do. His song “Rompe” (“Break It Down”) is currently No. 1 on Billboard’s Latin chart and could become reggaetón’s second mainstream hit. The song reduces reggaetón’s already simple forms to an insistent four-note phrase. The rhythm track is synchronized with the word rompe, which is repeated three times, with less syncopation than in most reggaetón songs but with as much enthusiasm. As the audience happily chanted along with Yankee, the women in the crowd executed subtle variations on a circular dance move that could be described as “butt in orbit.” The two words that consistently elicited the loudest response, however, had little to do with music: “Puerto Rico!”


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