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boom-ch-boom-chick
boom-ch-boom-chick

Reggaetón might be the first new musical phenomenon of the century, but the dance is as old as mammals. Fans call it el perreo, and Minneapolis newspaper Vida y Sabor has reported that it "simulates the copulatory movement of two dogs." But on a cool Saturday night at the Loring Pasta Bar, men and women rotate their lower torsos in the way only humans can. The DJ onstage, Omari Omari, has switched from the brass and piano razzle of salsa to the digital boom-click of reggaetón, and dancers on the crowded tile floor have abandoned the gyroscopic elegance of spinning and dipping for the more basic pleasures of animals trying curious poses.

"I've found the dancing pretty out there sometimes," says Katie De Los Reyes, 18, a regular at the Pasta Bar since she got her fake ID two years ago. "It's very sexual, and it makes a lot of guys uncomfortable to see their girlfriend out there doing that. I know my boyfriend doesn't like it, but that's why I don't bring him."

"Omari, cabron," shouts a man with two fingers on the straw of his drink, wading into the grinding couples as two women slide up under the DJ's portico to make requests. Omari, 25, speaks fluent Spanish, though his mother is Jordanian and his father, '70s rumba singer Hassan Omari, is Kenyan. (The son looks a little like Seth Gilliam from HBO's The Wire, wearing the white sports casuals of a grownup hip-hop kid.) Omari says he started listening to salsa as a way to pick up girls back at Minneapolis South High, though he plays "air cowbell" to his merengue selections with a fan's abandon.

Reggaetón (pronounced reggae-tone) is the next thing, he says, a Spanish Caribbean blend of American rap and Jamaican dancehall that has become an advertised draw at hip-hop, reggae, and Latin dance nights around town. Scenes like the one at the Pasta Bar have multiplied ever since El Nuevo Rodeo launched the first local reggaetón night in 2004. (Last year it moved to Thursdays, as Noche de Perreo.) Now the genre's stars touch down in Minneapolis—Luny Tunes at Rodeo on Halloween 2005, Ivy Queen at First Avenue in April, Tego Calderón at Rodeo in July. Meanwhile, the music has breached the previously rap-free zone of Minnesota Spanish radio, lighting up request lines on "regional Mexican" La Invasora 1400 (WMNV-AM, Thursdays from 7:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m.) and La Mera Buena 107.5 (KBGY-FM, weekdays from 5:00 p.m. to 6:00 p.m.), with more regular play on the new La Picosa 1530 (KQSP-AM).

"Nothing like this has ever happened in Latin music," says local reggaetón producer Diego De La Vega. "I've been to Ecuador, Colombia, Panama, and Venezuela. Reggaetón is out of control all over Latin America. If you can hear it on KDWB [101.3 FM] in rural Minnesota, imagine what it's like in some place like Peru."Maya Santamaria, owner of El Nuevo Rodeo, compares the explosion to salsa in the '70s, another sensation powered by Puerto Ricans through the hemisphere. Yet the new sound outsells salsa at Mena's International in Minneapolis, according to the store's owners. Four years ago, Universal began distributing reggaetón king Daddy Yankee and others on Puerto Rico's VI Music label, thanks to the connections of Gustavo López, a native of the U.S. territory who worked as a rep to Best Buy in the late '90s while living in Hopkins. Last year, López launched Universal's Machete Music, a major-label reggaetón imprint with echoes in Jay-Z's Roc La Familia and Diddy's Bad Boy Latino.

 

The same year, more than 100 students at Henry Sibley High School in Mendota Heights participated in recording and performing an anti-tobacco reggaetón song. And since the first local reggaetón show in March of 2004—Honduran-born brothers Caribbean Connection at El Nuevo Rodeo—more than a dozen Twin Cities acts have taken their version to the stage and into the studio, with enough evidence on demos and MySpace to justify buzz over next year's slated wave of CDs. One forthcoming compilation, produced by Leroy Smokes trumpeter Kyle Borchert, features bilingual St. Paul rapper and singer Maria Isa, Dominican-born MC Back-Up Plomo, Panamanian-born deejay the Kamillion, and others working across genre with such local reggae and hip-hop vets as Prince Jabba and Unicus. Watch this space for the future of Minnesota music.

Like any genuine pop movement, reggaetón is three new things at once—a beat, an audience, and an ethos. The beat is the ubiquitous, tripping dem bow, the boom-ch-boom-chick rhythm that is the hull of any reggaetón song. The audience is the changing urban core of the Americas, including the thousands of young Spanish speakers in Minnesota who marched for immigrant rights last April. "Most of the immigration that we saw in the last 10 years was from rural areas," says Alberto Monserrate, co-founder of Latino Communications Network, which owns Vida y Sabor and La Invasora. "Now what we've seen in the last two or three years is a lot of immigrants coming from big cities in the U.S., or from Mexico City."

The ethos is a new spirit of protest, frankness, and rowdiness. "The essence of reggaetón—and hip hop, too—is to express yourself in a way that you're not going to be scared to say what you feel and what you're going through," says Back-Up Plomo, 21. "The government is militarizing the frontiers. They're making it harder for immigrants to become legal. We believe this is a place that gives you an opportunity, but the truth of the matter is that lately it's not been going that way."

Then there is the matter of sex, a topic on which reggaetón makes the dirtiest New Orleans bounce sound prim. On a recent rainy afternoon, DJ Pablo, 24, plays me some tracks from the late '90s— old-school in perreando years—pressing an air horn on his Roland SP-404 for club effect while sitting in his Brooklyn Park basement. Born Pablo Duran in Cordoba, Argentina, the thinly goateed promoter DJs live for Danny y Elliot, a popular Puerto Rican-born duo known, as are most reggaetón acts, for encouraging female listeners to give up perspiration, inhibitions, and apparel. Yet the oldies go further. Pablo offers an on-the-fly translation of El Maricón's "Puta Cabrona Bellaca" (roughly: "Horny Slut Bitch"), a track that closes with a scene of simulated fucking notable mainly for its absence of female vocals. "He's saying he's not gay, but he likes dick, too," says Pablo, smiling. "It's a nasty-ass song, but my girlfriend likes it."

 

Another refrain, from Las Guanábanas' "Maldita Puta" (vaguely: "Fucking Bitch"), translates as: "Piss on her pussy and spit in her face." Pablo echoes the sentiment of an earlier perreo fan: "It's out there, man."

In more recent years, reggaetón has become increasingly self-possessed. After the slaying of Puerto Rican independence activist Filiberto Ojeda Ríos by the FBI last year, rapper Residente Calle 13 wrote and released an angry song titled "Querido FBI" ("Dear FBI") with a pointed line that translates as: "Instead of aiming into our own house, we need to aim up where it's cold, up to the Northerner." A strain of Puerto Rican nationalism runs through all the major reggaetón artists from the American commonwealth.

"I don't know if anyone's sitting in the Oval Office thinking of Tego Calderón and Daddy Yankee," says Maria Isa, 19, the most overtly political local reggaetón performer. "But as far as the media, a lot of reggaetón artists are for Puerto Rico libré, and people notice."

 

City Pages video: Maria Isa live at Babalu (Chuck Terhark)

 

boom-ch-boom-chick
boom-ch-boom-chick

 

The dem bow contains its own version of the story. Nourished to hip-hop splendor in Puerto Rico, it came from Jamaica, and traces a path of migrant exchange between the islands, New York, and Panama. The beat took its name from "Dem Bow" ("They Bow"), the 1991 Bobby "Digital" Dixon-produced track by growling Kingston ragamuffin deejay Shabba Ranks, which Rio Abajo-born rapper El General (Edgardo A. Franco) translated into Spanish the same year as "Son Bow," using the same backing track. Three quarters of a century earlier, tens of thousands of black Jamaicans and Barbadians had built the Panama Canal, and by the '90s the descendants of those workers crowded the same dense barrios of Panama City mowed through by the U.S. invasion in 1989. That war restored the white elite displaced since the '68 coup by populist general Omar Torrijos, but the dem bow delivered cultural revenge on the North. Today, footage of Torrijos shows up in a montage of revered figures in the MTV-rotated video for "Reggaetón Latino," by Puerto Rican superstar Don Omar.

"Dem bow" was the name given to the new music blasting out of San Juan's public housing projects in the '90s, at least at one point, before Don Chezina promised fans "a ton of reggae, a reggae ton" (according to hip-hop scholar and Maria Isa manager Melisa Rivière) and DJ Nelson popularized the coinage. (Early reggaetón was also known simply as "underground.") The "Dem Bow" backing track, or riddim, swept Puerto Rican hip hop on the heels of El General, as Panamanian reggaespañol met island rap and merenhouse in the Noise, an aptly dubbed discoteca of Old San Juan. The bridge was Brooklyn, where El General lived throughout reggaetón's early ferment. "He used to have his own float on Labor Day," remembers the Kamillion, 33, who resided on the same street in Crown Heights. "People would want to get on his float and ride it out to wherever it stops, because there goes the block party."

The beat hasn't changed in 15 years—but what great beat has? Listen to Wayne Marshall's 40-minute, 30-track "Dem Bow Mix" mp3 posted at riddimmethod.net, and you hear the universe of variation opened up by keeping one new thing the same. Reggaetón babies—bachata's bachatatón, cumbia's cumbiatón—now anticipate the punktón and metaltón to come. You could hear the future in 1992's "Murder She Wrote" by Jamaicans Chaka Demus & Pliers, a Sly and Robbie-produced riddim ("Bam Bam") nearly identical to "Dem Bow," with the toaster and crooner swinging madly on top to adjust to rhythm's new center of gravity. "Any MC from the reggaetón old school, they will get up on the spot if you play them that song," says Back-Up Plomo. "If there's any alcohol around, they will take a shot, too, because that brings back memories."

Plomo (born Victor Joel Almonó Vasquez) moved to Minneapolis in 1998, and remembers reggaetón reaching Santo Domingo a few years earlier as something closer to dancehall español than to hip hop, albeit amid rap contests in the American mold. "In Dominican Republic, the corner stores sell everything—food, liquor, house supplies, until 4:00, 5:00 in the morning," he says. "And what they do is, they set up a bunch of chairs, a bunch of tables, and some big speakers, and they would hold battles."

Caribbean Connection's Olman Barrera, 25, moved to Minnesota in 1997, and remembers the first reggaetón CD reaching Honduras in the mid-'90s. "Before Playero 37: The Original, it was all cassettes," he says. DJ Playero had recorded his classic mixtape in the Villa Kennedy public housing projects of San Juan where he grew up with Daddy Yankee, and the 1992 original was distributed by hand within the same buildings. Yet its clatter eventually produced international frenzy. "In Honduras, they were already playing reggae español from Panama," says Barrera. "But when Playero 37 came out, it was speeded up to 110 bmp. That CD was like the national anthem."

 

Reggaetón hadn't reached rural Costa Rica in 1999, when I visited family in Monteverde, but I should have seen it coming. Radio stations were already playing Jamaican dancehall alongside salsa in Spanish, and one night, as I watched my then-very pregnant step-aunt Debra salsa dance at an outdoor festival for the end of the rainy season, the disc jockey put on Beenie Man's "Let Him Go," and most of the campesinos cleared the grass. But a few boys in bright white sneakers stayed, and proceeded to breakdance. Flash forward to April of this year, and I was in Costa Rica again, chasing a rooster around Debra's backyard, trying to capture the bird's crow on my tape recorder, but mainly picking up the helpless giggles of my six-year-old step-cousin, Liam. As consolation, Liam sang his favorite reggaetón song for the tape, "El Tiburon" ("The Shark") by Alexis y Fido and Baby Ranks. (He later directed my brother and me in the roles of knife-wielding gangsters for a living-room production of Michael Jackson's "Beat It" video, with Liam pulling us apart to lead the dance.)

Here in America, the former subculture of 1970s South Bronx beat parties is sometimes viewed as the center of our pop solar system. Yet it's possible to imagine reggaetón as the heart of a larger galaxy. Think about the musical traditions that created rap music, or were created by it—reggae, Trinidadian soca (or soul calypso), chutney, raggamuffin, jungle, crunk, London grime, Rio baile funk, African hip hop, etc. Then notice how reggaetón sounds more like any of them than they do like each other. This is why DJ Omari Omari can so easily slip Michael Jackson's "Billie Jean" between a reggaetón crossover hit by Dominican merenguero Eddy Herrera and the latest from Nuyorican divas Nina Sky. Reggaetón's gravitational shift is southward, taking popular music with it, which is one reason why the movement is a source of pan-Latino pride.

"So many people are of Latino origin, but they're ashamed of it," says Colombian-born EBNZR ("Ebenezer"), 25, of the local reggaetón group Lírica Secreta. "We want to make music so they don't have to be ashamed. You're going to feel this no matter what language it is. And people that don't speak Spanish—they're going to have to, anyway, because of the way this country is going."

 

boom-ch-boom-chick
boom-ch-boom-chick

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