2007 opens with another moody, minor-key reggaetón from a long-serving pioneer in the genre. Héctor El Father and Tito El Bambino had been performing as Héctor y Tito since 1996, making a name for themselves in Latin rap and reggaetón circles until they split up in 2004. Héctor's solo career exploded; he signed up with Jay-Z under the imprint Roc-La-Familia, which no doubt played a role in this song getting to #1: these were the peak Roc-A-Fella years.
But after only two more years in the limelight, Héctor would step away from reggaetón, turning his MC name literal by becoming an evangelical minister. He is still a significant presence in Puerto Rico's Christian media, preaching over the radio.
There's nothing particularly sacred about this song, but it is, perhaps inevitably, sanctimonious. As a message song primarily in the second person, addressing a woman in an abusive relationship from the point of view of the man who "loves" her and is miserable watching her suffer, there's an undercurrent of victim-blaming (of the "just leave him" variety) and a heavy focus on his own feelings rather than any actual support for her. But no doubt it was still originally heard as a socially conscious song -- acknowledging the damage that men do to women wasn't exactly high on original-recipe reggaetón's priorities -- and I'm sure people in situations I've never been in have used it for solace or courage.
The fragments of repeated melody, bellowed in Héctor's doleful baritone, turn the dembow pulse into a persistent knocking rather than an invitation to dance. Every subaltern genre begins as sex-and-violence dance music and is turned into emotionally cathartic music over time. If I'm not particularly impressed by this entry in the transition reggaetón was making into expressing the full range of human emotions, it was still part of a necessary movement. Crudely-expressed sentimentalism is part of every genre too.
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