7th Mar, 2015
Picture a crusty, several-generations-old image of a Rat Fink-esque illustration of a yellow smiley face screaming so widely that its gums show, spittle in the corners of its mouth, over the words LET'S FUCKING GOOOOOOOO in Impact typeface.
Reggaetón's second generation -- at least as recorded by the top of the Hot Latin chart -- begins here, with a white Colombian applying the low-key fuckboy attitude (not to mention nasal singing) popularized by Drake to the head-bobbing skank of the Caribbean. It's over ten years old at this point, and it comes ten years after Puerto Rican reggaetón's initial high-energy breakout into the broader Latin-music conversation, and twenty-five years after the dembow riddim was first applied to Spanish-language dancehall by Panamanians in New York. But this is the point where it becomes clear that reggaetón was not just a late-2000s early-2010s fad, but an ethos, a tent at least as big as salsa or merengue was before it, as generational a dividing line as hip-hop or house was in the 1980s and 90s, as normal for young musicians to latch onto and build an identity around as rock had been in the 1960s.
José Álvaro Osorio Balvin had been born into an upper-middle-class family in Medellín in 1985, but after his father's business went under, the family was forced to move into a rougher neighborhood, where Balvin learned how to code-switch between the rich and working class. In the late 90s and early 2000s, he spent time in the United States, first as a privileged exchange student and then as an illegal visa-overstayer doing construction work. He began rapping in bald imitation of Daddy Yankee at the same time he was studying business at a prestigous universtity back home in Medellín, putting out his first underground record in 2004.
That tension between upperclass origins and underclass coding has remained in his music -- not unlike the Torontonian I compared him to above -- and has also made him more appealling to the Latin American middle class who always kept the original reggaetón generation at the kind of arm's length that white suburban US did with hip-hop. Puerto Rico -- a small, impoverished, racialized appendage of the United States -- is one thing; Colombia -- a large, relatively wealthy nation and one of the five epicenters of 21st-century pan-Latin media -- another. J Balvin, with his European features, economics degree and Nirvana tattoos, was safe for 2015, within the constantly-shifting meaning of safe within the global urban-capitalist socioeconomic imaginary, in ways that Daddy Yankee was not safe for 2005.
All of which is a lot of weight to put on the back of "Ay Vamos" (Hey, let's go), a midtempo electronic reggae song with a nagging "ahhhh, ahhhh" hook and mumble-rap lyrics about talking a girlfriend out of fighting with him. The dembow riddim is foregrounded in a way it hasn't been at #1 since at least Chino y Nacho in 2010, which means that Balvin gets to ride a loping beat contrasted agains the one-drop organ skank, sounding laid-back and cool where the Yankees, Wisins, Yandels, and Omars of the world have all been big, bombastic, and hyper in recent years, trying to impress with the scale of their achievements. Balvin sees that the future is more fugitive than all that busyness: intimacy has its own attraction.
Airplay Watch:
- Maná ft. Shakira, "Mi Verdad"
- Discussed in the previous entry.
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