for the banner. Couldn't have done this without him.
2006 - you had to be there: Nelly Furtado the pop bitch to beat, "Hips Don't Lie" was inescapable and Paris Hilton was
somehow worth our 99 cents. And maybe then some - tucked away in the no man's land of iTunes Latino was a
remix of Paris' "Stars Are Blind" that, in a move at once off-kilter and on-the-money, featured Puerto Rican duo Wisin y Yandel. That the original and its tanned version were semi-hits, in all their crossover glory, should come as no surprise; that the year spelled the beginning of the relative end for both ****-hot genre and lead performer (oop
) was a little..
.weird.
Weirder still was rapper N.O.R.E.'s eventual 180 on a genre that had once accepted him with open arms: back in October 2004, "Oye Mi Canto," a posse cut featuring a then-up-and-coming Nina Sky and --depending on which version you listened to -- either Tego Calderón or Daddy Yankee, reached #12 on the Billboard Hot 100, his second-biggest hit to date. But just twenty-five months later, N.O.R.E. (now P.A.P.I.) famously went on record
dissing his past dalliances with hurbano on another posse cut, the remix for The Game's "One Blood." His label told him it wasn't "hot in the building no more." (It's okay!: Oye's parent album,
Ya Tú Sabe, released July '06, entered the charts at 82.)
But were label honchos on to something? Don Omar's
King of Kings had just broken records, debuting inside Billboard's 200 at No. 7, with 68,000 units sold, an easy number one in this day and age. And at least one more top ten was still in the cards with Daddy Yankee's
El Cartel: The Big Boss (2007). Nope, the jig was over, the magic gone: subsequent singles with the likes of Fergie and Nelly Furtado failed to set Anglo charts alight and the poster boys of Puerto Rico largely stayed within Latin radio's confines. Like G-Unit, Dipset, and H-Town before it, reggaetón fit all too neatly into mid-00s' hip-hop's one-a-year dismissal of regional urban trends,
inglés or otherwise.
Elsewhere, reggaetón was losing ground with stateside Hispanic audiences. The genre's decline coincided with the comebacks of one (ugh) Enrique Iglesias and Colombia's Juanes, who monopolized radio through 2008, which then gave way to an imperial-era Aventura and a fresh, new face in Bronx-bred Prince Royce at the turn of the decade.
Not all was lost: presently, reggaetón sits comfortable alongside pop latino, salsa, banda, bachata and merengue (...urbano, but that's a different story.) JuanGa and LuisMi were unseated* by Enrique and Ricky (well, Enrique never dies) were unseated by Don and Yankee, who were unseated by Romeo and Royce and so on. (*First rule of Latin Pop: there is no such thing as a has-been.) Unlike the first four, however, Daddy Yankee, Don Omar, Wisin, Yandel and their ilk became untethered from
tradition in search of more modern music, for better or worse. That ubiquitous beat?
Gone the way of those LCD belts that were popular then, too. Reggaetón as its known today isn't reggaetón at all: the
lone Latin crossover hit of the '10s (and
everything that's come
"close") scans as anything but Puerto Rican, but Caribeńo: Angolan, Italian, Brazilian, you name it. (For that reason, hits by reggaetón artists released after 2009 will NOT be included in this rate.)
What is reggaetón, then, exactly?
Reggaetón (reh-GEH-
TOHN), sometimes spelled
reguetón, is a genre of music popularized, and most commonly associated with Puerto Rico, then characterized by an instrumental known as "dembow." Its closest relatives, sonically, are Panama's reggae en espańol (see: El General) and Jamaica's dancehall (editor's note: ...whose
Sean Paul I credit with spearheading America's onetime fixation with riddims, giving way to
"Turn Me On," "Move Ya Body" and eventually, reggaetón) and of course, hip-hop. Like American rap, It was early on criticized for its lyrical content, prompting "anti-reguetón" government campaigns and Puerto Rico's ban on "urban" attire in schools. Also like hip-hop, reggaetón is largely a dickcentric genre, with prominent females(
?) far and few in between. The genre's biggest names have netted sponsorships, starred in summer blockbusters and even launched charities. But before all that, before the legions of fans and myriad detractors (some of which I already see here! hi!), circa 2003, there was the music.
Rate.