Mala Música: The untamed and token tongues of reggaetón (original) (raw)
Related papers
“Con un Flow Natural”: Sonic affinities and reggaeton nationalism
Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory, 2011
Reggaeton's success in the international music scene has incited heated debates about the genre's genealogy. The dominant framework for discussing reggaeton's origin often relies on and reifies nation-based claims to the genre, overlooking how reggaeton resists being fixed to any single locale. In this paper I discuss the emergence of the reggaeton subgenre bhangraton (a mix of bhangra pop and reggaeton) and point to some of the ways that it challenged nationalist claims to reggaeton. Reggaetonera and Hindi-vocalist Deevani, in particular, complicates claims about racial, ethnic, and sonic purity that circulate within reggaeton by highlighting how race, gender, and affinity are performed and felt and by calling attention to the genre's multiple circuits outside the nation.
Hearing the Change: Reggaeton and Emergent Values in Contemporary Cuba
Latin American Music Review, 2012
This article deconstructs the wave of moral panic caused by reggaeton in Cuba to suggest that behind issues of “national” and “legitimate” culture lays a social but mainly political rejection to the marginal subject that this music brings to the fore. Reggaeton's embracing of money is a painful reminder to the authorities of the dreadful consequences of the dual economy and of the increasing gap between emergent values rooted in everyday life experience and socialist ideology. The text also discusses ethnographic work at performance venues that shows how this genre has been particularly successful in articulating not only the values and subjectivities of an underclass, but also the practices of symbolic distinction of more upward class sectors. In a different direction, the article exposes how reggaeton further participates in change, through discourses that voice the contradictory responses of male identity to the impact of sex tourism and the role of money in romantic relationships. Este artículo analiza la ola de pánico moral suscitada por el reggaeton hecho en Cuba y sugiere que tras discusiones sobre “cultura nacional” y “legitimidad” cultural se esconde el rechazo social y político al sujeto marginal que este género saca a la luz pública. La celebración del dinero en el reggaeton cubano es un amargo recordatorio para las autoridades de las terribles consecuencias de la economía de doble moneda y del creciente divorcio entre valores emergentes anclados en la vida cotidiana y la ideología socialista. El artículo expone cómo el reggaeton también participa de la interpretación del cambio social en Cuba, al proveer de discursos que permiten negociar los riesgos que el creciente rol del dinero en las relaciones de pareja y el turismo sexual suponen para la identidad masculina. También se discute en el texto trabajo etnográfico realizado durante varios conciertos de reggaeton y que indican que este género ha sido exitoso no solo en la articulación de valores y subjetividades ligadas a una underclass cubana, sino también como escenario de prácticas de distinción simbólica de sectores sociales más favorecidos. Keywords reggaeton, Cuban music, moral panic, underclass, symbolic distinction, hypersexuality, reggaetón, música cubana, pánico moral, clase baja, distinción simbólica, hipersexualidad
Languages, 2024
The rebranding of reggaetón towards Latin urban has been criticized for tokenizing Afro- Caribbean linguistic and cultural practices as symbolic resources recruitable by non-Caribbean artists/executives in the interest of profit. Consumers are particularly critical of an audible phonolog- ical homogeneity in the performances of ethnonationally distinct mainstream performers, framed as a form of linguistic minstrelsy popularly termed a ‘Caribbean Blaccent’ that facilitates capitalization on the genre’s popularity by tapping into the covert prestige of distinctive phonological elements of Insular Caribbean Spanish otherwise stigmatized. This work pairs acoustic analysis with quantitative statistical modeling to compare the use of lenited coronal sibilant allophones popularly considered indexical of Hispano-Caribbean origins in the spoken and sung speech of four of the genre’s top- charting female performers. A general pattern of style-shifting from interview to sung speech wherein sibilance is favored in the former and phonetic zeros in the latter is revealed. Moreover, a statistically significant increased incidence of [-] across time shows the most recent records to uniformly deploy near-categorical reduction independent of artists’ sociocultural and linguistic backgrounds. The results support the enregisterment of practices popularized by the genre’s San Juan-based pioneers as a stylistic resource—a reggaetón voice—for engaging the images of vernacularity sustaining and driving the contemporary, mainstream popularity of música urbana.
Towards a Legitimation of Reggaeton?
Towards a Legitimation of Reggaeton?, 2020
Using a mixed-methods approach, I aspire to trace the legitimation process of reggaeton. In this research, I examine market information regimes to understand the trajectory of reggaeton from 2005 to 2019. Billboard music charts, and press coverage suggest reggaeton did not follow an exponential upward trend. Data sources indicate high numbers between 2005 and 2008, before dropping, and remaining low until 2014. Following this descent, reggaeton’s presence in the USA mainstream music market has not stopped ascending until the end of 2019, indicating an unprecedentedly high level of legitimacy and popularity. In the qualitative analysis I investigate discourses of the reggaeton scene in relation to the Latin Grammy Awards. As suggested in the literature, reward systems are important indicators of legitimation. However, reggaeton has been nearly absent in the major categories of the Latin Grammys, since their inception in 2000. I examine the longstanding relationship between the Latin Academy and reggaeton, by focusing on the claims made by the reggaeton industry for the 20th Annual Latin Grammy Awards, on November 2019. Results suggest that 1) class-based discrimination is a main factor in the Latin Academy’s lack of recognition of reggaeton as an art form, 2) two levels of racism are at play in the social perception of reggaeton, namely within the Latinx community, and from the outside, 3) the reggaeton industry is challenging the relevance, influence and authority of the Latin Grammys, and questions are raised towards its structure and ability to vote.
Editorial - Reggae Studies in a Global Context
Interactions: Studies in Communication & Culture, 2018
From its origins in Jamaica, a small island in the Caribbean, reggae now commands a global presence. A substantial body of academic literature on the multilayered genre has been produced, with many scholars studying this phenomenon from a transcultural perspective, deploying a wide range of inter/disciplinary methodologies. This special issue of Interactions on ‘Reggae Studies in a global context’ documents the transformations of the music as it travels beyond the Caribbean to distant cultures and is reinvented through contact with other musical traditions. Itself a hybrid music, reggae privileges the transmutations that are engendered by cross-cultural interaction.
Levels of locality and recent expressions of reggae in Mexico.
Interactions: Studies in Communication & Culture, 2018
This article discusses various issues surrounding the presence of Jamaican popular music in Mexico and focuses on issues of great importance as the arrival, development, adoption and adaptation of these musical practices that arise in specific times or time periods; in different levels of locality that are related to each other, at the same time related to the global; and that they express themselves by reinterpreting these genres in their own ways. Each period has characteristics that distinguish it and at the same time coexist today in a same musical scene that involves several smaller scenes, as much regional as stylistic, in which continue to arise new expressions of reggae in Mexico.
Linguistic diversity of reggaeton songs: Their lyrics, their performers, and their audiences
2025
This dissertation analyses three categories of reggaeton-specific elements that appear across mainstream songs performed by artists from diverse geographic and linguistic backgrounds, representing different artistic generations. I also examine how linguistically and subculturally diverse audiences perceive, understand, and interpret these elements. The analysis is based on a wide spectrum of data, including a corpus of 26 reggaeton songs from Billboard year-end charts (2017–2020); 26 reggaeton concerts in 11 countries (available on YouTube or attended in person); media texts featuring reggaetoneros/as as well as those produced by listeners and musicologists (e.g., podcasts, TV series, memes, and magazine articles); digital activities of reggaeton performers and listeners; and interviews conducted with reggaeton artists and listeners in Medellin, Colombia.
On Legs that Breathe Out Poison: The Face of the Latin Migrant in Reggaeton
Reggaeton can be seen as an example of postmodern, postcolonial musical expression in Latin America and the Hispanic community in the USA. This paper offers a critical analysis of Residente Calle Trece's song 'Pa'l Norte' (Off to the North), and its correspondent music video, in order to show how this identity and linguistic cohesion for the Latin American urban youth is achieved through a pastiche of linguistic choices, sound and visuals, as well as poetic and religious intertextual imagery to be unified only as it diverges from an uneasy tension with the American Other. The paper will focus in particular on the representation of migration and migrant workers, and particularly the song's equal treatment of legal and illegal Latin American migrants, as well as of tropes such as class, religion and gender as they relate to the often contentious inter-/cross-cultural communication between Latin America and the global North. The analysis will be realised through the compilation of a multimodal corpus examined through Transana 2.52 (WCER 2005-2012), and combining it with critical discourse analytical approaches, especially following Van Djik (2008), Fairclough (2003), Wodak (2004) and Baker (2006)."
Postcolonial Minscapes and Contemporary Caribbean Reggae
European Journal of Literature, Language and Linguistics Studies, 2021
That Caribbean music forms and their sonic influences are steeped in a vibrant culture of social awareness and ethereal consciousness is incontestable. Roots reggae’s protest appeal, rhythmic syncopations, and deeply religious impulses attest to a rich, aware and reactive tradition forged from post-slavery legacies to engage the rotary realities of mid–late 20th century West Indies. Contemporary Caribbean reggae follows in this tradition. With a very deep root in the religious beliefs of the people, Reggae music developed as the medium for the masses to cope with the social, economic and political realities of the day in Jamaica and many other Caribbean communities. Consequently, the Reggae music has proven to be relevant as long as there is suffering and injustices among the masses, this is not to say Reggae music does not reflect some other aspects of life. The emphasis in this paper is to trace the history and development of Reggae, especially its connection to the Rastafari life...