Why I Study Reggaeton
By Guest Contributor Marisol LeBron, originally published at post pomo nuyorican homo
As I was getting myself ready to head down to the Puerto Rican Day Parade (or more accurately, its aftermath) I found myself dumbstruck by the profundity of what I was hearing and seeing.
Always the multi-tasker I was getting ready with the TV switched on to the Parade and Las Guanabanas’ new mixtape, “Regreso Al Underground” (Return to the Underground), blasting from the speakers in my bathroom. I stopped scurrying around my apartment long enough to watch the parade for a moment and paso una cosa rara (a queer thing happened). As Fox 5’s cameras cut from (post)reggaetonero Residente of Calle 13 to shots of flag waving boricuas watching the parade, the last song from “Regreso Al Underground” came on and announced to the world: “Yo soy bellaco, pa’ que tu lo sepas!” (I’m horny, just so you know!).
With the same cadence and enthusiasm that the crowds at the Puerto Rican Day Parade shout “Yo so Boricua, pa’ que tu lo sepa,” reggaetoneros Tommy Viera and Chantelly, announced and celebrated their hornyness. The theme of bellaqueo in reggaeton is not particularly surprising, however, this moment caught me completely off guard. Overlaid as they were, it seemed as if the two forces had synced and the crowd on the TV rather than announcing its Puertorriquenidad was announcing its desire to fuck. Right then and there, by pure happenstance, I had witnessed what Puerto Rican cultural nationalist must conjure in their worst fears about reggaeton – the excesses of the body and of sexuality and desire that resist the disciplining technologies of the nationalist project – and on this day of all days!
The management of sexuality – queer sexualities, racialized sexualities, and non-procreative sexualities – has always been at the center of any nationalist project. Yet, this accidental intrusion of bellaqueo into the quintessential spectacle of Puerto Rican cultural nationalism provides an interesting moment of disruption and illuminates the simultaneous absence and ubiquity of sexuality in nationalist discourse and imagery.
So I ask: what would it mean to put bellaqueo at the center of our studies of the Puerto Rican nation?
Of course, not in the way that it is already figured as core in the racist imaginary that sees Puerto Ricans as hot-blooded and always available Latin Lovers, rather I mean central in that it pulls back the curtains on nationalist projects of containment and disavowal that attempt to create knowable and manageable subjects. The moral outrage incited by the repetitious themes of bellaqueo, fumaera, and perreo that appear in many reggaeton songs are by now familiar, but what is important to note is how these moments of outrage expose the various disciplinary technologies that the corporeal and sonic excesses of reggaeton actively resist and challenge.
The accounts of reggaeton’s death have been greatly exaggerated as people eagerly await the demise of the genre. They want to do away with the porquería that reggaeton makes visible, as Frances Negrón-Muntaner argues in her piece “Poetry of Filth.” The thing is, the porquería and mierda and bellaqueo and brutalidad and …well… queerness in the form of cosas raras, that reggaeton regularly serves up to is audiences is, in my very humble estimation, one of the most valuable critiques of the failures and unevenness of the Puerto Rican nationalist project in contemporary Puerto Rican political history. Although reggaeton is increasingly being folded into Puerto Rican nationalist and Latino/a pan-nationalist efforts, spaces of resistance and ambivalence are still available within and through reggaeton.
That’s why I study reggaeton, because on the track the sound you’re hearing is reggaetoneros throwing up all the porquería that’s been shoved down Puerto Rican’s throats since E.L.A (Estado Libre Associado, or the incorporation of Puerto Rico into the U.S. as a commonwealth) and even before that.
Sometimes it’s the quotidian things, like being horny, that make all the difference in the world.
Carmen Van Kerckhove is co-founder and president of
PPR_Scribe wrote:
The management of sexuality – queer sexualities, racialized sexualities, and non-procreative sexualities – has always been at the center of any nationalist project.
This is something I have been contemplating in a recent post inspired by reminders of Henry Louis Gates’ defense of 2 Live Crew (speaking of “horny”
). Being able to “contemplate”–and write about–the racialized and sexualized imagery in popular music makes me a kind of “hipster” who is at once a part of that music culture but also–because of my socio-economic and educational status–apart from it.
I am still not sure what to make of what I wrote. But the idea of being “dumbstruck” or being caught “off guard” is very apt, I think, and something I can relate to.
Thank you for your piece. It’s given me more food for thought.
Posted 05 Aug 2009 at 2:36 pm ¶
Nin wrote:
Good piece. Reggaeton can be fun music, but it can also be a disgrace. The singers try so hard to be edgy, it becomes an embarrassing mix of desperation and lack of class. By “lack of class” I mean a certain mentality not socio-economical factors.
They have no sense of boundaries — they don’t think about what it means for Puerto Ricans to have to keep fighting against the image they create.
I put more responsibility on them than to blame it on our political status or (E.L.A.), though I certainly agree that it’s a factor. But these people aren’t kids, they have to understand than in order to change our political status from porqueria/trash, they have to start acting like people who can handle and nurture an entirely free nation. Or if fate would have PR becoming a state, do we really need this type of representation? On a national level, or an international level if independence ever came to be?
At some point, they, all of us, are going to have to start looking at the bigger picture. Reggaetoneros proudly talk about their music being an “ambassador” for our culture, they ought to be ashamed if this is what they make of it. Imagine the only thing you knew about someone else’s culture only being how horny they are all the time? Sounds to me like a culture I wouldn’t waste time or effort in getting to know, let alone embrace.
I hope it is ignorance, but after many years of battles against this mentality, I doubt it is ignorance anymore.
Posted 05 Aug 2009 at 4:18 pm ¶
Kjen wrote:
Hmm, it’s a slippery slope. The radicalness or subversiveness of the music or many things really depends on who is looking and what their analysis is. If the mainstream PR culture only adapts the music that reinforces the gender norms,status quo then no matter what the artists intended it is not really progressing the dialogue.
Posted 05 Aug 2009 at 7:17 pm ¶
chicagorose wrote:
“Imagine the only thing you knew about someone else’s culture only being how horny they are all the time? Sounds to me like a culture I wouldn’t waste time or effort in getting to know, let alone embrace.”
But, that’s been the only thing in addition to violence, misogyny, drug selling and nouveau riche displays of ghetto fabulous that most peoples around the world have been exposed to where African American culture is concerned, via the rap music industry. Beyond that, it’s generally perceived that we don’t even possess a culture. Save for when it’s being bled dry by appropriation. And then it’s as much a source of amusement and mockery as it is something that’s globally embraced and emulated. I cannot speak for Reggaeton, nor for where our cultures intersect and merge.
Posted 05 Aug 2009 at 11:57 pm ¶
cvalda wrote:
The radicalness or subversiveness of the music or many things really depends on who is looking and what their analysis is. If the mainstream PR culture only adapts the music that reinforces the gender norms,status quo then no matter what the artists intended it is not really progressing the dialogue.
It’s a matter of context. Any piece of music can be subversive in the right context; a local leftist brass band uses tracks like ABBA’s “Money Money Money” as a fundraiser for solidarity action, wage reform etc. By contrast, Bono might think he’s doing something progressive, but he’s so enmeshed in the studio system (and his own whiteness) that his actions are fundamentally affected by that; so rather than organising resistance to exploitation, he cries “Make poverty history.”
Reggaeton obviously challenges the nationalism project in its attempt to create a chaste, acceptable Puerto Rican people. Beyond that, everything is context.
Posted 06 Aug 2009 at 5:51 am ¶
N wrote:
There is much more to reggaeton than “me so horny” and while plenty of it is “offensive”, it would be a mistake for anyone to judge an entire culture by listening to one genre.
Would want to be part of a culture that is horny all the time? Well, that certainly depends. I wouldn’t want to be part of a culture that was never horny.
Just as a person has a heart, a brain, eyes, ears, feet, a mouth, an anus and a penis or vagina and its all good. Why a culture cant have poetry, music and literature about love, war, death,poverty, violence, peace, partying and plain old freak nasty sex is confusing to me. SURELY we can judge something as a whole, and not by one part. And I wouldn’t let a personal distaste for one of the parts cause me to dismiss the whole OR to conclude that that part in itself is Wrong.
Minorities get so caught up in the quest for approval that we internalize all of the values of the dominant culture and despair that they will never accept us because we are so US. Fuck them. How will women ever make it in the business world if they insist on crying and being kind and having babies and wearing makeup? We have to stop. How will black people ever be accepted if we have nappy hair and big lips and talk loud and dance at parties- we have to stop.
Ad nauseam.
If people want to proclaim that part of being who the are is being sexual, if they want to reject Puritan European asexuality, if they want to celebrate their enjoyment of pleasures of the flesh despite the fact that it feeds into the white fear of black and latino hypersexuality and fecundity (fear of a black planet- stop them from fucking and breeding because they are taking over), so be it.
I certainly don’t think that is the only art coming out of Puerto Rico, just as I hope people outside of the US don’t ignore all US art other than the massive amounts of porn and violent movies that have been released.
Posted 06 Aug 2009 at 10:47 am ¶
Nin wrote:
“But, that’s been the only thing in addition to violence, misogyny, drug selling and nouveau riche displays of ghetto fabulous that most peoples around the world have been exposed to where African American culture is concerned, via the rap music industry.”
Oh, absolutely. And it is a shame that it seems that our only purpose in the bigger spectrum, as minorities, is to create a fantasy of lawlessness and sexuality, escapism for everyone else when “reality” gets to be too much. To the point where “Puerto Rican” or “African American” are but euphemisms; such as “Urban” is now a euphemism for Black. As if it’s some secret language because the actual words are too explosive to utter.
“Minorities get so caught up in the quest for approval that we internalize all of the values of the dominant culture and despair that they will never accept us because we are so US. Fuck them.”
While this is certainly true in some cases, I live in Puerto Rico and my concerns run deeper than that. If Puerto Rico became the next independent nation, I would still have the same concerns, only I would be even more emphatic. I care about how our youth believes in the music they hear and somehow mold themselves to fit an image they have of themselves. This is true for every young person when they become a fan of something, anything. This music is seen as “Us” by many when it’s not. Not one music style is everything, not one music style can represent us all, but sadly, we’re at a point in which it seems you have to faithfully adhere to a perception in order to belong. I argue for having options, not to have to be content with letting someone else choose who I’m supposed to be.
In the world of the Internet and Pop culture takeover (such as Twittermania), people run to put their arms around what they think it’s their space, their domain, the one thing people recognize from your environment to which you can point to and say, “that’s me”, and have everyone understand and recognize. Well, I refuse to let Reggaeton define me. I like some songs, listen to them on my iPod every day. But that doesn’t mean I have to accept every message, and especially not the ones that in no way, shape or form represent anything about myself.
I’d like to think I’m bigger than a genre, and that our society, and the world, should not be held back from their own pursuits and goals because a few kids took up a microphone and called themselves prophets of a truth nobody wants to talk about. I say let ‘em talk about it, sing about it, dance to it, cry, bleed and have sex to it, but let it not define you in any way. Let it not trivialize you, belittle you, hold you back. Otherwise it’s done more harm than good, and I like the scales tipping the other way.
Posted 06 Aug 2009 at 5:01 pm ¶
Marisol LeBron wrote:
Wow, some of these comments are exactly what I am arguing that we need less of.
Craziness.
A lot (but not all) of the comments are definitely wrapped up in some politics of responsibility rhetoric that I find to be for the most part unproductive and marginalizing for those who fall outside of some pretty narron renderings of appropriate personhood.
We can’t just push aside reggaeton because it makes some of “us” uncomfortable. Reggaeton’s detractors for the most part are unwilling to perceive that discomfort as productive and really question why they are made uncomfortable by pop and youth culture. Just because there are some “unsavory” themes in reggaeton does not mean that it cannot teach us about the intersections and fault lines of categories such as race/sex/gender/class/nation.
@Nin: Not to pick on you, but I would ask you to really consider why you think reggaetoneros exhibit a “lack of class.” Explain to me why you don’t see that comment as being indicative of socio-economic status…if its not about class and the behaviors attributed to a certain group — “them” — what are you trying to say and why on earth would you use the phrase a “lack of class.” I’m sorry but a lot of what you’re saying about why reggaeton is a “disgrace” is very clearly implicated in concerns over what social class we associated with the Puerto Rican nation.
I’m not asking folks to agree with me, nor am I arguing that reggaeton is unproblematic and the best thing since sliced bread, but I am asking that we take the emotions — anger, loved, hatred, happiness — that the genre brings up for us as productive rather than wising it away.
Posted 06 Aug 2009 at 10:34 pm ¶
Nin wrote:
“@Nin: Not to pick on you, but I would ask you to really consider why you think reggaetoneros exhibit a “lack of class.” Explain to me why you don’t see that comment as being indicative of socio-economic status…if its not about class and the behaviors attributed to a certain group — “them” — what are you trying to say and why on earth would you use the phrase a “lack of class.” I’m sorry but a lot of what you’re saying about why reggaeton is a “disgrace” is very clearly implicated in concerns over what social class we associated with the Puerto Rican nation.”
Reggaeton is not a disgrace, what some have chosen to do it with its power is.
Now, socio-economic status doesn’t dictate your actions. You can be the richest person on Earth and still be lacking in class. Just as well you can be the most humble person and still have class, and exude positive traits others around you can pick up and build from.
There’s a song by Daddy Yankee on the album DJ Goldy 3: “The Melody” (track #3; 1997), that speaks volumes about what was going on in the streets at the moment. I get the chills still to this very day when I listen to it! That was an *important* song, it was a 3 minute epic that both celebrated a culture and warned against the dangers of its excesses. It’s when the excesses are celebrated that I begin to doubt.
Let’s put it this way, it’s not the genre, it’s the message of some of reggaeton’s most voiceferous artists that I can’t get behind.
Posted 10 Aug 2009 at 12:41 am ¶
N wrote:
@Nin
Still, define “class”. What you refer to as “class” is the mores,standards and values of the middle and upper classes.
Posted 10 Aug 2009 at 9:51 am ¶