Reggaeton owns the global charts now, and the story of how it got there runs through some of the most deliberately unglamorous recording spaces imaginable: housing project bedrooms in San Juan, a club tucked inside La Perla in Old San Juan, and a Jamaican-run studio on Long Island where a drummer named Dennis "The Menace" Thompson laid down a beat that would eventually reach every corner of the planet. The genre did not rise from a label boardroom or a radio programmer's decision. It rose from below, against active resistance, carried by cassette tapes that were copied by hand and sold out of car trunks.
The rhythm at the center of everything has a lineage that crosses three countries before it even arrives in Puerto Rico. In 1989, the Jamaican duo Wycliffe "Steely" Johnson and Cleveland "Clevie" Browne released "Poco Man Jam," featuring the "Fish Market" instrumental that they say gave rise to reggaeton. That riddim traveled to Philip Smart's HC&F studio in Long Island, where Smart, a native Kingstonian who had apprenticed under King Tubby, launched HC&F in 1982, enlisting Dennis "The Menace" Thompson as a house musician. Thompson crafted the instrumental for Panamanian vocalist Nando Boom's "Ellos Benia," a close translation of Shabba Ranks' "Dem Bow," capturing the rhythmic essence of Steely and Clevie's post-Poco riddim while adding digital timbales and other touches for extra sabor. The result, credited as "Dub Mix II," became the dembow riddim as the world now knows it. Nando Boom's "Ellos Benia (Dem Bow)," a mostly exacting cover of Shabba Ranks's 1991 single "Dem Bow," made ingenious yet understated changes that helped shape reggaeton's dembow riddim forever.
What made the riddim travel was the work of Panamanian artists who had been doing something culturally specific for over a decade. In the early 1980s, MCs like Renato and El General translated Jamaican dancehall to Spanish, creating some of the genre's earliest hits. El General's catchy riddims, a digital departure from traditional reggae, became popular across Latin America in the early 1990s, influencing the sound of "underground" music in Puerto Rico. The route from Kingston to San Juan ran through Panama City and then through New York, where Jamaican, Panamanian, and Puerto Rican communities overlapped. Wayne Marshall, an ethnomusicologist at Berklee who did his doctoral work in Jamaica and has become a leading expert on reggaeton and dembow, explains that reggaeton would not have happened without the decades of migration to New York from Jamaica, Panama, and Puerto Rico. New York was the transit point where all three streams converged before the music found its permanent home on the island.
When the Panamanian reggae en español sound reached Puerto Rico, it landed in communities that were already building their own musical infrastructure. In the 1990s, Puerto Rican youth in the low-income urban barrios and caseríos created underground, a unique blend of dancehall, hip-hop, and reggae en español. DJs like DJ Negro and DJ Playero performed and recorded with crews of MCs, including Daddy Yankee and Ivy Queen, at local parties and nightclubs. DJ Playero, whose mixtape series beginning in 1989 documented the earliest Puerto Rican underground reggae recordings, is credited with first capturing the sound on tape and distributing it through the community networks that sustained it. Daddy Yankee got his start with Playero, debuting on Playero, Vol. 37, which was recorded in a small studio in one of Puerto Rico's caseríos and was originally released in 1992. Meanwhile, one of the earliest clubs to play this music was opened by Felix Rodriguez, known as DJ Negro, located in La Perla, an extremely poor part of Old San Juan. That club was the legendary The Noise. The Noise became the central laboratory: a club-based collective that included DJ Negro, DJ Nelson, Tony Touch, Ivy Queen, and Baby Rasta and Gringo, issuing a long-running series of CDs.
The Puerto Rican government read all of this as a threat. The mid-1990s saw reggaeton, along with its performers and fans, become vilified by the Puerto Rican government. Police raided underground parties, clubs, record stores, and concert venues, citing concerns about morality, obscene language, drug and weapons trafficking, and explicit sexuality. The raids were part of a police operation called Mano Dura Contra el Crimen. During the early years of reggaeton, the genre was censored and banned on the island. "Police would raid neighborhoods where they thought music was being made," and "they would destroy cassette tapes." The suppression produced the opposite of its intended effect. Driven underground, the music developed its own distribution network through mixtapes, its own performance infrastructure through informal parties and club nights, and its own economic model through direct sales between artists and communities. The name for the genre itself arrived almost by accident: Daddy Yankee had mentioned "reggaeton" before in one of Playero's recordings, but when a publicist used the tag "Esto es Reggaeton" at one of Puerto Rico's most famous record stores of the time, Casa de los Tapes, the media loved it so much that the name exploded in 1995, and it stayed.
By the time the genre had a name, it had also built a generation of artists who had spent years developing inside a system that the mainstream wanted nothing to do with. Ivy Queen released two albums in the late 1990s, but it was her third album, Diva, in 2003, that really broke through. She had intentionally written from a female perspective, having come up in a male-dominated scene in San Juan where women were constantly being objectified. Daddy Yankee had been recording since the early 1990s, building his reputation track by track through the underground network. Barrio Fino, released July 13, 2004, was recorded at El Cartel Studios in San Juan and Mas Flow Studios in Carolina, Puerto Rico, with production credits including Luny Tunes, DJ Nelson, Eliel, and Nely, among others. Daddy Yankee wrote the album's lead single while sitting in the tiny apartment he shared with his wife and three children in Villa Kennedy, a housing project in San Juan, Puerto Rico. The song's unforgettable refrain, sung by Glory, who was not originally credited, came from listening to women outside his window in Villa Kennedy playfully teasing their friends who accepted rides from men with flashy cars. "Gasolina," produced by Luny Tunes and released as the first single, debuted at No. 1 on Billboard's Top Latin Albums chart on July 31, 2004, the first reggaeton album to hit that spot, and eventually became the top-selling Latin album of 2005 and the entire decade. It peaked at No. 32 on the Hot 100, and its unique dembow beat allowed it to catch on not only in Latin America but throughout Europe and the Far East.
The arc from Dennis Thompson's drum machine at HC&F in Long Island to "Gasolina" on mainstream radio worldwide is about twenty years of people building something real in the absence of institutional support. The cassette tapes that police tried to destroy turned out to be the blueprint. Every artist on a global stage today, from Bad Bunny to Karol G to Feid, is standing on infrastructure that was assembled by hand, in housing projects, in a club in La Perla, and in the margins of a music industry that did not see any of this coming.
