Hidden music: Reggaeton, youth and silence

Music is an artistic and cultural manifestation that we share human beings, it is the greatest stimulus we have to communicate through sound and power to express ourselves. Through cultural history we can study the social representations and practices that are given through music.

In this essay I will use the song called mainstring, popular or “the bad call youth music. We often heard the debate as echa phrases as for example: “that music was that of before”, “that the songs of before spoke of love and not of sex”, that the music of before had a message and something because to fight”. Every age and every generation heard that phrase. But we never really ask why music influences young people so much? The supposed “young music” why does it have a bad picture of the comparison of others? In this work, I took as a case the reggaetão a genre Born in the poor neighborhoods of Puerto Rico, was fought at its beginnings, accused of corruptor and to promote perreo, a dance considered soez. But over time, it expanded until it became a worldwide success and the main music export product of Puerto Rico.

Part One: Unnature the supposed young music

Youth is the product of a long historical process, which still remains open.

Although the figure of the young man may be traced from primitive societies to early civilizations of the Old World, it did not cover importance until modernity. To put an example in the Middle Ages, in addition to the hope of life being around 40, the idea of youth did not correspond to what it is now, and it was called young to all who were neither children nor elderly.

The invention of youth 1875-1945, journalist Jon Savage explains that the word “adolescent” begins to be used in the USA. USA. After World War II for young people aged 14 to 18. It didn't work.

As a generational label if not especially as an advertising and commercial tool. The adolescent as a consumer was an opportunity for a Europe very affected by war. According to the author, the fact that youth will become considered as a market target also meant that it had become an age group with its own rituals, rights and demands.

In 1904, the concept of adolescence was first introduced by the American psychologist and educator G. Stanley Hall, who attributed specific biological and psychological characteristics to young people between 14 and 24 years. This model was reinforced by Sigmund Freud, who understood adolescence as a period not only problematic, but also universal, common to all societies.

According to WHO, adolescence is a period of preparation for adulthood during which several experiences of development of great importance occur. In addition to physical and sexual maturation, these experiences include the transition to social and economic independence.

The development of identity, the acquisition of the skills necessary to establish adult relationships, assume adult functions and the capacity of abstract reasoning. Although adolescence is synonymous with exceptional growth and great potential, it is also a stage of considerable risks, during which the social context may have a decisive influence. But how music influences and teens

In the process of creating and consolidating personal identity, adolescents join groups with similar affinities. From these group unions emerge friendships, key pieces in the important formation in emotional learning and culture, and can influence customs and emotions.

It often happens that adolescents replace family dependence by group dependence.

The stage of adolescence is characterized by identity and confusion; it occupies the fifth stage of the process of formation of identity. It should be noted that it is the key moment in which the teenager seeks his place within society. Music represents in many cases the belief of social groups, determining the way to move, talk and dress.

At the time when I read it reminded me of a text of anthropologist Pablo Semán music and hegemonic youth:criticism of a recurrence that asks.

Is music a predominantly juvenile activity? Is youth predominantly musical? Seman marks that the relationship between music and youth is underestimated when we talk about what it is to be young. More importantly, this assumption does not fail to influence the connection between concept and emerging ideas. Sometimes the image we have of the young becomes childish and impoverished.

Seman places us that we forget what can help "express it musically" or "identify itself socially through music" to young people. Under this concept of "identification" - that is, the reason why the "jóvenes" that should approach music. For this Seman raises two problems that we do not have when talking about young or popular music.

First, and for several reasons, it seems problematic the existence of a "young music" and that is not in any way like that.

There are many young songs and today's "juvenes" have a "infinite" menu in their options and combination complexity. If music is part of sentimental education (...) contemporary generations (...) In today's "a song", the same song has been part, in different ways, of various "juventudes". Our closest relatives of small people put music to us when they were teenagers.

That thousands of young people get this musical legacy influencing their own youth, but as the author says every young person finds a different feeling in every musical genre and can appropriate music, use it as a means of expression or find his own voice.

Aca goes the second problem that raises seman:

However, when the market study is directed at individuals between 15 and 30 years and the (fusion) integration of secondary social pressures with the basic characteristics of young people, it is unclear to what extent this noble principle was lost.

The contemporary notion of "juventud" cannot be studied if the radical contingency of the context of struggles for the definition of youth and life cycle is not recovered.

It can be noted moments that have a musical factor and create "juventud" values without importing age, or circulating music that allows to establish bridges between several generations, redefining the very one of youth. The values that order the age fractions and that attach to each of them vary greatly as the look stops in specific musical practices and in the events where music is used for recreational purposes and at the same time identity.

Unnaturalized a little the concepts music and youth I will begin to tell full the history of reggaeton by putting into account all that we have come to tell.

Second Part History of the Reggaetão

The Jamaican Reggae and its rhythm mark the beginning of this genre's history. The immigration of Jamaican citizens to the end of the 1970s to Puerto Rico or panama made their music play in other languages. At that time, both Latin music and Jamaican sound began to develop.

He created a fusion of rhythm and language. On the one hand, the producers Steely & Clevie of Jamaica created a rhythm to which they called DemBow.

The word dembow is currently used to define the characteristic rhythm that conforms to the base of reggaeton. However, at its beginnings it had a very different meaning. The first to use this rhythm was the Jamaican Shabba Ranks, dance hall singer, in one of his most famous songs: DemBow (1991). In Jamaican ducks it means ‘they lean’ (appeared to English they bow), and Ranks uses it to refer to homosexual men denigrantly. “Take your hand if you know you don’t lean” repeats the striillo. But the song goes further: the lyrics, besides homophoba, have a high anticolonialist content. “Freedom for the black people / That means the oppressors are inclined (...) Agravias to their black brother, that is to say that you lean / hate to your black sister, that is to say you lean”. Basically, Ranks insults the racist and oppressor by calling him gay.

In the same year, two Panamanian singers translated Shabba Ranks' song into Spanish. Nando Boom held it Benia, and the General called it Son Bow. In addition to the change of title, the lyrics maintain homophobic and anti-colonialist content: in this case, both sing that neither Jamaica, nor Panama, nor Puerto Rico nor Colombia are “bow”, that is, they are gay. The way through the song Dem Bow that would beat the famous rhythm reggaetonero is a good example of the social and cultural dynamics that lived in the region. The bond between Jamaica and Panama began when immigrants from the Caribbean island moved to the isthmus to work on building the Panama Canal.

Since then, the musical flow between both countries has been intense, and several singers, such as Nando Boom and El General, have devoted themselves to translating reggae and dance hall songs into Spanish. Nando Boom published a record that bautized Spanish Reggae, where among other things sang explicitly against racism. In the song they call us immigrants — in which, moreover, one identifies an already close rhythm to the future reggaeton — the singer says the following: “They call us immigrants because we live in America (...). We defeat racism, we have to fight, we have to unite among brothers”. This Hispanic speech reggae is one of the seeds that would then bloom the reggaeton. However, it was in Puerto Rico where the genre crystallized. With an ear placed in the hip hop of the United States — and especially New York — the island saw a generation of Boricua rappers that filled the peripheral neighborhoods of São João, the capital, in the mid-1990s. But they did this with their particular Caribbean idiosyncrasy, shaving on musical bases quite different from those who used their New York companions. Among them was the dembow, the rhythm that amplified from Jamaica and Panama. In fact, the first Puerto Rican reggaetoneros were called rappers, and the genre that years later would popularize worldwide took the name of melaza, black music or underground music. These names explain how the incipient reggaeton was closely linked to class and race issues: it had become a high-voice for the marginalized communities, mostly Latin Africans.

The merger was very popular in the discotheques of the island, characterized by its very strong lyrics and explicit language, extending little by little between the local youth.

The merger grew successfully, but clandestinely, as it was persecuted by the authorities. The goal was to regulate reggaeton's lyrics and video images. It was also to moderate the alleged excesses of the dance that usually accompanied, known as perreo, which is characterized by the sensual way the participants restriegan each other to the are of the rhythm of Jamaican origin called dembow.

From the beginning, it was produced by and for the urban youth of the poorest classes. But already in the mid-1990s the sexually explicit lyrics of reggaetão and its chronicles of everyday violence reached high middle class ears, which responded to the new musical genre of low neighborhoods.

The Portorriquenho State, which faces an unprecedented and uncontrollable criminal wave, put reggaetão as the culprit of all evils was associated with low-class citizens its “supposed” predisposition to violence and sexual depravity.

In 1995, the Puerto Rico Police Vicio Control Squadron, with the help of the National Guard, took the unprecedented initiative to confiscate recordings of music stores, claiming that reggaeton letters were obscene and promoted the use of drugs and crime.

Under this justification, the police confiscated cassette tapes with recordings and fined the places that reproduce this type of music. This criminalization was part of the "Mano Hard Against Crime" campaign that began in 1993 and was established under the leadership of Governor Pedro Rosselló, who is no more than the father of the recently deposed Ricardo Rosselló. One of the Boricua rappers, Eddie Dee, remembered him well in his reggaeton Censurame(2004):

Many look at me like I'm a guy without a fix

Like they've never seen a black man

Like I'm a criminal

As if with the pencil and with my bookstore I kill people

(...)

Those who criticize us

This is the music with which young people identify themselves

Censurarme by being rapper

It's like censoring a whole people.

The Island Department of Education joined these efforts and banned underground music and hollaid clothing in an attempt to eliminate the plague of hip-hop culture from schools.

Since the reggaetão rebased the borders of the poor neighborhoods, its repression also became impossible for another reason: the reggaetão was "real". Unlike the commercialized and sanctioned rap in Spanish and the romantic sauce that replaced the central neighborhood letters of the classical period, reggaeton made direct reference to the prevailing social conditions in the country: unemployment rates of up to 65% in some areas, a poor educational system, government corruption and violence linked to drug trafficking. Although government officials tried to blame music for many of these problems, reggaeton's generation understood that raw language, explicit sexuality and street chronicles were no longer obscene, violent or morally questionable than the general state of the country.

However, reggaetão's status changed over the years, especially when in Puerto Rico artists began to draw censorship with less explicit letters, both at violent and sexual content level and at political level. Thanks to this and the growing efforts of Latin producers such as Luny Tunes, reggaeton began to be considered an increasingly mainstream genre.

One of the most important milestones that started the global reggaeton fever was the rightly titled "Gasolina", by Daddy Yankee, where she sang the women from a very macho perspective where she objectivized the woman. This song, and its phenomenal success, seemed to have arisen from nothing but congratulations to a record industry, which had desperately sought the next product to sell in the youth urban market. The hope that reggaetão would do for the Latins what the hip-hop had done for African Americans caused a wave of changes in the industry.

Calle 13's arrival at reggaeton also represented a significant change in other directions. Although Calle 13, like other reggaetoneros, tends to focus on themes related to the sexuality, racism and violence of life in the neighborhoods, his vocalist, Residente, is also self-designated as the "digestive system of the nation", transforming the garbage of desire and politics into a new language to criticize society and politics.

Although today reggaetoneros are doing more tech-based songs, hip-hop, r&b and pop ballads, among other genres.

Final Reflections:

This can be compared with a very close rhythm of Argentina to Cumbia base(villera). That Surge in the second half of the 90, as a genre that puts at stake young people in the poorest neighborhoods of Argentina The adjective “villero”, used with less price to characterize the inhabitants of the villages, the poorest settlements of the cities of every country, is raised with pride and recovered as a differential mark within this genus. Being villero is, in the gaze of the “others” being worse than just being poor if not an idle, criminal, addicted and without future.

What makes these is to visibilize and criticize the social context of crisis of each country by giving young singers opportunity to show a look at the reality that was denied and concealed although in Argentina there was no political persecution of cumbia villera, the social desprestigio was generated.

These genres have voiced and identified thousands of young people who seek the way to feel identified in some way. In order to deconstruct, we care, and uninstall.

This will allow them to take on a new argument against cultural reality.

Music is a reflection of society and a clipping of reality, let's not fail to analyze criticizing these genres just not to leave aside as they arose and because they arose.