Maybe you were at a basement party rocking a crazy pair of baggy jeans and a belly button ring you couldn't stop staring at. Maybe, if you were a little older, you were driving around town with too many friends in the back seat. Maybe if you were in the Caribbean you were at a party de marquesina learning what your hips and ass could do. Maybe you heard it at a high school dance and felt compelled to participate in the ritual of a pre-adolescent dancefloor ordeal. Maybe you bought it as a ringtone for your brand new hot pink Motorola RAZR cell phone.
Maybe you were in East Harlem, or Humboldt Park, or Santurce, or a suburban market town in middle America. No matter where you lived, there's a good chance that sometime between 2004 and 2005, you heard Yankee Daddy announce his arrival in the US mainstream with a crystal-clear introduction: “Who's that? Daddy-ddy Yank-ee!” “Gasolina” was ubiquitous back then: It was called by a hook, a revving engine and an indelible, booming pre-chorus that emanated from every boombox, every passing car window and every iPod Mini.
“Gasolina” was the dawn of an empire. Barrio Fino, the album on which he appeared, was the first reggaeton LP to debut at No. 1 on Billboard's Top Latin Albums chart, spending 24 weeks at the top spot. In 2005 he won a Latin Grammy for Best Urban Music Album. Within a year of the record's release, Daddy Yankee had landed a $20 million record deal with Interscope, a sneaker collaboration with Reebok, a Pepsi sponsorship and a controversial modeling gig with Sean Jean. If reggaeton was going to go global, Yankee would get every cent he could out of it. After all, the man got an associate's degree in accounting so he wouldn't be scammed “out of money.”
This is the enduring image of Daddy Yankee: genre pioneer, business mogul, reggaeton king. On Barrio Fino, Yankee is presented as the commander of a movement that was poised to take over market dominance. But beyond its commercial impact, which is only one benchmark of its influence, Barrio Fino it is also a document of a kind at a moment of transformation. This is an album that carries within it the stories of reggaeton – from its beginnings as a form of protest poetry, to its transition into a global money-making force, to its role in asserting the imagined identity of Latinidad.
Dad Yankee, born Ramón Ayala, said he imagined Barrio Fino partly as an antidote to the works' reductive depictions of life. “The news you see everywhere is always marginalizing [the barrio], or blaming it for things it's not to blame,” he said in an interview in 2005. The barrio in question was Villa Kennedy, the caserío, or public housing project, where Yankee cut his teeth without style at 13. At 16, he started recording his own mixtapes, tapes for $5. In the early 90s, reggaeton wasn't quite established into the genre we know it as today. one of its precursors was known as the underground, and Yankee was one of its prominent practitioners. The government of Puerto Rico has used music as a scapegoat for the proliferation of gangs, petty crime and drug addiction. Then-governor Pedro Rosselló implemented an anti-crime campaign that also targeted underground artists, leading to police raids on record stores that sold their tapes in February 1995.
