Reggaetón Scholarship Today (11.21.22)
Join us for a roundtable discussion, moderated by Michael Birenbaum Quintero, featuring three short presentations of 10-15 min each by Wayne Marshall (Berklee College of Music), Petra Rivera-Rideau (Wellesley College) and Marina Arias Salvado (Universidad Complutense de Madrid). Sponsored by the BU Musicology & Ethnomusicology Department with support form the Center for Latin American Studies as well as the Department of African American Studies.
Monday, November 21, 2022
6 PM
African American Studies (138 Mountfort Street)
Does Reggaeton Owe Reggae Money?
Wayne Marshall (Berklee College of Music)
Reggaeton’s bedrock rhythm, the dembow, is named after and musically derived from a Jamaican dancehall recording. After nearly 30 years of unbridled sampling, reggaeton artists have been sued en masse by Jamaican producers seeking a slice of what has become a very big pie, with nearly all of the major reggaeton artists and up to 200 songs named as infringing on their copyrights. Having been approached by all sides in the ongoing lawsuits, reggaeton scholar and expert witness Wayne Marshall will sift the claims of musical ownership at the heart of the case in order to shed light on its legal and cultural ramifications.
What is the Urban in Latin Urban music?
Petra Rivera-Rideau (Wellesley College)
The success of Luis Fonsi and Daddy Yankee’s 2017 crossover hit “Despacito” seemed to be a watershed moment for reggaetón. While much emphasis was placed on reggaetón’s crossover into the U.S. mainstream, the problematic racial politics of “Despacito” within the Latin music scene received less attention. In my book Remixing Reggaetón, I argued that reggaetón in Puerto Rico provided a space for urban youth to articulate an African diasporic politics that refuted notions of Puerto Rican racial democracy. Instead, reggaetón called out persistent antiblack racism on the island. As reggaetón grew more popular, the genre became subsumed under a new “Latin Urban” music category in music industry venues such as the Latin Grammys. Although the new classification nods to the urban roots of reggaetón, the Latin Urban designation also obscures afrolatinidad and reggaetón’s earlier African diasporic orientation. In turn, the shift to Latin urban replicates old discourses of mestizaje that stress mixture and fusion in ways that bring Latin American cultures closer to a whiteness defined by Western modernity.
Spanish Reggaetón and “Latinized” Musical Personae
Marina Arias Salvado (Universidad Complutense de Madrid)
After the 2019 Latin Grammy Awards, the internet was fueled with discussions about whether Spanish artist Rosalía deserved winning the Best Urban Song for “Con Altura”. The conversation focused primarily on how Rosalía took advantage of her European privilege to appropriate Afro-Latina/o music and culture. Critics of Spanish artists like Rosalía are just the tip of the iceberg of a more problematic issue that conceals the “whitening” of the genre, its insertion into pop music, and postcolonial power relations. The ability of Spanish artists to navigate between different identities and, hence, different music markets, results in a complex interaction between Spanish and Latina/o identities and reggaetón which deserves a deeper analysis. This presentation seeks to understand how Spanish artists appropriate reggaetón music and how this process affects their identity construction as “Latinas/os” from an mainstream US perspective.