Barrio Fino

Maybe you were at a basement party, grinding with a pimply crush in low-rise flare jeans and a belly button ring you couldn’t stop staring at. Maybe, if you were a little older, you were driving around your city with too many friends in the backseat. 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 middle school dance and felt compelled to engage in the ritual of a preteen dancefloor tryst. Maybe you bought it as a ringtone for your brand new hot pink Motorola RAZR flip phone.

Maybe you were in East Harlem, or Humboldt Park, or Santurce, or a suburban strip mall town in middle America. No matter where you lived, there’s a strong chance that at some point between 2004 and 2005, you heard Daddy Yankee announce his arrival in the U.S. mainstream with a crystal-clear introduction: “Who’s this? Da-ddy Yank-ee!” “Gasolina” was ubiquitous back then: That shouted hook, revving engine, and indelible, blistering pre-chorus blasted from every boombox, every passing car window, and every iPod Mini.

“Gasolina” was the dawn of an empire. Barrio Fino, the album it appeared on, was the first reggaeton LP to debut at No. 1 on Billboard’s Top Latin Albums chart, spending 24 weeks in the top spot. In 2005, it 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 collab with Reebok, a Pepsi sponsorship, and a controversial modeling gig with Sean Jean. If reggaeton was going to go global, Yankee was going to squeeze every cent he could out of it. After all, the man got an associate’s degree in accounting so he wouldn’t be cheated “out of money.”

This is the enduring image of Daddy Yankee: genre pioneer, business tycoon, reggaeton king. On Barrio Fino, Yankee presents himself as the commander of a movement that was poised to assume market dominance. But beyond its commercial impact, which is just one benchmark of its influence, Barrio Fino is also a document of a genre in a moment of transformation. This is an album that carries the knotty histories of reggaeton within it—from its origins as a form of protest poetry, to its transition into a moneymaking global force, to its role in affirming the imagined identity of Latinidad.

Daddy Yankee, born Ramón Ayala, said he imagined Barrio Fino in part as an antidote to reductive portrayals of life in the projects. “The news you see everywhere is always marginalizing [the barrio], or blaming it for things that aren’t its fault,” he said in a 2005 interview. The barrio in question was Villa Kennedy, the caserío, or public housing project, where Yankee cut his teeth freestyling at 13 years old. At 16, he started recording his own mixtapes, hawking bootleg cassettes for $5. In the early ’90s, reggaeton hadn’t quite consolidated into the genre we know it as today; one of its precursors was known as underground, and Yankee was one of its preeminent practitioners. The Puerto Rican government used the 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 of record stores that sold their cassettes in February 1995.

By the time Barrio Fino rolled around, Daddy Yankee was a star in Puerto Rico. He’d appeared on DJ Playero’s foundational underground mixtapes in the ’90s and had local hits with solo albums and compilations, like 2002’s El Cangri.com, 2003’s Los Homerun-es, and Luny Tunes’ Más Flow anthology the same year. He knew the sweet spot between bombast and pillow talk, and he knew how to speak about reggaeton’s favorite topic and to its primary audience: women. Above all, he was the kind of rapper who could ensnare you with an irresistible hook, only to stun you with a technically dazzling verse moments later.

But not everyone was a fan of Daddy Yankee—or reggaeton at all, for that matter. Most of the entertainment industry had blacklisted reggaeton, refusing to play it on the radio, in spite of its grassroots popularity. White middle- and upper-class communities in Puerto Rico and across Latin America scorned the genre, associating it with poverty, vulgarity, and Blackness. In interviews around the time the album was released, Yankee wasn’t afraid to point out the irony in the genre’s commercial success, given its previously denigrated status. “When we started, no one wanted to help us. There is racism, classism in Puerto Rico,” he told The New York Post in 2005. Later that year, he elaborated on the prejudice the genre faced in The Washington Post. “The government didn’t understand the subculture. To them, we were just criminals and dumb kids doing this music. We had to prove we were too smart for the system. And we did it.”

El Cangri modeled his career after hip-hop moguls like Jay-Z or Sean Combs, building a kingdom with music at the center. But part of that enterprise was an identity movement, too—a thesis about a generation of young people who saw reggaeton as an affirmation of their heritage, one that would yield the questionable, feel-good promise of representation. “Reggaeton means the same thing to Latino youth as hip-hop does to African American kids,” Yankee told The Washington Post in 2005. “The young kids now, they’re looking at Daddy Yankee and Tego‬ Calderón and Ivy Queen like kids in the American hood look up to 50 Cent or 2Pac.” In his vexed invocation of hip-hop, Yankee creates an ideological distance between Latinidad and Blackness—as if the two are mutually exclusive, or as if young Latines couldn’t also feel kinship with it. In addition to the muddled racial politics, Yankee’s comments back then speak volumes about the marketing, public reception, and stylistic choices of Barrio Fino.

Artistically, Barrio Fino is the ultimate exposition of Daddy Yankee’s gifts. The album slots party tracks right next to political statements; bleeding-heart breakup anthems next to brutal tongue-lashings against his enemies. The first quarter of the album is a perreo fight club. On “King Daddy,” an early avowal of his supremacy in the genre, he snarls a threat to a hater in double-time: “Tomorrow you’ll be food for the birds on the asphalt,” he spits, glass shattering in the background. Producer duo Luny Tunes arrange sputtering snare rolls into machine gun blasts. RIP to their victims.

“Dale Caliente” is a reggaeton shoot-out complete with samples of cocking handguns and sprayed bullets. Daddy Yankee issues a warning to anyone who thinks they’re tough enough to square up, then lusts after a woman who’s igniting the dancefloor with her trembling ass cheeks. Glory and Blacka Nice, an unsung reggaeton diva and a dancehall vocalist, pepper the track with some breathless ad-libs. Neither are credited on the song, a fact that reflects one of reggaeton’s more iniquitous traditions: the excision of its Jamaican and femme contributors. Glory famously sang the “dame más gasolina” hook on the smash hit; she also has features on three other songs here, none of which are credited.

In some moments, Daddy Yankee returns to his rap roots, sidestepping reggaeton altogether. “Santifica Tus Escapularios” is a merciless attack on his foes, recalling the freestyle battles he grew up on. He aims vicious barbs at an unidentified adversary (rumored to be fellow reggaeton trailblazer Don Omar at the time), even referring to his target as a shit-eating vagrant. “Salud y Vida” incorporates tubas from Mexican banda, evoking Chicano rap classics as Yankee casts doubt on a culture obsessed with material things, rather than human life. On the highlight “Corazones,” Yankee gets political. The song tackles the “spirit of death” that devours Puerto Rico’s caseríos, calling for a truce between gangs and decrying the government for not putting enough resources into education.

In spite of his lyrical dexterity, some of these beats rely on predictable conventions of “conscious” hip-hop—theatrical minor-key pianos, church-choir flourishes (it’s like El Cangri strapped on a backpack and fastened it as tightly as he could). But the messages they carry are potent, and only slightly diluted by those choices. Daddy Yankee—the world-weary critic, the caserío documentarian—was always capable of making more than club anthems, even if the radio was hyper-fixated on the party-hard ethos of “Gasolina.”

And while most listeners outside of the Caribbean thought that reggaeton could only be about stunting or bumping uglies, El Cangri demonstrated the genre’s romantic textures, too. “Like You” is a suave R&B-reggaeton serenade delivered in Spanglish, a rare crossover maneuver that invokes Big Pun’s “Still Not a Player.” This is a far cry from the unflinching raunch of earlier reggaeton mixtapes, like DJ Blass’ Reggaeton Sex series, and evidence of the way artists and producers were softening the genre’s roots for radio appeal. The classic “No Me Dejes Solo” features Wisin y Yandel, whose vocal registers make them ideal yelling partners; all three reggaeton vanguards beg a woman to save them from loneliness with their signature barked raps. “Tu Príncipe,” with Zion y Lennox, is a perfect slice of narrative-driven reggaeton, telling the story of a man who longs to be more than just a woman’s friend.

Although he was far from the only one moving the genre in this direction, Daddy Yankee was making strategic, market-oriented artistic choices that happened to feel authentic, too. Stories of breakups and relationship woes may seem like pretty run-of-the-mill thematic fare for reggaeton in 2024, but just two years before Barrio Fino’s release, a Puerto Rican senator launched a campaign against reggaeton’s “dirty lyrics” and lewd content, calling it a trigger “for criminal acts” (Tellingly, the same politician appeared onstage during a stadium show with reggaeton icons Héctor and Tito el Bambino a year later). Romantic tracks were a way to “clean up” reggaeton for the radio, but they also felt like a natural artistic evolution as reggaeton’s popularity surged.

It’s basically impossible for a reggaeton artist not to scream “Latino!” in one of their songs at this point, but back then, the explicit overtures to a shared ethnic identity were newer. On “Like You,” Daddy Yankee appeals to the community twice, summoning all his “Latinos to stand up” and declaring himself “proud to be Latin.” On “El Muro,” he refers to reggaeton as the sound that makes “everyone in Latin America move,” closing out the song with a call for all Latinos to keep perreando. The classic “Lo Que Pasó, Pasó” lifts piano keys and a horn section from Dominican merengue, while “Sabor a Melao” taps salsa legend Andy Montañez as a guest vocalist. As the scholar Wayne Marshall has written, these choices—speaking to a Latine audience, invoking elements of culturally accepted genres like salsa and merengue—helped fuel the perception that reggaeton was the music of a wider community, one with a “recognizably Latin” sound. At the same time, these stylistic changes began to shift its perception as a stigmatized Black genre from the projects.

Even if the Daddy Yankee of 2024 does not look anything like the Daddy Yankee of 20 years ago; even if the reggaeton lion largely abandoned social commentary in his work; even if, in the 2010s, he began to churn out mostly middle-of-the-road pop-perreo hits, including Luis Fonsi’s “Despacito,” perhaps the most diluted version of reggaeton possible—that is until Justin Bieber hopped on the remix and went viral after he flubbed the lyrics in a vaguely xenophobic drunken haze at New York celebrity hotspot 1 OAK; even if he announced his retirement in 2022, only to return to the public eye late last year as a born-again Christian: Barrio Fino is unquestionably an artistic triumph. It captures Yankee at his peak—as an agile lyricist, cultural envoy, and forever hitmaker. The album, along with other reggaeton titans of the era, forced the Latin music industry to re-examine its aesthetics, its business interests, and its biases. And of course, Barrio Fino is also an artistic proposition—a statement about poverty and sex and joy and hardship, and the ways reggaeton has soundtracked all of those realities. In its movements between the dancefloor, the bedroom, and the block, Barrio Fino illustrates the capaciousness—and complexity—of a genre forever defined by transformation.

Additional research by Deirdre McCabe Nolan.