Xmas Mix 2011

Something of a tradition ’round these parts. In the spirit of Xmas I keep the tracks separate, so you can treat ’em like Legos and re-arrange and combine to your liking. This year has lots of soca and a lil Bieber (chopped up and not slopped up), but my favorite is DJ Mingo’s reggaeton remix of “El Burrito Sabañero.”

Xmas Mix 2011 (ZIP 115 MB)

1. Traditional Ethiopian – Genna

2. Baron – Drink Ah Rum

3. Billo’s Caracas Band – Brindis Navideño

4. Unknown – Money in the Bank

5. Scarface – Thiefing Santa

6. Colm III – Christmas Tree

7. Unknown – Funk Do Noel

8. Tosin Martins – Silent Night

9. Jacob Miller – Natty No Santa Claus

10. Susan Macio – Trini Christmas

11. Justin Bieber – Christmas Eve (Screwed and Chopped)

12. DJ Mingo – Burrito Sabañero (Reggaeton Remix)

13. R. Kelly – A Love Letter Christmas

14. Fernand Gignac – Le Feu Danse San La Cheminée

15. Willie Colon – Esta Navidad

16. Professor Ken Philmore – Christmas Stagger Riddim

17. Lord Beginner – Christmas Morning the Rum Had Me Yawning

18. Los Jibaros – Decimas De Nacimiento

19. Marry Harris – Happy New Year Blues

20. Corre Guachin – Papa Noel

21. August Burns Red – God Rest Ye Merry Gentleman

there is no cumbia on Puerto Rican radio…

… and knowing why that is (and why there’s generally no cumbia in the islands) might tell you a lot about both cumbia and the Caribbean. But sorry, honey, I ain’t the one.

There’s a lot of other stuff of course, from 80s grocery store pop — Tears for Fears may be the world’s most ubiquitous band — to rock en español, salsa, merengue, reggae, and corporate pop. Heard some of that Ke$ha for the first time, and can I say, this is what media conglomerates throw money at these days? To quote the name of a tourist trap Mexican place in the Condado neighborhood of San Juan, “Orale, guey!”

The urban stuff rules of course, which means LOTS of merengue de calle, a bit of dancehall, a (tiny) bit of U.S. commersh hip hop — the latter a music that conquered the globe five years ago only to all but completely recede into U.S.-centered provincialism a few years later. It would seem Lil Wayne doesn’t export well. And oh yes, Pitbull, who, along with mentor Lil Jon, anticipated the way to maximize international saturation would be to go deeper into the club, mining the trendiest house tracks of the year. They certainly speak Americano in this respect.

And, oh yes, reggaeton! You’ll hear the big pop tunes that you get on the radio in the states, autotune ballads. And Don Omar’s self-conscious global cross-pollination never sounded better pumping from a Jeep Wrangler on the north coast of the island.

This is of course the watering down of the wilder cacophonic kuduro that pricked up the ears of a thousand bloggers a few years back, smoothing things out for something more Carnival-ready. Gotta say I miss the dreds, Don.

What doesn’t make it over here, or at least to the Latin radio dominated by Central American tastes in the DC area, is reggaeton’s current throwback phase, exemplified by two of the best songs on PR radio. The first recalls the teched-out DJ Blass stuff that knocked me head-over-heels back in ’04, but with some of-the-moment (at least in Latin pop) autotunage. In PR, they don’t stop at the club, they tear the beach up too. And you’re in the right place if you can’t tell the difference between the two.

Quick digression: one of my favorite tracks of 2010 was the similarly Blass-inspired remix of Bomba Estereo’s “Fuego” by the Frikstailers. With this and moombahton, ersatz reggaeton was killing it last year.

Next, a track by reggaeton’s prettiest pretty-boy, Tito el Bambino. His last album was almost totally ballads underscored by gentle dembows, but here he teams up with my favorite spanish “ragga moofin,” Don Chezina, for a deliberate recall of the proto-reggaeton era of DJ Playero. The beat switches up mixtape-stylee, with some vintage Playero-riddims thrown in for good measure.

Perhaps post-crossover-crash, reggaeton’s nostalgically revisiting its roots.

Speaking of Playero, I scored a couple of mixes (37 and 39) at a record store at the seen-better-days mall/market of Rio Piedras, along with an Omega bootleg. You would think this would be the ideal place for CD-R mixtapes, but you’d be wrong. It does have an amazing food court, though. You know your roast pork’s coming from the right place when you’re getting it from a 350-poung guy named Junior who’s being assisted by an older gentleman with a prominent bypass surgery scar.

Speaking of Omega, he’s more prominent than Daddy Yankee these days. His CDs were everywhere. Check out his own Dembow homage. Fuerte!

I finally came across that universal figure of hood modernity, the bootleg guy, hanging at a pool hall on Luquillo Beach, where the cars are hot, the music is loud, and the ballcaps are askew at impossible angles. And the mixtapes are more expensive than what I get in DC. I tried to go for the 3-for-10 deal I get from the go-go dudes at the Florida Market, only to be told by my very stoned vendor that he works for someone else and can’t make deals. Todos somos trabajadores!

The mambo I got there was some of the most creative music I heard on the island. As it emerges from its convention-establishing phase, mambo is mixing with club sounds in a variety of weird ways. Zombie Nation’s soccer anthem “Kernkraft 400” makes an impromptu appearance among Dominican polyrhythms:

Fútbol is really the path towards global crossover, which, just like capital, is where pop music wants to go.

The compilation closes with a timely remix of MJ’s “Remember the Time” (labeled presumptuously “Omega FT Michael Jackson”). I noted the explosion of mambo remixes of Michael Jackson acá.

Here’s the whole compilation, which is the first I’ve ever purchased with a prominent twitter link printed on the cover. Don’t sleep on the merengue remix of 704 Boyz, or the soon-to-blow-up Prophex.

DOMINICANHITS.COM PRESENTS: MERENGUE ELECTRONICO VOL. 1 (103 MB ZIP)

 

Updates from Chicago’s Puerto Rican Pride Festival

As a follow up to my previous post, I thought I’d check out Chicago’s annual Puerto Rican Pride Parade and accompanying festival in the Humboldt Park neighborhood. Rumors of reggaeton’s death are be greatly exaggerated — there were certainly dem bows to be heard, but lots of other sounds as well.

The parade goes through the South Loop, featuring lots of tricked out rides, floats, and contributions from Chicago civic groups, politicians, and businesses.

Music was heavily featured in the parade, almost exclusively salsa. Practically every float had its own DJ or band. Even a few cyclists got in on the act.

One float was blasting reggaeton: B96, a station that recently altered their format slightly away from Top 40 to popular club dance. I haven’t heard any reggaeton on their station lately, but they lent their support to the parade.

The Parade is the big mainstream showing for Chicago’s Puerto Rican community. The Humboldt Park neighborhood is where they throw the party for themselves. The floats and politicians don’t show up, but the cars and bikers reconvene on Division Street to continue the parade.

Chicago architecture + Puerto Rican culture

The park itself turns into a carnival, with rides, food, vendors, and music. A local promotions company had a “reggaeton contest” where contestants (teenaged or younger) danced for Wisin Y Yandel tickets. There were a couple of young boys who danced as well, to my surprise. Unfortunately I missed winning performance, but the park was so crowded in the areas that weren’t mudpits that rushing around wasn’t an option. The crowd mostly took on the role of dutiful spectators, waving their flags when prompted, but I did notice a few guys grinding on each other in front of me. There was a sizable amount of gay pride to go along with Puerto Rican pride at the festival, which was great addition; I would love for gay activists to increase their visibility in Chicago neighborhoods that aren’t always on their radar.

Of course in any type of street market setting, I make a beeline to the mixtapes. In Chicago, that means that house will be in abundance. The Violator DJ Squad booth had dozens of house and freestyle mixes; I picked up a couple juke-centric CDs. I snagged another mix from bountiful Mother Earth, where it had been dropped.

DJ Cholo, who hails from Pilsen (where I hang my headphones), had a quite nice offering on his mix — he didn’t lean too heavily on the classic booty tracks and paid attention to sequencing and flow. I’m providing a sample germane to the reggaeton topic: a juked out remix of Jowell y Randy’s “No Te Veo,” one of the more recent reggaeton popular hits. Cholo substitutes the original soca-influenced backing track for a traditional Chicago-style drum machine workout. The smoothed-out autotune-vox (the Caribbean had been autotuning years before it took over American hip hop) is left intact.

DJ Cholo – Track 08 – Juke & Club Mix

Juke is a genre that stays visible by constantly offering remixes of the latest popular hits, so I wouldn’t call juketon a trend or anything like that (the next track gives a similar treatment to “Ayo Technology”).

Here’s a video (there are many versions of this song) of the original, apparently shot at a European harbor. Looks chilly.

DJ Phantom’s Latin Takeover is chock full of contemporary Latin club hits. The Dem Bow is definitely muted or completely absent in a lot of these tracks, instead there’s a kind of digital-dancehall feel, with lots of effervesynths and autotune. The way reggaeton (if you can call it that) is looking in 2009 is a hybrid of T-Pain R&B, Caribbean pop, and hints of trance. In spite of its futurism, the music draws the line at withdrawing completely from the human like techno does, grounding the songs in the traditional pop realms of sex and sentimentality. And it has a polished commercial sheen; earlier techno-reggaeton outings, like this for example, mined a vein similar to UK Hardcore — chopping, decontextualizing, ironizing, and dehumanizing the human voice. A few examples of the new stuff:

Ok, so on one hand these guys are trying out some Timbaland/lake styles which are big in big-tent clubland. But check out the videos and the lyrics: instead of the poststructuralist de-centering of the subject you see in hardcore and earlier reggaeton-trance, there’s a re-centering of the whole giddy confusing mediated world around individual sexual desire. Don Omar brings some heavy technology metaphors to seduce robots; Alexis and Fido praise technology for keeping (mediated) booty calls on the DL. These artists (along with counterparts in other genres) suggest a sexual pleasure obtained by interfacing with the machine, not leaps and bounds away from beating off to online porn in front of the computer (a recent cultural practice in sore need of examination); however, they cushion this radical notion (if we can call it that, it’s practically a commonplace by now) by underlining their humanity and individuality created means of their desire. And really, what could be more in tune with the dictates of late capitalism than a highly mediated desiring subject?

The night is a carnivalesque atmosphere of car stereo bass, inebriation, smoked meat, fistfights (and tales of them), and the occasional police helicopter. But I’ve already gone off on several tangents, and put in more work than one should have to on a lazy Sunday after a long night in Humboldt Park. I’ll end things here for now and tend to the grill.

Can We Talk About the Reggaeton Crash?

2005 seems so far away….

So I know it seems “trend-ish” to talk about musical cultures like they’re commodities, as if a genre with a geography and a history were equivalent to a fashion accessory (“kuduro is this year’s keffiyeh!”). But of course they are fashion accessories as well, right? Perhaps not to the well-meaning bloggeratti, who are exploring means of ethical consumption and creative interaction between the artists of the global south and enthusiasts of the imperial core. But in the brief period of time that we’ve seen international booty bass styles burst through our high-speed internet connections, a clear life-cycle has emerged that mirrors the economic structure that has laid the foundation for these styles and their consumption: boom and bust. In this post, I’d like to sketch this progression and interrogate the relationship of nu-whirled DJ-bloggers (of which I am a part) to it. And to provide myself a convenient escape hatch, I’ll classify this as an “intervention” to excuse any empirical oversights. I’d like this to provoke a conversation that has been largely ignored and tip-toed around by the most intelligent commentators of this branch of music, and will accept criticism and debate with an open mind.

The dominant narrative is well established: in the midst of urban poverty afflicting a community of color/nonWestern nationality, young people appropriate the techniques of hip hop/reggae/techno and make their own version of these established genres in their vernacular. A flurry of creativity creates an entire musical culture full of rapid stylistic changes and hybridity; meanwhile, the older generation and middle classes disdain the music as oversexual and immoral. Then the music hits the shores of the West, through immigrant diasporas, study-abroad programs, and canny journos looking for the next big thing. Gushing articles are written, cosmopolitan centers host parties centered around the sound, and the most recognizable sonic elements of these genres (dem bow, tamborazo) show up in remixes and DJ sets. A few artists are cherrypicked as leading the crop. A compilation album firms up the brand identity (what are genres but brands?). Tours and careers are launched. And then the genre fails to keep up with the rapid cultural turnover endemic to digital capitalism and interest fades. Luckily new genres from new locales spring up to fill the void.

Reggaeton in some ways was one of the first post-WWW examples of these genre cycles, and in many ways the most spectacular, but the model predates it (I would argue that Detroit ghettotech follows a similar trajectory but worked mostly through “old media” infrastructure). It is also unique in many ways (of course each genre has its own unique history) in that reggaeton became associated with the rising Hispanic population of the United States unlike the minimal mainstream penetration of funk carioca or grime, which had little in the way of newly acknowledged immigrant diasporas to piggyback upon. 

The tale is familiar: an explosion of interest from international media conglomerates, who flooded their distribution channels with the new style. Major labels signed the biggest artists like Daddy Yankee and Tego Calderon. The Source and Bad Boy Records launched Latino brands, rock stations changed to all-reggaeton formats overnight. Movie deals, NPR documentaries, club nights, and popular literature all followed. This had parallel support from writers and academics, who hailed the emergence as an opportunity for Latinos in the U.S. to forge identities, just as marketers saw it as an opportunity to sell these identities to a newly important demographic. Reggaeton encountered resistance from the older generation, but also notably from hip hop fans, Latino and otherwise, who (unjustly or not) pointed out the repetitive nature of the beats and the lack of lyrical sophistication from MCs.

And then the crash. By 2006, all-reggaeton formats were diversifying by including bachata, salsa, and other types of Spanish pop into their mix. Calle 13’s (promoted by academics as the “conscious” alternative to the machismo of most reggaetoneros) biggest hit, “El Nadie Como Tu” isn’t reggaeton at all. In 2009, La Kalle was dropped from the Chicago market altogether; in its place was “Recuerdos,” an oldies format. The Source magazine declared bankruptcy and Source Latino has evaporated. While I could hear the occasional Dem Bow blasting from car stereos in my neighborhood during the summer of 2007, I have yet to hear it at all this year. Even established reggaeton artists have dropped under the radar. Most recently (the spark for this post) I bought  a bootleg mix CD at a block party entitled “REGGAETON DEL 2009.” As new reggaeton had disappeared from my radar as it had largely disappeared from most of the blogs and magazines I turn to for such information, I wanted to see what was going on in the genre today. Fewer than half the tracks were reggaeton at all; instead were bachatas, some mambo tracks, pop-R&B from Don Omar and Ivy Queen, and, yes, a few songs with some of that ol’ Dem Bow, alongside newer trends like Autotune. Even reggaeton CDs lacked reggaeton. 

So what happened? Obviously in the case of reggaeton, media conglomerates overexpanded, creating a bubble of interest. Just as speculation on real estate caused an artificial inflation of prices and a subsequent crash, so too went reggaeton. Similar bubbles affected other emergent genres of the same time: funk carioca (branded as baile funk) no longer appears in DJ sets or on the albums of fashionably globo-chic artists like Diplo and MIA; grime’s biggest artist Dizzee Rascal is leaving the sound behind to focus on mainstream pop. These genres are by no means dead — they still retain cachet in their places of origins, and maintain devotees in the places of export. I still enjoy all of them. But it seems plainly obvious that interest has moved elsewhere, and equally obvious that the same thing will happen again to Baltimore club, juke, kuduro, cumbia, bassline, kwaito, and whatever else comes along.

So why the silence from the perceptive writers of global ghettotech? There are precious few articles such as “The Demise of Hyphy” that describe the rise and fall of a music genre and how it came to pass. I have some theories on contributing factors. First of all, it’s a lot more fun (and easier) to jump on the bandwagon early and promote a new exciting musical genre than sift through the detritus of an older one. I should know — I’ve been that bandwagon jumper, and those articles were easier and more fun to write than this one. If you’re of progressive leanings, it’s distasteful to dismiss another culture, especially if you’ve tied it to identity politics — slam reggaeton and you risk slamming the people who still like it, those people who you were standing up for a couple years back. Finally there’s a self-interested motivation: if you are an early-adopter booster, you jeopardize your credibility as a tastemaker by calling attention to your own critical oversights and boosterism. But if we are going to be responsible commentators on global ghettotech, I think we have to shine a light on our own contexts (and not in the navel-gazing PoMo way) — how this stuff works in the cosmopolitan West, when it doesn’t work, and how interest (and profits) are generated and lost. Gregzinho’s post on Cabide DJ’s lackluster U.S. tour is getting there, but it still seemed like he was pulling punches; to bring a DJ unknown in the States several years after interest in funk peaked was going to be a tough sell. I went to the Zizek Tour when they stopped in Chicago, and even when they were plugged on all the appropriate sites, the venue was more than half empty. More recently I saw an interesting spectacle: ghetto house pioneer DJ Slugo opening for Egyptrixx, who makes a kind of international bass fusion music heavily in debt to juke. At a nearly empty club (on a Saturday night no less), the new (white middle-class) kid on the block, headlines, while the artist who helped shape the sound gets second billing (the first DJ, who played your standard global ghettotech genre-hop, left immediately after his set finished). Slugo had the biggest crowd response of the night; most people left when the headliner started up. When I left I wanted to throw in the towel for nu-whirled music, at least as it appears in indie clubs.

I don’t want to harp on the failure of music I enjoy, but I do want to understand what is going on. Bad venues? Bad promoters? Audiences committed to only the latest trendy beats? It’s obvious that a certain segment of educated middle class young urbanites have a symbiotic relationship with genres that have a very different resonance in their native contexts, but ironically  I don’t see much analysis on it from the writers and DJs on their own context (again, SELF INCLUDED! SELF INCLUDED!). Like whiteness in general it’s become an invisible presence in these genres. Whether this relationship is mutualistic (both sides benefit), commensal (one side benefits, the other is unharmed), or parasitic (one side benefits at the expense of the other side) requires a lot more analysis, particularly of the economics that can get uncomfortable especially if you make income from this relationship. Focusing only on identity or semiotics, I feel, will not adequately address this. Without a political economy of global ghettotech we won’t understand the nature of this relationship, we won’t be able to make sure that interest in the privileged portions of the globe helps those places that make the music we love, and we won’t be able to make sure that these genres can be sustained. Wayne’s proposal looks promising, and I hope to see others follow the lead. As for myself, I feel only tangentially related to this stuff sometimes (I have but a likkle blog and no gigs, still haven’t learned how to laptop DJ), but I’ll be starting a PhD soon and looking for a diss topic… plus I love to throw darts…

Translatinidad Vol 1 – Tecnorumba

Ok, so after I check out this awesome mambo mixtape I got in the Dominican Republic, of course I wanted more. And I knew from my days combing for bongoflava that this wouldn’t be as simple as firing up the ol’ Soulseek. This was going to be navigating through the slapdash HTML slums of the Third World Internet armed with only Google and a passable knowledge of Spanish. Luckily I stumbled upon something promising right off the bat, something that was much more than the mambo treasure trove I desired. This was Tecnorumba, a Spanish-language social-networking site hosting videos, chat, and most importantly, thousands of mp3s. I found plenty of mambo (I think Tecnorumba is based in the Caribbean, if not the Dominican Republic) as well as… well, everything else. The latest American rap, Eurodance, reggaeton, bhangra, old school salsa, and LOTS of homemade remixes branded with that mark of piracy-based mongrel music — “Made with Sonic Foundry ACID.” This was something foreign and yet familiar at the same time, and I could almost envision the soundwaves of the poorly beatmatched 50 Cent/cumbia mashups as I started a massive binge of downloading.

What I find interesting about Tecnorumba is that it’s a node in the vast series of Intertubes in which the music of the Global Postmodern — mainly indigenized and hybridized forms of hip hop, reggae, and dance music from throughout the developing world — collects and mutates, almost with a mind of its own. Indeed, sifting through the vast amount of music on the site, my browsing imitated a data-mining virus more than a record connoisseur. I scooped up as much as I could through a series of preset inputs (“search ‘reggaeton'”; “search ‘remix'”), then went back through to pick out the valuable pieces of information. So several weeks later, after picking through bad songs, broken links, odd titles, shitty mastering, and the kind of bizarrely wonderful cultural soundclashes you only find through a mixture of serendipity and perseverance, I could come out with this value-added compilation of harvested data that will fit on any standard CD-R: Tecnorumba: The Mix.

The music of Caribbean has always been subject to clashing cultures wrought by economic imperatives, and Tecnorumba is just a late installment in this long history. Still, I wonder at the weird kinds of identities being produced by this proliferation and collision of culture, where Turkish DJs make reggaeton hits big in Dominican clubs, where Tanzanian hip hop mixes made by Dubai DJs find their way into Eastern Europe via digital trade routes through the Caribbean, where microgenres formed in the crucible of geographic and cultural isolation suddenly invade the hard drives of youth worldwide hungry for shared contexts. This is what I mean by “Translatinidad,” in which identity becomes ingrained more through cultural collaboration and mixture than through political boundaries or racial categories, although a shared language seems to be one major organizing principle. I’ve got at least one more installment of the Translatinidad theme planned, hence “Vol. 1.”

Translatinidad Vol 1 – Tecnorumba

1. DJ Mauro Martinez – Cumbia Crunk – excerpt from a mix of cumbia rhythms and rap acapellas
2. Omega – Me Persiguen Los Mamberos – Omega is the king of mambo: although not necessarily its most representative artist, he could be the genre’s most talented. He’s got a whole band, and his songs have that spontaneity of a live performance, although structurally they’re similar to other mambo songs.
3. DJ Hakki – Kolbalsti – From what I can tell, DJ Hakki is a Turkish DJ who makes reggaeton-inflected Turkish club-dance. Reggaeton is HUGE in the nascent Turkish pop industry, and Hakki’s in turn found fans in the Caribbean.
4. Africanos – DRAGON ROJO – Champeta used to be a kind of Spanish afrobeat from Cartagena, Colombia, but now can refer to any number of sonic mixtures hailing from the area. This one is more cavernous Latin house than anything.
5. rumba portuguesa – I have no information on the artist, but it sounds like it’s from a mix of rave-influenced Latin music. There’s some cubia-style accordion as well as trancey synths.
6. Punto Rojo feat. Nastasja – Calabria (Dominican Remix) – The 2007 reggae-fied remixes of “Calabria” by Danish producer Rune are blowing up Spanish radio. Here’s the Dominican version.
7. Mambo Infinito feat La Mayor – Coje Lo Tuyo – This is basically mambo ghettotech and as such IT OWNS. We’ll see how long it takes for this to migrate from my blog into Diplo’s DJ sets.
8. DJ Sam – Minimambo Mix – A 10-minute mix of merengue, street and classic.
9. Huaynos – Llaqta – Ok, I don’t know if I got the info right, but this is an example of the guitar+female vocal music of the Andes that influenced cumbia. Heartwrenching singing!
10. Charly Dyen – Esposa amp Amante. This is labeled “Bachatatango,” which means you get that arpeggiated guitar with some FUNKY bass for your troubles. Oh, and some drum machine kicks and claps for good measure. This cuts off abruptly, so was probably part of a mix I wish I had.
11. DJ Blu – Chingue Tu Madre. Yes, they are acquainted with the dance genre of ‘breaks’ in Latin America as well (proximity to Florida probably helps).
12. Don Chezina – Te Pongo Mujer. Don Chezina was in Playero 38, the DJ crew that got reggaeton started from a hodge-podge of Spanish dancehall and 90s hip hop. This particular track is a perreo-style romp through the beatboxing from Doug E Fresh’s “Freaks.”
13. Tempo – Donde Estan Las Girlas – Another older Puerto Rican track, with the synth riff from “I Like to Move It Move It” and some dem bow drums. Tempo was the doyen of dirty lyrics in the pre-crossover days of reggaeton; unfortunately he was in prison when Daddy Yankee broke big. Truthfully he is a bit lacking as an MC.
14. DJ Ricky – Los Power Ranger En Mambo – El nombre dice lo que es. DJ Ricky is the go-to guy for mambo remixes (sort of like DJ Kazzanova in reggaeton). Here he covers the Power Rangers theme, while throwing some 50 Cent and Nate Dogg acapellas over top apropos of nothing. Zany!
15. El Original – Te Doy (rmx) – This is the token cracked-out cumbia track, with a reggae interlude for good measure. I had hoped to find more druggy-as-hell cumbia in Tecnorumba, but came up short.
16. Omega y Su Mambo Violento – Por Telefono No – Omega begging his girl not to break up with him over the phone. Great theme for a track like this, and once again Omega’s performance doesn’t disappoint.
17. Arcangel – Siente El Mambo – Another DJ Ricky remix. The hushed vocals and unreleased tension remind me of the Whisper song.
18. Hector El Father – Tumba -Reggaeton heavyweight with some merengueton; melodically this owes more to standard merengue than the ultra-minimal mambo/merengue de calle. A nice spice to what otherwise could be one of those drearily portentuous reggaeton anthems.
19. Guanabanas – Chinga – Some bhangra drums and bed-squeaking (a la Trillville’s “Some Cut”) with your reggaeton? Yes, please. “Chinga” means “fuck,” so you can guess what this song’s about.
20. El Rookie – Papel y Pluma – Old school (1998) Spanish dancehall! Maybe Panamanian?
21. Residente Calle 13 – Japon (DJ Sticky Remix) – Another mambo remix of a reggaeton track, with all the appropriate seriousness that Residente commands.
22. Jessly – Adios Amor – More of that beautiful musica de indios Andeando, but very well produced. The shimmering off-kilter guitar rhythm has a “glitch-remix” feel to it, but it’s all natural. Does Bjork listen to this stuff?

Coming soon: More Translatinidad mixes! And should you find anything worthwhile on your own Tecnorumba expeditions, drop me a line.