The King of Reggaeton

The New York Times Magazine

February 5, 2006

By SARA CORBETT

A long time ago, before he started draping himself in huge diamond medallions, before flocks of teenage girls began trailing him nearly everywhere, before he had a staff of 15 working day and night on the maintenance of his image, Daddy Yankee had a regular name, which was Raymond Ayala. When he is at home in Puerto Rico, his parents still call him Raymond, as does his older brother Nomar, who works as one of his managers, his wife, Mirredys Gonzalez, who is another manager, and his former neighbors at Villa Kennedy, the run-down San Juan public-housing project where he lived until a few years ago. To just about everybody else, he is Daddy Yankee.

He picked this name for himself back when he was a teenager obsessed with rap music. He watched music videos on MTV and BET and loved what he saw there. He identified with guys like Dr. Dre and Rakim and Big Daddy Kane, the first-generation rappers, even though he was a Spanish speaker who'd never left Puerto Rico and couldn't understand a thing they said. He was, by his own account, a pudgy young kid with no money but possessing a certain brazen faith in his own possibility, a sense that he, too, would outgrow not just his name but his circumstances too. At 13, he rechristened himself Daddy Yankee. In street slang, it means "powerful man." The next year, he started rapping in Spanish, using a friend's four-track recorder, spitting out unrefined lyrics over a speeded-up beat borrowed from Jamaican dancehall reggae.

These days, when Daddy Yankee, who is now 29, performs before throngs of adulatory fans, he will sometimes shout out alternative names for himself, including El Cangri (the chief) and El Rey (the king). All this is meant to emphasize his place at the forefront of reggaetón, a rapidly growing musical genre that mixes Spanish-language hip-hop with the complex rhythms of Caribbean music. With its signature syncopated boom-pa-dum-dum beat and boisterous, often raunchy lyrics — not to mention the libidinous grind it inspires on the dance floor — reggaetón has infiltrated nightclubs and radio airwaves with a speed and vigor that has surprised even canny record-company executives. Daddy Yankee's album "Barrio Fino," which was released in 2004, has sold more than 1.6 million copies in the United States, spent 24 weeks on top of Billboard's Latin charts and won Yankee several prizes, including a Latin Grammy. The album's hit single, "Gasolina," became a party anthem that — akin to Ricky Martin's 1999 hit "Livin' La Vida Loca" — broke out of the Latin niche and was embraced by masses of clubgoing, booty-shaking Anglo-Americans.

More:http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/05/magazine/05reggaeton.html